Irish struggle stokes
author’s fascination
Patrick Michael Rucker
When Patrick Michael Rucker and his friends first visited Northern Ireland in 1991 as part of a youth group event, he says he found the people open and accommodating with strangers and renowned for their love of talk for a good reason.
Rucker, now 27 and a globetrotting freelance journalist, is a 1992 graduate of the Freehold Regional High School District’s International Studies Learning Center at Freehold Township High School.
Home for a recent visit with his parents, who still reside in Howell, Rucker spoke with a Greater Media Newspapers reporter of the events that led to his writing a recently published book about his second visit to Ireland.
It is a visit he said he had to make following the 1998 peace accord reached between the Catholic Irish Republican Army and the Protestant British government of Northern Ireland.
Rucker said he went to Ireland that first time in 1991 firm in the belief that an exchange of dialogue and ideas between young Americans of different religions with their Irish Catholic and Protestant counterparts could achieve inroads to peace in the region.
Looking back now, he says, "We thought we would make a difference when they saw us with all races and religions together. We were definitely naive and a little self-indulgent. It didn’t end with all of us singing Kumbayah."
Having lived in Ireland since his return in 1998, Rucker says he recently returned "buoyed," even while recognizing that despite the gregarious nature of the people on both sides who may equally share a fervent desire for peace, the problems inherent in the clash of political and religious ideologies are not going to be solved overnight.
Rucker notes that even the way people talk about "the troubles" — which is how locals in Northern Ireland always refer to the armed conflict between Catholics and Protestants that have plagued the region for four decades — shows their need to minimize it. He said he thinks the need to downplay the conflict is because if people had greeted the full horror of the death and destruction they would be overwhelmed by their helplessness.
Rucker said while there the first time, "doing teen-age things" like bowling and going to the movies with friends he still has today, he found there were good intentions on both sides, and therein, he says, may lie the problem. As in the Middle East, there are persons of good intent on both sides, equally committed to a cause they perceive as morally just, he maintains.
That is why he said he had to return to Northern Ireland following the 1998 Good Friday peace accord reached between the Irish Republican Army hierarchy, its political arm Sinn Fein and the Protestant Ulster government.
Rucker said he wondered if peace was a realistic expectation, given the region’s history and the ironically named "peace walls," 10-foot-high brick walls topped with razor wire that run through the middle of neighborhoods separating Protestants on one side of the street from their Catholic neighbors across the street.
Upon his return, when he met and talked at length with leaders on both sides of the struggle, as well as with victims of the violence, Rucker said he found pragmatic realists who were embracing peace because they were finding that war was an expensive game with both sides racking up too many losses and no gains.
However, he says, he found on this second trip back in 1998 that although they had given up fighting an organized opposition, inherently violent men who had enjoyed the outlet the pre-peace accord environment gave them for venting their violence, once again were meting out vengeance, this time on their own and not as part of any official organization.
Gaining notoriety, Rucker found, were "punishment beatings," vigilante justice that was being dispensed by groups who now, instead of directing their rage against the other side, roamed their neighborhood streets looking for their own, individuals who stood accused of breaking some social contract or moral code in some fashion, such as drug dealing.
Rucker said he met with and talked at length with victims of these beatings who, although beaten within an inch of their lives, still would not go to authorities to report the perpetrators.
Rucker said an inbred, generations-old policy of never cooperating with British authority or any police protects the "thugs" who, he says, are as well-known among their neighbors as are their actions.
While living in Ireland since his 1998 return, Rucker supported himself as a free-lance journalist covering news in Ireland, gaining research for his book, This Troubled Land: Voices From Northern Ireland on the Front Lines of Peace, recently published by Ballantine Books, a division of Random House.
Rucker said his story records the changes and exchanges that will work their way into the folklore of northern Irish history. The book is full of poignant exchanges that followed the release of all political prisoners after the 1998 peace accord.
Rucker said political prisoners were defined as anyone on either side who was in prison for crimes directly linked to any armed conflict between IRA soldiers and British soldiers.
He said these individuals were granted unconditional releases and sent home to the very streets where each had killed people whose family members were still living in those same neighborhoods.
Rucker offers snatches of a conversation between two mothers from the same neighborhood, one Protestant, the other Catholic, offering condolences with the words, "My James is sorry he killed your Seamus."
Rucker says he has talked to men who freely admitted having killed dozens of individuals, men who were serving life sentences for their crimes before the amnesty condition of the peace accord granted them clemency.
Rucker said it has become commonplace for men from both sides of the conflict who were jailed separately in the same facility to now not only pass on the streets, but to socialize in the same neighborhood pubs. Oftentimes, he says, former guards and inmates stop and exchange pleasantries as they pass on the streets.
Rucker says it is fascinating to witness these "personal acts of redemption and reconciliation."
"People who once were trying to kill each other now meet and greet each other on the street," he said.
At this time, while the leaders on both sides work to achieve common ground, Rucker, a Protestant, says the basic beliefs that are at the heart of the conflict between Catholic and Protestant in Northern Ireland remain, if not as destructively, for the time being.
Since the 1920s, Rucker said, Ireland had essentially become two countries, each with its own government: Catholic Dublin in the south and Protestant Belfast in the north, with the IRA seeing itself as a government in exile.
Rucker notes that presently, one telling thing is that southern Ireland is now using the Euro dollar for currency while Northern Ireland continues to recognize the British pound as the coin of the realm.
Rucker says he nonetheless remains "cautiously optimistic" about the continuation of the Good Friday peace accord because "the IRA is now completely mainstream and now fights things politically and wins elections."
Regarding Irish Americans who supported the IRA with money all those years, Rucker has nothing but contempt. He said the American support was directly responsible for the violence to be able to escalate as it had since the late 1960s.
According to this front-line journalist who saw the results of this support, "Either out of ignorance or a lack of caring, they indulged themselves and their romantic fantasies of revolution in Ireland."
It is, observes Rucker, just another in a long line of contradictions and ironies that is Ireland.
Rucker noted one of Ireland’s greatest ironies illustrates what is at the heart of the Catholic Republican and Protestant Loyalist conflict — that being the legend of St. Patrick, Irish icon and patron saint who was not even a native of Ireland and is another, Rucker says, in a long line of outsiders who came to claim Ireland for their own.
Chuckling, Rucker observes that St. Patrick was "one of the first colonizers" and a harbinger of things to come due to the fact that the Irish-British conflict can be traced to St. Patrick having kindled British interest in Ireland.
According to Rucker, since 1690, Northern Ireland has been a British stronghold secured by a predominantly Protestant population that pretty well assures a majority Protestant rule.
Presently, Rucker says, peace is a commodity the former warriors from both sides will have to fight hard to achieve and maintain, this time in courtroom battles where victories will be recorded in the blue ink of treaties and not the red blood of innocents.
For now, as he reflects in his book, Rucker says the peace is "healthy and holding."
But, he is quick to point out, the IRA conceded to the terms of the 1998 peace accord agreeing to end the violence, "not because they had a moral problem with the violence, but because it wasn’t working and they weren’t getting anywhere."
Rucker says the parallels between the present truce in Ireland and the struggle to achieve the same in the Middle East are there, but that doesn’t mean it can be assumed the same approach to peace would work.
Rucker said each will find their way to a peace for their people, a way to guarantee its people they are safe from the outsiders with whom they must effect a workable and continuing peace.