An open letter to Joe Brolly: Tribal language will not win the centre ground

Dear Joe, I write as a liberal Ulster Protestant, hoping you might listen to why I was distressed by your article in the Sunday Independent last week, attacking almost everything I believe in.

Your bitter polemics came across to a liberal unionist such as myself as ‘Fenians good, Prods bad’. Joe, you are no longer a member of an oppressed minority.

As a professional nationalist of privilege, do you lack the moral courage to join unionists like me in constructively building a peace instead of relying on traditional and toxic tropes like ‘Fenians’? Aside from your article last Sunday, I have not heard the word Fenian used for the past 25 years!

You talk about the travails of your family and other nationalists during the Troubles. But neither you nor nationalists have a monopoly on suffering. My experience of growing up in the North, 15 years ahead of you, was similarly blighted, not by the British Army or the State, but by the IRA, by its daily murders and by loyalist retaliations. Blighted by IRA ethnic cleansing on the Border. Blighted by sectarian killers finding a safe refuge in the Republic.

Why, Joe, did you not allude to an IRA atrocity like Enniskillen? Why did you not recall, as Seamus Mallon did, how SF-IRA blighted your own community, murdering more Catholics than any other armed group?

I read and respected your account of your family’s fraught experience during the Troubles.

But how about you reading my experiences with the same respect? As the eldest son of a Stormont politician, we had a 24-hour armed police guard at home for a period. I was sent off in 1965 as an eight-year-old to board at Methodist College in Belfast to take me out of the warming cauldron of Paisley’s Ballymena, where my father’s moderate politics were at risk of making his children a target of ridicule in the community. He wasn’t to know that Belfast would effectively become a war zone in the following years. Joe, some of your most bitter words were aimed at the DUP. But a vote for the DUP is mostly a vote against SFIRA. And just as you can’t abide the DUP, so people of my tradition cannot abide the fascist Sinn Féin party. Above all, we will never understand how nearly 50 years after full civil rights, Roman Catholic nationalists vote for a party whose IRA military wing murdered so many of their Protestant neighbours and those of their own community.

How will jeering at evangelical Protestants promote the cause of peace? How will demonising the DUP promote peace? How will your tribal language do anything but destroy the middle ground so necessary for peace? Because it is the people in the middle ground who will decide, electorally, whether there is a lasting peace in Northern Ireland, and thus, on the whole island.

If you want liberal unionists like me to listen to you, you need to speak with courtesy and decency, and not harangue us in a hectoring style. You need to leave your green echo chamber and listen to your Protestant neighbours. You need to accept that many of your “shared community” are as unimpressed by the GAA as you are by the evangelical community. And that’s alright — we can all agree to differ. It’s called tolerance.

Let me assure you, Joe, that there is a big centre ground that has no interest either in the GAA or extreme evangelism. Those in the centre crave wise, moral men and women to lead us to peace. Selectively picking soft DUP targets and ripping them apart with malice may work for you in court, but it’s not a good look within a shared community.