Putting Catholics out of their homes

Des Wilson:

The present campaign of chasing Catholics out of their homes in Ireland's northeast is not the result of blind hatred by "a few rotten apples" – or oranges – it is a carefully calculated and organised tactic to reduce the voting, economic and cultural power of the Catholics.

Unionist people are led to believe they have a right to put Catholics out of their districts, they tell their children they have a right to hit Catholic children in the streets, that they have a right to assault and harass them as they go to school. It is then only a small matter to convince them they have a right to kill Catholics too.

Where are people taught that they have the right to do all this? In the religious/political lodges? The mission halls? In the drawing rooms and clubs of The Respectable? Or is it in all of these?

While all this persecution is going on, while in districts where people are struggling to get jobs, or keep them, windows are broken and the cries of "Fenian Whore" rend the air (English and Scottish and Welsh soldiers were taught to shout this too when here), in the drawing rooms and the clubs, in the archepiscopal palaces, at the church fetes, there is a calculated and planned silence – not a dignified silence, but a silence clothed in that artificial dignity which is another name for hypocrisy. The holy voices which once trumpeted from platform and pulpit, from drawing room and club about the evils of terrorism are silent. Silence from the Great Unnoticing.

In the police barracks tea is sipped and stories are told and phone calls are accepted which give reassurance that the police need do nothing and that they will not be blamed for it. Belonging to a police force is well paid but belonging to the same lodge as the squire is even more rewarding. So the windows continue to be broken, the children continue to be assaulted, the homes continue emptying and the voting pattern in the squire's and the preacher's constituency remains unaltered, free from dilution by the Fenian Whores or at least as undiluted as they can be short of a full scale racist war.

The work of Time, which from their pulpits they tell us is The Great Healer, is halted. The balm of healing which they say they all want must be ripped off not only to reveal still festering wounds but to make sure they stay festering. And the windows continue breaking, the oil tanks continue resisting, but just about, the flames sent in over the neighbour's hedge. And children and parents struggle to assert even in their own minds their equality with everyone and their dignity as children of God.

And a Great Silence persists.

People seldom blame The Greatly Silent. From most of the preachers and all the humbugs they expect nothing else. For such people, words are not meant to make justice, words are meant to further trickery. But there is one group of the Greatly Silent whom one does blame. That is the Catholic bishops, archbishops, papal nuncios, cardinals, popes. It is only in one's imagination that one sees them flaming with anger at every house of their parishioners burned, at every child smacked on the face, at every school smashed open, at every insult hurled at fathers and mothers.

And in one's imagination one asks – as one Catholic family after another lies at night wondering if they will be next – how is it that members of a church which has had two thousand years of dealing with every kind of regime under the sun, a church which has more experience of what to do than any other body on the face of the earth, that has thousands of universities, millions of fellow members, thousands of newspapers and books and libraries and intellectuals, all of them having shaped not only the church but the whole of Europe, a church which has been the pivotal force of thousands of years of history, which has learned how to cope with every kind of good and every kind of evil, even with the evils it created itself, why is it that such a church has to bow the knee and keep silent when the misery-spreading little preachers come out of their huts and lodges to insult them?

Catholics are under siege in Ireland. They are suffering from the Small Ones who are aggressive and from the Great Ones who are silent.

If the Great Ones in their own church came together, just this once for God's sake, and stood against this evil, the London government would have to make its choice of how to respond. Either it would have to stop encouraging its criminals to persecute the people, or it would have to persecute the leaders of the Catholic church. Is it the second of these that the leaders of the Catholic church are afraid of?

Let them not be afraid – it is doubtful if even the London government would dare persecute the leaders of the Catholic Church, they are too near home. And even if they did, what is so special about the houses of the Mighty that they should be spared so that the houses of the Small in Belfast and Ahoghill can suffer? If the leaders of the Catholic Church in Ireland were persecuted the Small People would protect them even with their lives – so when the Small People are being persecuted why do the Mighty Leaders not do the same for them?

How long will the leaders of that powerful and supposedly influential church go on allowing their people to suffer the insults and attacks of one of the most ignorant, aggressive and unworthy political/religious movements in Europe?

Teens 'behind sectarian attacks'

'Motiveless' is no reason for no action

Lessons in hate

Ever get the feeling no-one's in charge?

Turn attackers over to police

LVF after legally held arms