Skipper

Hugh Orde warned us terrorist activity was looming closer once again in Northern Ireland, but we didn't want to hear that. We have a curious ambivalence to the province. Visitors praise the friendliness of Ulster denizens as well as the beauty of the landscape but we have long had little patience with their incomprehensible 'medieval' disputes.

'Religion? what's that all about?' we secular Brits have sniffed. I recall my people loving grey haired old mother saying, despairingly after yet another atrocity, she thought the whole population should be torpedoed in mid Atlantic. But if you read any history of Ireland you begin to understand a bit more: the Troubles were the fruits of our centuries of misrule, come back to haunt us, as such things often do. Terrorism is never conceived and nurtured in a benign vacuum. My students at Liverpool who come from the province have been saying for a while that, even though the surface looks calm, the two communities are as divided as ever. [Tiny example: one, a Catholic, said another, a Protestant, would not be able to visit her house back home.]

It's weird to hear McGuinness and Adams condemning the violence when they would say nothing when their own platoons were doing it only a short while back. Cynics would say 'Yes, they condemn it now that they have won power for themselves'. But it is in reality a hugely positive sign. The real test will be if the Catholic community offer up the Real IRA assassins or continue to protect them as they did their predecessors for over three decades.