Mary Holland Commemorative Lecture
Mansion House, Dublin
7 July 2005
Mary Robinson
How sad and ironic that there is once again the dark shadow of explosions today in
London hanging over us as I speak. Our deep sympathy goes out to those who have
been killed and injured and their families. Mary Holland may be best remembered as a
journalist and broadcaster whose integrity in reporting on Northern Ireland ensured she
was held in the highest respect by people on all sides of the many political divides she
came to know intimately. However I will always remember her with deep affection as a
woman of enormous courage, commitment and energy who had an internal human rights
compass which she never failed to check and follow.
That compass helped her to be one of the first journalists to recognise and publicly
comment on the potential of John Hume and the importance of the establishment of the
SDLP. Decades later she was again to the fore in recognising David Trimble’s attempts to
distance the OUP from the right-wing of unionism. At various times she was described as
a ‘provo lover’ and an ‘apologist for Unionists’. Perhaps this is clear evidence, if such
were needed, of the impartiality of her journalism?
In October 2003 at the Irish Journalist of the Year Awards, Mary Holland was presented
with a Special Judges' Award for her outstanding contribution to her chosen profession.
Professor John Horgan, Chairman of the Judging Panel, said at the presentation:
Mary Holland is a journalist who, over more than three decades, has left an
indelible mark on the historical record of events in Northern Ireland, in an
astonishing range of newspapers, magazines, radio and television programmes on
this island and further afield.
But Mary was also a critically important commentator on social issues in Ireland. I fondly
remember her coverage, during the 1980s and 1990s, of issues such as the campaign to
decriminalise male homosexuality in Ireland and the position of women in Irish society.
She was unflinching in her support for the suffering individual or community and stood,
literally and in her writings, with those who found themselves excluded by society. It was
typical of her that she came each year to CHERISH Christmas parties with Kitty, and later
Luke at a time when single mothers in Ireland needed just that kind of strong solidarity
and support.
Mary Holland is so intrinsically linked to contemporary Irish journalism that it is important
to note a little of her personal background – part English and part Irish. Born in Dover to
parents of Irish extraction, Mary’s primary school education was at a convent boarding
school in Co. Cork under the watchful eye of a close relative, a nun in the school. She
returned to England, to a convent school in Farnborough, for her second level education
and later went to King's College London to study law.
Though she did not finish her degree course it is clear from her writings how much,
knowingly or unknowingly, Mary benefited from that education. Her attention to detail,
focus on primary sources and inherent sense of fairness were a loss to the law but
signatures of her journalism – which began when she won a prize for young writers, and
became a feature writer for Vogue magazine. By 1964 she had moved to the Observer
and it was the then Editor, David Astor, who posted her to Northern Ireland in 1968. This
resulted in Mary being the only journalist for a major British newspaper based in Northern
Ireland before the civil rights marches began – and in a remarkable continuity of coverage
over a thirty year period.
Mary’s focus was on the so-called ordinary people of Northern Ireland – who lived in extra
ordinary times. Initially she tried to explain the position of the beleaguered Catholic
communities making known the reasons behind the civil rights protests. But she had
equal empathy for the Protestant / Unionist people and their deep-seated fears and made
the film Shankill to help amplify the voice of working-class Protestants.
I referred to Mary’s moral human rights compass and it was a reading of that compass
which, after the mind-numbing bombing of Canary Wharf in February 1994, led her to
write about why journalists had not warned about the serious build-up of tension. She
said:
There are many forms of censorship and, from personal experience, I know that
self-censorship by journalists of what they write and report is the most corrosive, at
least in a democracy, where theoretically there are few restrictions on the freedom
of the press.
In this, the first commemorative lecture to honour her life and work, I feel it appropriate to
challenge members of her profession – many of whom would aspire to meeting the high
standards Mary made her own.
Let us begin by reflecting carefully not just on how Mary lived but also on how she died.
She died on June 8th, 2004, after a long and painful battle against scleroderma, a chronic
progressive disease of the body’s connective tissues, which can affect the internal organs
in addition to large areas of skin. The last months of her life were unnecessarily difficult
and debilitating because the appropriate full-time medical care she required was simply
not available.
