New Paths to Peace by Robin Percival Robin Percival attends the Bishop Street Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) in Derry. Quakers have a long pacifist tradition. But Robin is also a committed Republican, linked to Sinn Féin, and a member of the Pat Finucane Centre which works for human rights and democratic politics in Ireland.
Some of his fellow-Quakers have criticised his association with a party which clearly backs the IRA’s campaign of violence. He has been denied full membership of the Society of Friends. But his supporters point to the fact that Friends are active in other nonpacifist parties, including the Conservative and Unionist party (which has one Quaker MP), and all the mainstream parties which support the enforced division of Ireland.
Here, Robin Percival explains why he has chosen to work for peace from within the Republican movement, applying the Quakers’ historic peace testimony where it is least expected.
IT IS DIFFICULT TO EXPLAIN TO British people why someone like myself, who is English yet has lived in Northern Ireland for 25 years, should want to be a republican. Most people in Britain regard Irish republicanism as synonymous with the IRA, with violence, terrorism and murder.
My position is very clear. I have never supported the IRA but I understand why there are many people in Ireland who see violence as a legitimate means of achieving political goals. Too often events confirm the view that British Governments find it easier to respond positively to violence than to nonviolence. Despite 18 months of ceasefire the British Government could not set a date for allparty negotiations. Six days after the bomb in Canary Wharf they announce a date!
Most People in Britain see the conflict in Ireland as one in which Protestants and Catholics are fighting amongst each other and Britain is somehow caught in the middle preventing the whole situation from getting out of hand. In earlier times I was told that the British presence prevented the North from collapsing into civil war.
With over 3000 people dead and dying it is hard to argue that somehow Britain contains the situation. If British people tell me that now I tell them the truth as I see it.
The British Government is making a bad situation worse, not better.
I believe that Britain is primarily responsible for the conflict in Ireland. I do not deny the reality of sectarianism or the fact that many people in the North want to live in the United Kingdom. But nothing can detract from the fact that the British Government is the most powerful of all the “players” in the North. It is the de facto government of the North. It has under arms far more people than all the paramilitaries put together. It can mobilise more political power than all the political parties put together. The key question that British people should ask themselves is not why the Northern Irish problem is so intractable but whether the influence and power of its Government has been used to facilitate peace in Ireland or to promote conflict? Has the British Government over the years (or even the past two years) worked to achieve a political settlement to which all can feel committed as something they have helped to create? The honest answer is no. Since the collapse of the Power Sharing Executive in 1974 the British Government has pursued a single strategy aimed at winning the war against the IRA. The IRA, not surprisingly, have responded in kind and the ordinary people of Ireland (and sometimes Britain) have been caught in the middle with the situation deadlocked.
Over the past seven years the republican movement has been pursuing a strategy aimed at achieving a negotiated end to the conflict. In 1989 I was asked by Sinn Féin to take part in a small group which could advise on how the political process in the North could be developed and enhanced. One of its central recommendations was eventually to kick-start the peace strategy which culminated in the August 1994 ceasefire. A key member of the group was Pat McGeown, a former IRA commander in Belfast and hunger striker who, when he was released from prison, was elected a Sinn Féin councillor.
Sadly Pat died last year. He was one of the key activists within Sinn Féin who knew that the future of Ireland lay not in armed struggle but in the generation of unarmed political movements which seek to fundamentally change Irish and world society.
He was as committed to achieving a genuine, accommodating peace in Ireland as anyone I have known. That was because he was a republican, not despite it.
For the past number of years | have worked in a group called the Pat Finucane Centre. It is based in Derry and is named after the Belfast lawyer assassinated by the UDA, the largest loyalist paramilitary organisation. Though the Centre has no links with any political party, we would be perceived as being republican and none of our members would take any exception to being described as a republican. Our focus is human rights and politieal development.
We are explicitly committed to nonviolence and oppose all violence. Peace and reconciliation is our bread and butter.
As I look back over the work of the centre, some things stand out. The sight of the Church of Ireland minister panicking when he thought the media had rumbled a secret meeting which included Ulster Unionists and Sinn Féin members. The picture in the local press of a man who lost his brother on Bloody Sunday warmly welcoming to Derry’s Bogside a former UVF commander. Or the group of Warrington clergymen who came shortly after the Warrington bomb. They met with people whose loved ones had been killed by the British army. One of the clergyman stayed in the home of a family whose son was an IRA volunteer killed on active service.