February 17, 2011
By Staff Reporter
They were, unfortunately, quite wrong.
This week, loyalist protesters in Carnmoney, Co Antrim, say they plan to dig up the bodies of Catholics in a municipal graveyard and urinate
on the graves.
Almost as disturbing has been the reaction in Ireland and Britain to this outrage, with some politicians and even media deliberately playing down what has occurred.
Imagine for a moment if Catholics had threatened to desecrate Protestant graves. It would be front page news for a week, there would be a “crisis” in the peace process, the White House, the Vatican and
the European Union would be asked for statements.
Instead, the British and Irish governments, their current focus firmly on persuading unionists back around the table, hardly blinked.
The current strategy is to reassure unionists that their culture and tradition is in no way under threat. This is a dangerous approach. It
fails to grasp that a significant element of unionist culture in Ireland revolves around keeping the Catholics down.
For example, this week’s behavior in Carnmoney is an echo of the underground walls in Belfast’s City Cemetery, built by the unionists at the end of the 19th century, to separate the Protestant coffins
from the Catholic ones.
Logically, the British government should now establish a Graves Desecration Commission, along the lines of the Parades Commission, to regulate such expressions of tradition.
In reality, instead of pandering to bigotry, the British and Irish government should reject it, and instead offer unionists the chance to turn the page on the past, and help build a new Ireland, on the basis of equality, in the decades ahead.