We need to reflect on her dying, not out of morbid curiosity, but because, as the Irish
Hospice Foundation would point out – dying is about living until the end. Chronic
debilitating diseases can bring complex symptoms of a physical and psychological
nature. There are often multiple medical and pharmacological interventions and multiple
service providers. There is a sense of loss experienced by family and friends, few of
whom may be equipped to take on the role of champion of a person’s care, and there is
the profound sense of frustration, not just with disease itself but also with the system
which can be experienced as disjointed and incapable of tackling things in the round.
In Ireland Hospice care is available primarily for people with cancer when cure is no
longer an option. Mary’s situation, and the situations of many others in similar
circumstances, points to the need for high intensity care facilities and services for people
with complex, debilitating and advancing diseases often requiring ongoing nursing and
medical care. This challenge of care requires not simply more specialists, but critically,
powerful generalists who can manage the linkages between primary, community and
continuing care as well as acute hospitals and other specialist facilities.
Mary Holland was a passionate and courageous advocate for the powerless. She
believed in the dignity of the individual and social justice. Yet this talented, brave woman
was rendered powerless in her final struggle. Geraldine Kennedy, Editor of The Irish
Times, which has associated itself with the Irish Hospice Foundation in initiating this
commemorative lecture, said of Mary that “She interfered with our comfort zones and
challenged all of us”. Her death must interfere with our comfort zones and force us to
think of the needs of those who are dying or who have life threatening conditions and how
we, here in Ireland, must intensify our efforts to make the systems of health and social
care more innovative and more responsive to the realities of people’s living and dying.
Mary, I believe, would also have wanted to interfere with our comfort zones on a much
wider level if she had been reporting on the events of 2005. She would have discerned
early on the significance of the worldwide people’s movement to tackle extreme poverty
and inequalities, and to hold governments to their promises. She would have applauded
the broad participation in The Global Call for Action against Poverty, including the
development, environment, humanitarian and human rights NGOs, of course, but also
faith based groups, trade unions and a number of business leaders. Mary would
probably have had some witty observations about the fact that the Global Call for Action
Against Poverty was launched last January both at the World Social Forum in Porto
Alegre in Brazil and the World Economic Forum at Davos Switzerland.
I am altogether less sure of how Mary would have assessed the celebrity contribution
which was captured in the Live 8 concerts led by Bob Geldof and Bono. She was always
capable of surprising us with her perceptive insights, and yet I feel she would have
shared at least in a justifiable Irish pride! But now you see my problem – Mary Holland’s
strength lay very much in the integrity of her own voice. I cannot resurrect her nor carry
any longer the fiction of assuming to know what she might have thought of current
events.
Instead, and in deep tribute to her, I will continue with my own assessment of current
events – with an eye to the role good journalism can play.
First of all, I am glad to note that the media coverage, both broadcast and print media, of
issues relating to Africa and to climate change has been more extensive and deeper than
coverage I can remember before any other G8 meeting. This is true of the media here in
Ireland and internationally, including in developing countries themselves. The coverage
is imbued with healthy scepticism about too much focus on the G8 itself, or what may
emerge from Gleneagles. Its true value is that it is informing the worldwide movement to
make poverty history, which has now been mobilised but which needs to be prepared for
a long haul, over the next decade at least, if extreme poverty and inequality are to be
eliminated.
I have just come from pre-G8 meetings in Edinburgh. The intensity of the discussion was
inspiring. I attended a meeting on Tuesday which was addressed by “The Global
Warming 8”. They were eight individuals from developing countries with a great deal to
tell us about the immediate effects on them and their communities of the climate change
brought about by the greenhouse gas emissions for which the developed world is
responsible. Let me capture three of their stories:
Nnimmo Bassey, a professional architect from Nigeria spoke eloquently about the
damage to the Ogoni people of the exploration for oil in that region. He showed a
relentless film of the flaring of gas which is wasting millions of dollars and also causing
toxic pollution. He referred to the African charter for human and people’s rights and
asked us to think of climate change not as a technical issue but as a political and
development issue.
Rebecca Masyoka, a subsistence farmer from Kenya’s eastern province spoke from her
experience about the worsening climate situation. She noted that drought was more
frequent, there were flash floods and women had to go further both for firewood and for
water. She spoke eloquently about their plans to develop sustainable energy schemes
involving micro hydro projects and the dream of wind and solar power. In other words
she wasn’t just describing the worsening situation she was seeking sustainable solutions.
