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29 July 2016

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An Agreed Ireland – New relationships and accommodations

Casement’s Legacy in 2016

FOR THOSE of us who confess to being biased, County Antrim’s coastline, Glens, hills and parks, and loughs and rivers are best described as ‘God’s Country’.

Murlough Bay between Torr Head and Fair Head is one of Antrim’s spectacular settings and it is synonymous with the legacy of the executed 1916 Rising leader Roger Casement. Murlough Bay was his chosen burial site.

For many years Seamus Clarke and others organised an annual commemoration there on the Sunday closest to Casement’s execution date, on 3 August.

It was a regular date in the local republican calendar.

Murlough Bay was the first commemoration or march I was allowed to attend on my own at the age of 13 or 14 independent of other family or adult supervision.

This Sunday the Murlough Bay commemoration is being revived to mark the centenary of Casement’s execution.

Roger Casement represents a powerful link between County Antrim and the Easter Rising. Others such as the Monahan brothers, the Corr sisters, Jack White and Winifred Carney represent other important connections. 

Casement, however, is particularly significant because he came from an Anglo-Irish background and served as a renowned British foreign diplomat before becoming an active Irish republican and Gaelic cultural activist. As a result of his diplomatic career he also became famous as a great humanitarian. 

Although he was born in Dublin he was reared and educated in the Ballymena area, and he never lost his affinity with County Antrim.

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Casement’s story is not unique.

Years later, John Turnley from Carnlough, some miles further around the coast, emerged as an important nationalist political leader. He was an Irish Independence Party councillor on Larne Council and became a member of the National H-Block Armagh Committee during the Hunger Strikes. He was assassinated by a unionist death squad in June 1980.

In the same period, Ronnie Bunting, an Irish Republican Socialist Party leader, also came to prominence. He too was a member of the H-Block/Armagh Committee.

Ronnie Bunting was born into a solid unionist background and was the son of Major Ronald Bunting, a well-known unionist figure in the 1960s and 1970s.

Like John Turnley, Ronnie Bunting was also executed by a death squad in October 1980 alongside his comrade Noel Little.

Growing up I was encouraged to learn about the influence which the Presbyterian and Dissenting tradition had upon the development of Irish republicanism.

Famous United Irishmen such as Jemmy Hope from Templepatrick, William Orr from Donegore, and Henry Joy McCracken were all closely associated with my home area. Jemmy Hope’s revolutionary ideas of the time had a particular influence upon both James Fintan Lalor and James Connolly.

Secularism and anti-sectarianism are both absolutely core to the ideology of Irish republicanism.

The republican vision is of a society which is tolerant, pluralist, and multi-cultural, and celebrates the diversity of all our people regardless of religious persuasion, cultural identity, political affiliation, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.

Modern-day Ireland is a cultural melting pot. That is a good thing. Diversity is exciting and should be celebrated, not undermined by sectarianism, racism or homophobia.

Cultural diversity, equality and parity of esteem must be protected with a zero tolerance approach against any, and all, forms of intolerance and bigotry.

The right to civil and religious liberties, and to be treated with respect, must be paramount in society.

None of us has a monopoly on the future direction of this island but we all have an equal stake in that future.

Ireland’s cultural and political diversity means that an inclusive process is needed to work out how that is democratically enabled.

The Brexit decision has swept away all of the old assumptions.

The British state as we have all come to know it is in constitutional, institutional and political crisis.

The EU referendum was always about a civil war within the British Conservative Party.

Most citizens in the North of Ireland recognised that agenda was nothing to do with them. That is why the North (and Scotland) voted decisively to remain in the EU.

The attempt to pull the North of Ireland out of Europe against the democratic will of the electorate here because of a vote in England is fundamentally undemocratic. It is an untenable economic and political prospect to have the South of Ireland in the EU and the North of Ireland dragged out against its will.

New, serious divisions will be created as a result.

Brexit has become the price of Ireland’s continued partition.

Ireland’s political landscape, North and South, has been dramatically transformed.

Everything has changed and massive uncertainties have been triggered about the implications for business, trade, jobs, social protections, educational opportunities, and future political and economic stability.

Unprecedented chaos has consumed the British state and its government agencies.

There is no institutional memory or experience within the British system to navigate a clear path through the prevailing uncertainty and complexity.

Theresa May says that “Brexit means Brexit and we will make a success of it” – but there is no plan to do so.

All of this poses huge challenges for Irish national interests.

And yet a real potential has opened up to begin a new political and civic conversation about Ireland’s future in a post-Brexit context.

Political partners, social partners, civic stakeholders, and popular community opinion should concentrate upon working together to recast these challenges into a new, positive, national conversation about how we might collectively begin to reimagine and redesign constitutional, political and economic arrangements which better serve Ireland’s needs.

An unprecedented opportunity has emerged to begin a new popular and inclusive conversation in the North and throughout the island about how our shared future can evolve.

Its focus should be on exploring new relationships and imaginative accommodations that serve the greater good and which transcend old communal cultural and sectarian divisions. We need to be thinking about new relationships between the island of Ireland and Britain – and the importance of a new confident, outward-looking relationship between Ireland and Europe as well as the global community.

Brexit contradicts every previous assumption about the old constitutional, political and economic status quo, in Ireland, North and South – and also in Scotland.

A completely new context has emerged and a new public and political discourse is required.

We need to end, not reinforce, divisions – either among our people or on the island, between North and South.

As Liam Mellows said: “We are back to Tone – and it is just as well.”

A Rubicon has been crossed. 

A moment has arrived to begin a considered conversation about Ireland’s future, to begin talking to each other about new relationships and the compromises and arrangements upon which such a new future should be based.

All sections of our people – regardless of creed, culture, colour or class – deserve better than our past and what our present has become.

It is time for a new direction and a new future and a discussion about the transition to a new, multicultural and agreed Ireland – and shaping our own ‘Rainbow future’.

That is the legacy of Roger Casement in 2016.

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Contributions from key figures in the churches, academia and wider civic society as well as senior republican figures

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