When do you abandon enmity for peace?
I ask that question in light of Arlene Foster’s comments on Friday. Appearing on RTÉ’s Late Late Show, the most senior Northern Irish politician was asked about her decision to attend the 2017 funeral of fellow politician Martin McGuinness.
The context here is that Foster is Northern Ireland’s first minister and is the leader of the pro-British Democratic Unionist Party. McGuinness was a former Irish Republican Army terrorist commander responsible for attacks designed to force Britain to relinquish its sovereignty over Northern Ireland. But, following the signing of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, McGuinness became a politician and served alongside Foster as Northern Ireland’s deputy first minister.
Because of McGuinness’s history in the Northern Ireland conflict, many of Foster’s DUP supporters were angered when she attended his funeral, and that’s what Foster addressed.
Attending the funeral “was absolutely the right thing to do,” she said. “There were a lot of innocent victims who felt very strongly, and I lost friends over going, but I still believe it was the right thing to do. I took the view I had worked with him in government, served with him. As a leader, you have things to do you would not do as an ordinary citizen, and I had to do it.”
Does this mean that Foster endorses McGuinness or the IRA? Of course not. The reality of the Northern Ireland conflict is one etched brutally in many memories. A history of IRA death squads and bombing cells, of collusion between British security services and loyalist death squads, of police officers gunned down as they sought to hold the line of law and order, of wrecked innocent lives.
But Foster recognizes a truth any true leader must, that there is a time to love, and a time to hate, a time for war, and a time for peace. Catholics, Protestants, and people on all sides of the Northern Ireland debate would recognize those words from Ecclesiastes, but a leader must do more than recognize them; they must act on them, and Foster understood that the anguish some might feel over her supposed betrayal would be manifestly outweighed by the moral benefit her act would bring, a benefit earned by showing former enemies and still-ardent political foes that the cause of peace is worth striving for and building wherever practical, that death is best used to bring people together rather than drive them apart.
It’s a truth in which McGuinness’s supporters chose to share when they applauded Foster on her arrival at his funeral.
I applaud Foster’s courage. Acts such as hers and the vision of peace they represent do not exist in a vacuum. The alternative is the way of war, of more funerals, more innocent dead, and of Northern Irish streets marked by blown-out bodies rather than, as today, by bustling shops.
And in the choice between hate and valued peace, there is no real choice.