Bishop Donald Mtetemela. a senior church leader in Tanzania spoke of rural
development and poverty alleviation in the diocese of Ruaha. He emphasised that rural
farming communities already feel the impact of climate change. It is bringing about food
shortages which are causing displacement from rural areas to the cities. He spoke of
malnutrition causing children to drop out of school and his recent experience of visiting a
school where only 40 out of 400 children were attending the school that day. He made
the simple point that making poverty history is an empty promise if we do not stop climate
change.
At another event in Edinburgh yesterday the focus was on raising living standards in
Africa and on the role of the G8 in giving signals on fair trade. The debate centred on
what kind of agreement must be reached at the WTO Ministerial meeting in Hong Kong in
December to ensure real income growth in rural areas throughout Africa. The discussion
analysed the importance of US reform of cotton subsidies for countries in West Africa and
for a sensitive approach by the EU to sugar reform bearing in mind the development
needs of least developed countries such as Mozambique, Malawi, Zambia and Ethiopia.
As I listened to the passionate contributions at these events I remembered a striking
banner at the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002, the last world
conference I attended as UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. The banner adopted
there by civil society groups read “no sustainable development without human rights”.
This was the first time that development experts, environmental specialists and human
rights advocates had combined their expertise to seek a common agenda. Since then
the circle has widened and the agenda has become the agenda of the Global Call for
Action against Poverty, with its symbol of a white band.
The campaign is making clear the linkage between all of the issues. There must be
cancellation of debt, an increase in development aid to reach the target of 0.7 percent by
2015 at the latest, a clear indication of progress on trade issues to be undertaken at the
WTO ministerial in Hong Kong in December and the commitment to reducing green
house gas emissions to prevent damaging climate change. In addition, commitments to
good governance and to tackling corruption must be implemented by developing
countries.
There is another very human issue on which urgent representations are being made to
the G8 Summit – the issue of health. The project which I lead, Realizing Rights: The
Ethical Globalization Initiative has focussed on health as a human right. It has become
very clear in our work that if the Millennium Development Goals on Health – relating to
maternal mortality, child mortality and tackling HIV/Aids, TB and malaria – are to be met
by 2015, the crisis in local health systems in developing countries must be addressed.
This was the subject of a conference we co-convened recently in Wye River, Maryland,
which resulted in the Wye River Call to Action for Global Women’s Health which has been
sent to G8 leaders and is available on our website www.realizingrights.org. We focussed
particularly on the health of girls and women and emphasised that:
“Health systems are more than delivery systems for technical interventions. They
are core social institutions that lie at the heart of the poverty reduction agenda.
They are fundamental building blocks of secure and democratic societies”.
This Call to Action has struck a particular cord with public health experts and is being
supported by individuals and organisations worldwide.
At another pre-G8 meeting on health in Washington DC last week, organised by
Physicians for Human Rights, there was a particular focus on how to influence the Bush
administration’s policy on HIV/Aids as it impacts on women and girls. The health
professionals present were particularly concerned that the approach to safer sex
characterised as ABC – “abstain, be faithful or use condoms” - with a particular emphasis
on abstinence, does not work well in areas such as sub Saharan Africa. They referred to
the mounting evidence that married women in that region are now more at risk and that
young girls between the ages of 15 and 24 are six times more likely than their male
contemporaries to become HIV positive. As one doctor put it: “in some African countries
girls are becoming an endangered species”.
Listening to the discussion, I felt sure that this was an issue that Mary Holland could have
tackled head on. She would have used her skills as a journalist to bring out the reality of
women’s lives and challenge an ideological approach which has become life threatening
for many women. However, a journalist of her calibre would also have helped us avoid a
polarised debate by enabling us to see that safer sex through the ABC approach is a
desirable outcome for society. It is an outcome which is more likely to be achieved over
time through education of boys as well as girls, through tackling violence against women,
through economic empowerment of women and through access to full information on
prevention and full access to care and treatment.
All of these issues will be influenced by decisions of the G8 leaders at Gleneagles. Never
have their decisions been so transparent. Never has media coverage been more
intensive and critical. Never has world opinion been so clear about the responsibility of
those making the decisions. Over the coming months there will be an opportunity to
follow up on these decisions at the General Assembly in New York in September on the
Millennium Development Goals; in Montreal on the 3rd December at discussions in
follow up to the Kyoto Protocol, and later in December at the Hong Kong WTO
Ministerial on the Doha Development Round. The challenge will be to ensure that the
focus of public attention and media attention remains constant and vigilant. Promises
made must be promises kept. Failures of political will of the G8 must be pursued
relentlessly throughout 2005 and the years ahead.
