Reid And Wrong

I have a rule of thumb that, in order to be hurt by someone's criticism of me, I have to first respect that person. If some half-wit wants to act like a six year old and fling insults around, it's of no concern to me. But if someone who I hold in high esteem criticises something I've said or done, then I take their views seriously. Such a relaxed attitude to abuse has served me well on Joeuser when the Neanderthals get into full swing.

So it was that I reacted to Father Alec Reid's recent remark about Nazism, not with anger, but rather with amusement. In a heated exchange at a public meeting in Belfast this week, the elderly priest said:

“The reality is that the nationalist community in Northern Ireland were treated almost like animals by the unionist community. They were not treated like human beings. It was like the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews.”

Emanating from someone else, such a claim would have been shocking. But coming from the lips of Fr Reid, a man who is - in his own mind - close to both God and Gerry Adams, such a comparison is not surprising. Fr Reid after all is a man of the cloth who has long been an apologist for an organisation which murdered hundreds of innocent civilians. Where was Fr Reid's pro-life Catholicism when the IRA were killing women and children? Where was his anti-fascism when the Provos were gunning down Protestants just for being Protestants? The opinion of a man who can square "love thy neighbour" with kill thy neighbour is of no concern to me. I can only bring myself to laugh at a man who can't see the difference between gerrymandering and gas chambers.

Reid's problem is that, in his desire to provide a damning paralell to the oppression of nationalists during the Stormont period, he went too far. If, rather than over-reaching with the Nazi jibe, the priest had instead invoked apartheid South Africa, his critique would have been far more powerful. This is not to say that unionist discrimination was equivalent to Boer racism, it was not. But there were certainly plenty of similarities in the two situations. But to compare, as Reid did, the institutionalised discrimination of the Stormont period with the attempt to wipe an entire religion off the map is ridiculous. His own swift and abject apology for the remark is evidence of this.

Many commentators have linked Fr Reid's Nazi slur with a similar remark made by Mary McAleese earlier this year when she said:

"They (the Nazis) gave to their children an irrational hatred of Jews in the same way that people in Northern Ireland transmitted to their children an irrational hatred, for example, of Catholics..."

The similarities between these comments are self-evident. There is however one crucial difference between the two instances. McAleese, unlike Reid, had a good name to lose. While the senior priest's pronunciations are a matter of supreme indifference to me, I do hold the President in high regard. For this reason I found her remarks deeply hurtful. For an otherwise tolerant and reasonable person to draw such a paralell was a shock, and not a pleasant one.

I confess to having had mixed feelings about McAleese upon her election to Aras an Uachtaran in 1997. However, the Nazi jibe aside, she has confounded my fears and been an excellent representative of Ireland, both at home and abroad. In particular I have been impressed at how she and her husband, Martin, have worked to build up links with the loyalist community, which has become dangerously marginalised in recent years.

She, more than any other nationalist politician, has tried to reach out to working-class Protestants. For this reason, her Nazi remark was the cause, not only of anger but also of sorrow. Years of patient bridge-building between the southern state and northern Protestants was undone with a sentence.

Even Fr Reid could tell you that this was a shame.

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