Overall there was a very positive response to the piece I posted the other day that examined the interpretation of history of the Northern Ireland conflict as articulated by RTÉ in its news broadcasting. That may have to do, of course, with the networks in which it has been shared.
There have been some people who responded with genuine and valid criticisms. Others responded more negatively and unproductively. I am going to explore these responses alongside some further exploration of the data.
First, I would like to stress that there’s nothing new in what I presented. The data, and similar work, have been publicly available for a long time. In so far as people are surprised by it, I suggest it is because the presentation is at odds with the prevailing media representation of the Northern Ireland conflict, both in Ireland and the UK. Many people in the North will not have been surprised by it at all, however, because it reflects their lived experience.
I would also like to stress that disputing an account of events does not mean you are offering a defence of any actor in those events. The fundamental question ought to be whether an account is true. If I say it was raining outside, and you say it was not, this does not mean you are defending the rain.
An RTÉ journalist responded on Twitter with two tweets: one linking to a Wikipedia article on the Kingsmill massacre (to illustrate that the IRA targeted unionists) and one linking to an article on the IRA’s use of proxy bombs (to illustrate that the IRA targeted Catholics did not ‘toe the line’).
This response disregarded what I wrote. The central issue of my piece was whether a ‘campaign of violence’ that ‘targeted unionists, and Catholics who did not toe the line’ was an appropriate characterisation of overall events, especially considering no mention is made in the obituary of violence from British State forces or loyalist paramilitaries, even when the latter two groupings were also decisive actors in the conflict.
The obituary used the example of Patsy Gillespie as indicative of a campaign targeting Catholics who did not toe the line. It emphasised the fact he was a Catholic, but omitted to mention that he was employed by the British Army.
Once again, I must stress that this does not justify his death or the methods employed. It so happens that my father -also a Catholic- was used in a 1,000lb proxy bomb attack with my grandmother held hostage (fortunately he survived, or I would not be around to write this), so I am not indifferent to the methods used here. There were, however, other civilians who worked for the British security forces, and who were killed by the IRA, often shot or killed with booby trap bombs. From the descriptions in the Sutton data, I counted 15 Protestants and 8 Catholics who died in such circumstances — and there may be more. With all this in mind, the formulation of ‘Catholics who did not toe the line’ -as a principal characteristic of the IRA campaign, supported by the example of Patsy Gillespie- becomes meaningless.
In Irish media discourse, there is a short list of -indisputably horrible-atrocities kept close to hand. The list includes Jean McConville, Kingsmill, Patsy Gillespie, the La Mon bombing. Items on this list are frequently used in relation to debate on any matter concerning the IRA. They are intended to function as an ace in the hole, as a display of impeccable ethical and moral judgment. But the casual use of such names reflects ignorance at best, and pure cynicism at worst.
From my perspective, no-one involved in this game cares about any of these people. If they did, they would not be so casual in throwing their names around. If they had any genuine concern for what happened, they would also show some interest in the machinations of the British State in perpetrating atrocities throughout the period of the conflict. The would show some interest in holding that State to account. For the most part, they do not.
One person claimed that I was putting a ‘sectarian spin’ on the data -even though I made a point of highlighting the discomfort I felt at using the classification of religion from the source data, and the effects of applying this kind of classification. There is no doubt a degree of ethical judgment involved in whether you are going to describe a person as Protestant or Catholic. It depends on the context, and the relevance of the description to the context.
The kind of emphasis used by RTÉ here shows an absence of ethical judgment.
A former ministerial adviser to the Irish government tweeted to say that all the data I had included had been published previously elsewhere, and cited an appendix in a book. I am not sure what the purpose of this intervention was, but the book only contained figures on Provisional IRA killings, indicating he had not bothered to read the post.
Another person sought to contradict the figures I presented by posting a link to the same data source I used, which showed that overall, Republican groupings killed more people than Loyalists. I did not deny this anywhere, but the provision of the statistic appeared to suggest that I had. They maintained that they were ‘just counting the numbers’. Here are the total figures, for the period covered by the past post.
What does it mean to evaluate the total figures, and leave it at that? It appears as if you are treating every life as equally precious. You are tacitly proposing that whoever produced the highest body count must bear primary responsibility.
But what happens if we consider people as people, regardless of whether they are part of an armed unit dedicated to maintaining a state of oppression? If you disregard the latter, you are taking the side of the oppressor. It only appears that you are treating all lives equally. Under the surface, you are attributing less worth to the lives of those subject to oppression. This is the case in relation to Northern Ireland, and it is the case in any situation of oppression that has ever existed. This doesn’t justify each action taken that is supposed to end this situation. Some may dispute that such a state of oppression existed, and that despite discrimination in some respects, everyone was subject to the same rule of law. This is not reflected in the civilian death toll.
The graph below shows the religion of civilians killed by security forces in Northern Ireland during the period in question. There were nearly eight times more Catholic civilians killed as Protestant civilians — and we must bear in mind that Catholics were in the minority.
Below is the same data, represented annually.
We ought to recognise, however, that there is a gap between statistical data that uses categories relating to institutions, and the human beings to whom it refers. One person tweeted that the statistics were ‘distorted’ because they did not account for the way in which
“British security forces” are ordinary policemen who were just doing a job.
Moreover:
which category would Arlene Foster’s dad, a farmer but [part-time cop], fall under?
I disagree with the characterisation of ‘ordinary policemen who were just doing a job’. There was no such thing in Northern Ireland, as the graph below shows. This does not mean that they or their families saw things that way.
Which category would anyone’s father, or mother, or child, or friend, fall under? The answer lies in the question. I imagine it would be hard for anyone to recognise anyone they knew and lost under any of the categories used here, because there is a whole life hidden from view.
Below is a cartoon by El Roto, published in El País. The woman says ‘There are people behind those numbers’. The man is saying ‘Well they should get out of there!’. Numbers can be a useful window, and a useful corrective. Simply focusing on the deaths might also mean disregarding wider social experiences: of repression, terror, and despair. In many quarters, the preference would be for both the numbers and the people to be disregarded. But when it comes to the question of what to do about these things, I have no wish to turn into the man on the right.
As I pointed out in the previous piece. there is no truly ‘objective’ viewpoint from which these events and figures can be evaluated. There is no such thing as ‘just counting the numbers’. When you spend a lot of your days finding different ways of ‘counting numbers’, as I do, this is fairly obvious. Each person brings their own interpretation, based on their own history and sense of what is important. What matters is whether that interpretation is ethically justifiable and reflects the truth. But we have too few mechanisms for dialogue so that the full social and political implications of such data can be teased out, and we have state institutions systematically opposed to such a process ever taking shape.