In conclusion let me return to the woman we are commemorating here tonight - I have no
doubt that Mary Holland would have enjoyed playing her part in holding those in power to
accountability. In an obituary for her Roger Alton, the editor of the Observer, said:
For the best part of three decades Mary Holland was the Observer's
correspondent in Ireland. Throughout that turbulent period she provided
unmatched coverage; she was hugely respected by all communities and her
insight, her compassion, and her clarity of vision made her indispensable reading
for anyone interested in the modern world.
A wonderful and deserved tribute. But Mary’s legacy is not only in her writings it is first
and foremost in her children Kitty and Luke, then in her broadcasts, her film Shankhill and
importantly in the inspiration she is to journalists everywhere.
At her funeral, Seamus Heaney said:
she shaped the very history she reported.
May Mary Holland continue to inspire journalists of today and tomorrow to follow her
example. Instead of “dumbing down” the news content of the media, let journalists make
sure that the agenda of making poverty history dominates until it becomes, in fact,
history.
CROKE PARK CONFERENCE CENTRE
Wednesday 12th October
Mary Holland Commemorative Lecture
Conor O’Clery
It is a great honour and privilege to be asked to deliver a lecture commemorating a colleague
and friend whose name is synonymous with courage and integrity in my profession.
More than anything I admired Mary Holland for her resilience, for her ability to recover from
setbacks in her journalistic career, for her fortitude in difficult times, especially in her final days
of illness.
I always found her terrific company too, whether in the coffee bar of the Europa Hotel in Belfast
or the Ritan Restaurant in Beijing where she and her daughter Kitty visited me when I was Asia
correspondent of the Irish Times. And I am glad to see Kitty here this morning.
The number of people who crowded into Mary’s funeral service seven years ago in Kilmainham
was testimony to her standing in Ireland.
Afterwards a few of us went with the cortege to Mount Venus Cemetery in Rathfarnham.
There a rather embarrassing event occurred – at least for me - as everyone stood around after
the burial, not quite knowing what to do.
I was talking to Ronnie Drew of the Dubliners when Nell McCafferty came up and said “Ronnie,
why don’t you sing something to get all these people to go home?”.
Ronnie Drew turned to me and said, “What should I sing?”
I replied, “Why don’t you sing Óró, Sé do Bheatha ‘Bhaile – which is a song about a heroic
woman of Ireland I had learned at Downpatrick de la Salle High School.
Whereupon Eamon McCann, who overheard this, announced, “Listen up everyone, Ronnie Drew
and Conor O’Clery are going to sing us home with Óró, Sé do Bheatha ‘Bhaile.
Ronnie then turned to me and to my horror, in everyone’s hearing said, “You start!”.
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And I did. Now I only knew one verse and the chorus. I didn’t even know what the Irish words
meant. Luckily Ronnie took up the second verse and someone else the third so I got away with
it.
I don’t know if Mary would have approved of that send-off. But it had a resonance insofar as
the song honoured a brave woman of Irish mythology.
Mary herself was a brave woman of modern times, whose reporting and analysis helped us
understand the issues that underlay the conflict and tribulations of this island.
Many tributes were paid that day to her passionate reporting from the perspective of peace and
justice, and to her dedication to the truth, however uncomfortable that made people she knew
and loved.
I remember John Hume saying at the time, Mary was “a most important voice offering
consistent clarity and hope during the despair of recent years.”
Seamus Heaney noted that she “shaped the very history she reported.”
As former president Mary Robinson put it here at this forum, the year Mary Holland died, her
legacy is her inspiration to journalists everywhere.
Reading Mary Robinson’s tribute set me thinking about the concept of legacy, and its
importance to how we live and how people perceive us after we die.
This Forum is dedicated to End of Life. Taoiseach Enda Kenny will later today launch the forum’s
Think Ahead project, a system to guide people in recording their preferences in the event of
emergency, serious illness or death.
I would like to broaden that concept out to consider the idea of thinking ahead about one’s
legacy after death.
Many people of course tend to think of a legacy as an inheritance, like a bit of money or
property left by a distant relative in a will.
The prospect of receiving such a bequest is of course one way of persuading us to mourn the
passing of the distant relative or even friends with greater feeling.
As Miguel de Cervantes wrote in Don Quixote: “There is a strange charm in the thoughts of a
good legacy, or the hopes of an estate, which wonderfully alleviates the sorrow that men would
otherwise feel for the death of friends.”
