British violence ignored by church, say Irish priests

July 20, 1994
Issue 

DUBLIN — Four Catholic priests, members of the Clergy for Justice group, have accused Irish church leaders of deliberately ignoring the "institutional violence of the British state in Northern Ireland".

"Given the way the British government uses 'violence' for propaganda purposes, it is absolutely essential to identify primary violence and secondary violence in the context of the conflict in the Six Counties. To fail to do so is to fail to speak the truth about the conflict", says a statement by Father Des Wilson, of Belfast, Father Joe McVeigh, of Garrison, County Fermanagh, Father Maurice Burke, of Waterford, and Father Tomas Walsh, of Cork.

They say that for many church leaders there is no such thing as "British violence"; for them, only two groups engage in violence, loyalists and republicans, and they only comment on, and condemn, republican and loyalist violence in a way which suggests one is a reaction to the other.

"Such a distortion of the realities is widespread among churchmen and is favourably reviewed in the media and by politicians", the priests said. "It is important to understand republican violence as a response to the much greater, primarily British, violence ... It is also essential to understand loyalist violence as another element in British counter-insurgency strategy."

The priests cite as "British institutional violence" in the North the statistics that, of the 3284 people killed since 1969 in political violence there, 1268 have been killed by "British police and soldiers and pro-British death squads", compared to 1753 killed by the IRA.

They also cite the 30,543 armed soldiers and police on the streets; draconian emergency laws; the large numbers in prison as a result of the political situation; the harassment, abuse and questionable shootings of Catholics; continuing discrimination against Catholics in employment; and the 27 findings of a breach by the British government of at least one article of the European Convention on Human Rights, four of them related to Northern Ireland.

"The Downing Street Declaration contains not one word of undertaking on the part of the British to deal with these human rights violations, which have caused concern to independent observers around the world", the priests' statement says.

Alleging that the "secondary" violence of the IRA is a "reaction against the source of the present injustice", they say that politicians cannot ask the alienated republican community to accept passively the injustice of the state.

"These people have had every non-violent means of resistance or amelioration of conditions cut off from them." The priests urge church leaders to support "the attainment of justice, the removal of the conditions which give rise to violence — not repression".
[From Irish American Information Service.]

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