After the Quinn boys' murders, moderate Protestants speak out

By FERGAL KEANE

write from the edge of the union, from a town called Castlederg. Here, nearly four centuries ago, Scottish Protestants established one of their most far-flung Ulster settlements. The border with the Irish Republic runs in a loop around the town. Throughout the Troubles, I.R.A. units would attack targets in Castlederg and then vanish along remote border roads. The local Protestants learned from an early age that group solidarity was imperative.

Visit the graveyard on a forlorn hill above the town and you begin to get some idea of the price paid by those who support union with Britain. Chiseled onto dark marble headstones are names like Michael Darcy, Ronnie Finley, Heather Kerrigan. Below each is the simple line: "Murdered by Terrorists." The outside world has forgotten these names. They have vanished into Ulster's bitter history, replaced in the public mind by other victims as the Troubles drag on.

But in small towns like Castlederg, the memories do not slip away. Families and friends remember. The local Protestant minister, Canon Walter Quill, buried many of the dead and continues to console the bereaved. He smiles at a mention of Ronnie Finley. The murdered man was a helper at church services and a part-time policeman and farmer. The canon remembers him as a man who liked jokes. On the day he was murdered by the I.R.A., Canon Quill comforted the family. He remembers going to the farm and seeing Ronnie's body on the ground, his two young sons sitting in the car and his wife Kathleen pacing back and forth. Something like that you never forget.

Canon Quill knows better than most how much pain exists in the Protestant community, and he is as proud as the next man of his British heritage. Yet when I heard him address local Orangemen last week, the canon did not speak the words of comfort and solidarity you might have expected. For, as he stood before the members of the Order, the canon was thinking of the three dead Quinn boys murdered in Ballymoney. And so he used words like "anger" and "shame," and he wondered what kind of men could murder innocent children. The Canon reminded the congregation again and again that he had not come to condemn the Orange Order. These were his people and he understood their fears. But it was time to take a chance, he said. It was time to extend the hand of friendship to the other side. There was silence in the church as the words sank in. Some might have agreed with him, but the hard-liners in the Orange Order would regard such words as treachery.

The truth of the situation is that Ulster's Protestants have never been more divided. There is a great bitterness in the air. In nearly 20 years of writing and reporting on Northern Ireland I have never seen anything like the rancor which now pervades unionism. Those who support the path of moderation are called traitor. I have seen them being waylaid by angry groups of men on Castlederg's main street. This is a crisis that is dividing friends and families. Protestant Ulster is at war with itself. The poet and Ulster Protestant, Derek Mahon, once described his people as a "lost tribe." Never has that description seemed so apt.

How must all of this seem to the world at large? The people of Ireland at war with themselves again, living up to the old cliche that they are happiest when they are fighting. But now, more than ever before, we must resist the temptation to despair. The reality is that most of us who grew up here would rather wake up and find that we lived on an island that had no past, a place where sectarian murder was not part of the daily agenda, where no children died in agonies of flame. We did not choose the past, it was given to us.

We are haunted by those three impish faces, smiling out at us from a happy family photograph. The murders of the Quinn children are first and foremost a private tragedy, another Irish family driven into a wilderness of grief by ancient hatred. Because of this I am aware of the danger of sounding glib, of minimizing the individual pain by talking about the deaths as a turning point in our broader history. But something profoundly important has happened since the murders.

The divisions in Ulster Protestantism have been driven out into the open and good men like Canon Quill have taken a courageous stand for tolerance and peaceful coexistence. There are men like him preaching the same message in towns across Ulster. Do not for a moment believe that the bigots are winning. Quite the opposite. The moderates whom they denounce as traitors are the voice of the majority and, like Canon Quill, they are prepared to stand up and be counted. Hatred will be with us for a long time yet, but men like the canon will make sure it is never again allowed to dominate political life. For the sake of the dead children and the generations to come we must learn to speak the gentle language of hope.

Fergal Keane is a senior foreign correspondent for the BBC