Editorial Hate still burns

The acceptance followed by the public validation of the Belfast Agreement, the election of a pro-deal Northern Ireland Assembly, and that Assembly’s selections, last week, of a first minister and deputy first minister, are all strong indications that a democratic political process is at last taking root in Northern Ireland’s bitter soil. But that process won’t thrive if a major source of its nourishment continues to be sectarian hatred. That hatred was evident everywhere in the North last week. But its depth was most clearly illustrated in the arson attacks against 10 Catholic churches, three of which were destroyed.

There have been other attacks against Catholic churches in the North over the years. Many of them, in fact. The recent almost year-long harassment by loyalists of Mass-goers in Harryville, Ballymena, was a particularly egregious act of intimidation, not to mention an assault on religious liberties. Still, the sheer numbers of last Wednesday’s firebombings set them apart. Indeed, they are without precedent and seem particularly ominous.

It’s possible that these were copycat attacks. More likely, though, they were coordinated, occurring, as most of them did, near strongly loyalist towns with minority Catholic populations. The attacks were none-to-subtle reminders of the potential for mayhem that still exists in the North. Their timing, of course, had everything to do with the stopping of the Drumcree march. They send the message that similar decisions by the Parades Commission will be looked on as provocations deserving of extreme countermeasures.

There can be, of course, no justification for such cowardly attacks, whose perpetrators tend to slink back into the night. President Clinton, flying home from China last week, correctly likened them to the firebombings of black churches in the South during the Civil Rights era. The attacks were also widely condemned in Northern Ireland by Nationalist and Unionist politicians alike. These condemnations need to be repeated over and over, louder and louder. It must be made clear to every hate-filled lout that he is part of the past, that there is no place for his kind in the new Northern Ireland.