The article based on an interview with Kenneth Branagh’s cousin ended with a touching remembrance of his ethnically cleansed Catholic neighbours, his final comment being “Northern Ireland can be a great place if they’d just leave us alone” (“‘I grew up with Branagh in Belfast: our childhoods haunt his new film’”, News). That is the kind of sentiment often heard from this country that sounds significant but is actually meaningless. Who is “they” and who is “us”? Was it all someone else’s fault? The “they” who put his Catholic neighbours out were his fellow Northern Irish Protestants. As the article makes clear, some of those Protestants could have in their turn been put out by Catholics.
Notwithstanding the involvement of the British army, indigenous tit-for-tat violence was at the core of the Troubles and the reason it went on for so long. If “they” implies some outside influence, it was only the intervention of British, Irish and US politicians in support of home-grown peacemakers that eventually ended the Troubles in 1998. Northern Ireland can be a “great wee place” (as the saying goes) but only if we Northern Irish make it so. There is no “they”.
Stephen Butcher
Tullaghgarley, Ballymena, Co Antrim
