Calls to restore direct rule are based on muddled thinking and a skewed interpretation of history

MALACHI O’Doherty (Comment, November 6) expresses in an aside towards the end of his article (“The message is clear: it’s the right time to bring back direct rule”) what now seems to be the conventional wisdom among commentators. But it is a false wisdom.

It has it that Northern Ireland was badly governed by unionists, making it a cold house for Catholics, as though Catholics, for the most part, wanted it to be a warm house.

Nationalists and republicans then thought that the house had no right to exist at all. They sought to bring about its collapse through refusing to co-operate, leaving unionists to govern without consensus.

Yet, for nigh the first 50 years of unionist government without consensus and despite, on occasion, the outbreak of political violence, the number of those killed for political ends on all sides amounted to few, compared to the thousands killed in the subsequent, politically more enlightened, 30 years.

Forget the conventional wisdom. Are not the group minds that Malachi O’Doherty writes of rooted in what has been told, or not told, of what was a violent sewing together of a western Christendom, both in its making and, again, in its unmaking, an equally violent unravelling of it?

A Christian world, then, very much akin to the Islamic world today still making its presence felt in Northern Ireland. The way to lancing it might be through teaching the making and unmaking in the schools as part of a shared culture.

Think about it.

W A MILLER Belfast