Seamus Mallon - a true Irish patriot

I was in a bookshop browsing through the latest publications and was joined by another browser. We talked. On seeing Seamus Mallon's recently published A Shared Home Place, I said I was looking forward to reading it. “Now what more would you want to know about that bloody place?”, he asked.

He was, in his own use of language, reflecting the attitude which many of us have about those six northern counties of our small island which have been steeped in blood and subsumed by hatred for so many decades in recent times, and which Dervla Murphy, in her book on Northern Ireland called A Place Apart (published in 1978).

 But it is not a place apart for Seamus Mallon. It is a natural part in geography and history of the island of Ireland, which he hopes will be reunited at some time in the future, in an ambience of accommodation, changes in thinking and attitudes, and above all, in a generosity of spirit, and in which he calls A Shared Home Place.

It is a unity which would not involve the spilling of another drop of blood. He is now aged 83, and this is a dream, the realisation of which he does not expect to see within his lifetime, but he finds comfort in the old Greek proverb: A society  grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they know they will never sit.

And Seamus Mallon has been a planter of trees. He has devoted most of his adult life in working for justice and parity of esteem for all the divided peoples of Northern Ireland. He made a significant contribution  to the achievement of that justice and peace in the Good Friday Agreement. 

As a member of the SDLP he has done this entirely through the political route, condemning the terrible violence and killing, whatever its origins. This did not make for a comfortable easy life. He and his family were constantly under threat from both conflicting sides. 

He persisted and withstood all the dangers because he is, as his fellow-writer, Andy Pollack, writes, a man of “courage and generosity”. This a courage to which Fintan O'Toole has added “integrity” and a “fierce intelligence”.

He was born and lived all his life in Markethill in Co. Armagh, which was, until the end of the sixteenth century, part of O'Neill's Gaelic Ulster, but all of that was to change with the plantations.

 Now, the majority of his neighbours are protestant and Unionists, with whom he has always had the most friendly relations. 

Like his father before him, he became principal  of the local catholic primary school, and was already  aware of the discriminations suffered by his fellow catholic nationalists.

The peaceful campaign for justice  and civil rights for them brought him into membership of the SDLP.

 In 1973 was elected as a councillor in Armagh District Council, and shortly afterwards into the first Northern Irish assembly, and within the same year, an agreement  between the political parties, on power-sharing, resulted in the ill-fated Sunningdale Agreement. Indeed it was Seamus Mallon who accurately described the Good Friday Agreement as “Sunningdale for slow learners”.

He became a familiar figure to us in the Republic through his frequent appearances on television and the media, when he passionately condemned violence and murder, and the tit-for-tat killings which were a feature, particularly of the Armagh country in which he lived.

He decided, early in the Troubles, that he would visit the homes of the bereaved families in his constituency, and attend the funerals of the victims of violence from whatever source. 

And this he did, even though sometimes his presence was not welcome. It reflected courage and generosity, his two most enduring characteristics.

Seamus Mallon was deeply involved in the long negotiations which led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. Subsequently with the formation of a new Northern Ireland assemby, David Trimble of the Unionist Party and he, became First Minister and Deputy First Minister. 

He regards the reform of the RUC and the formation of the PSNI, to which he made a very active contribution, as the most significant achievement of that assembly.

His very close encounters with the deaths and destructions of the Troubles, and especially the deaths through violence of people he personally knew,  have left him with disturbing memories which still haunt him. It has also left him with a deep conviction that violence is not the solution to the achievement of mutual understanding  or unity amongst divided communities.

He writes that,  while the Good Friday Agreement achieved the decommissioning of the gunmen and their arms, the hurt and grieving of the bereaved, and the memories of bombings and bullets have left an even more divided society than heretofore.

Perhaps the most interesting part of the story which Seamus Mallon tells is his vision of the future, based on his own experience of the past. He is a nationalist, commited to peaceful reunification, but he does not see that in the near future, and certainly not within his lifetime. 

And he warns against any premature border poll, which, if it resulted in favour of unity, based on a margin of fifty per cent plus one, would unleash on us in the Republic a terror campaign even more terrible than that suffered in the North over a period of thirty years.

 So: if I were again to meet my fellow bookshop browser, I would tell him that I have indeed learned much more about the complexities of that small area of the island in which I live, and that tiny spot in the geography of the world. 

And I have done so through the experiences of an honourable, decent man of great intelligence and integrity, a true patriot who, with Andy Pollack, has told the story of his life and times in A Shared Home Place, published by the Lilliput Press.