Kettle's Boyled: Sundered children on this sundered island

Last January, Sinn Fein’s Mary Lou McDonald said the days of partition were numbered and a united Ireland was 'in touching distance.' I'm not sure what she was going to use to touch this Republican Utopia, but the proverbial forty-foot bargepole would seem nowhere nearly long enough.

The Buddhist nun Chiyo-ni once wrote about a fishing rod whose line touched the moon, but she was using poetic licence to allude to the line being cast into water that merely held a reflection of the lunar body. Perhaps she was being similarly poetic, speaking of Irish unity in the abstract, a unity that is simply a reflection of the thoughts of the small group that controls her party. Or maybe I'm giving them credit for some kind of sensitive side they have yet to display.

David Rice is a renowned teacher, journalist and author of numerous books. Best known for works like ‘Song of Tiananmen Square,’ 'Scattered Vows' and 'I Will Not Serve,' he is a former Dominican Friar who became a widely syndicated journalist across the USA. He went on to found the Rathmines School of Journalism, where he honed the skills of a generation of journalists. In retirement, he carried on training writers, and many of us learned our craft by his fireside in Killaloe.

Rice’s most important book may well be one he did not actually write, but one in which he compiled the thoughts of thirty-six interested and expert contributors around the subject of Irish unity. That recently published work, ‘The Sundered Children,’ attempts to make sense of the reality that is Northern Ireland, and it explodes the myth that unity by majority vote will lead to a peaceful and harmonious thirty-two county state. 

This is summed up by Rice in his foreword to the book when he says ‘there can be no united Ireland until we get a united Northern Ireland. Let us work towards both – but in that order.’ Reading through the various essays, the factors creating division are clear, in particular the issue of segregated education. 

Two divided tribes, educated separately by teachers trained separately, even using two different history books. You can’t start a unification process when you are teaching division from early childhood. One contributor asks how we can ask Northern society to end sectarian education before we show the same example here, and that question answers itself. Rice quotes an expert on world conflict who has shown examples suggesting that enforced unity by a simple margin in Ireland will have civil war as an inevitable outcome.

Irish unity is possible, but it is a long way away, and groups like Sinn Fein have to either learn to stop stoking the fires of division or agree to leave the stage. If they want to see a united Ireland, they have first to stop being divisive. They could start by reading ‘The Sundered Children.’