We all leave something of material value behind, however little it might be.
A woman once called into a newspaper office in the American Deep South to have an obituary
published.
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Told it would cost ten dollars a word she said she could only afford two words. She dictated
them: “Joe died.”
The clerk in the newspaper office took pity on her and said she could have three more words
free of charge.
She thought for a moment and then said, “Joe died. Boat for sale.”
The dictionaries also defines legacy as “something that exists as a result of something that
happened in the past, or someone has achieved that continues to exist after they stop working
or die.”
This meaning, and this is the one I am concerned with here, has become much overused in
recent times.
There are, for example, seven movies called Legacy, seven novels, eleven comic book series and
twenty musical scores, including a rap sheet L-E-G-A-C-Y. The third episode of Star Trek is called
“Legacy”. There’s a heavy metal band called Sacred Legacy, and a road tunnel in Brisbane called
Legacy Way. Some of you might have driven here this morning in a Subaru Legacy.
Indeed “legacy” has become as overused as the word “iconic”. In the Irish Times of recent weeks
there have been references to the “legacy of the spending spree”, the “legacy of the boom” and
the “legacy of the big house sale”.
And of course much has been written this week about the legacy of the Apple visionary Steve
Jobs, under such headings as: “From the mouse to the iPad.” .
As the day of reckoning approaches we all consciously or subconsciously become concerned
about what people will think of us, and about how we conducted our selves in our time on
earth.
The thought of how we will be judged is mainly what tempts politicians to write self-serving
memoirs, to define their legacy rather than have others do the job for them – and journalists
like myself aren’t really any different in that respect.
It was undoubtedly the thought of his legacy that promoted a certain clergyman in Northern
Ireland to say “Yes” to his enemies after a lifetime of bellowing the word “No”.
Undoubtedly a similar concern for their legacy was one of the impulses that made other men,
once dedicated to violence, become peace-makers.
For those politicians and other celebrities who seek to establish their legacy this way, the past is
often a foreign country where they did things differently.
I became aware, when researching my recent book on the last day of the Soviet Union how
Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin conducted themselves with one eye on the future history
books.
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Their legacy is the reality of what is achieved,: In their baleful interaction they made the world a
safer place and removed the persistent threat of nuclear war.
History they say is always written by the victors. And our legacies are sometimes written by our
friends and professional chroniclers.
You will hardly be surprised to hear that the concept of honoring the dead with fine words has
been commercialized on an American website called Legacy.com which prints obituaries under
the motto “Where life stories live on”.
It can sometimes be difficult to redeem a wasted life - but not impossible, as the following tale
might illustrate.
The Smith family in the United States was proud of the fact that their ancestors had come to
America on the Mayflower. As a legacy for their children, they hired a biographer to research
their family history. To their horror, they discovered that their great-uncle George had been
executed in the electric chair for murder.
The author assured them he could handle everything tactfully. When the book came out, it
contained the following: ”Great-uncle George occupied a chair of applied electronics at an
important government institution. He was attached to his position by the strongest of ties and
his death came as a great shock.”
Sometimes a legacy can be identified during a lifetime, before the time comes to write
obituaries.
Which brings me to one of the people I want to talk about this morning, one whose legacy in
material and inspirational form is with us here today in this hall and throughout the island.
That person is the philanthropist Chuck Feeney.
Some years ago I got involved in articulating his legacy by writing his biography. I called it The
Billionaire Who Wasn’t because everyone thinks he is a billionaire but he isn’t, because he has
given all his wealth to a foundation he created.
I would never have got the chance to do this but for the fact that Chuck Feeney himself, late in
life, became concerned about his legacy. Let me explain why.
Chuck Feeney came from a blue-collar Irish American family in New Jersey. He was the first of
his community to go to an “ivy league” university, Cornell in upstate New York, thanks to a G.I.
scholarship. After that he embarked on a whirlwind career with a partner to create the biggest
duty free empire in the world.
But as he became rich he grew uncomfortable with the life-style of the very wealthy. He
decided, in middle age, to put his whole fortune into a charitable foundation, and to spend the
rest of his life making sure it was put to good use. He never forgot how education opened the
world to him and he began funding schools and universities and scholarships to enable kids like
himself to gain an education.
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And for many years nobody knew he was doing this, because he did it all anonymously as he did
not want any public credit or acknowledgment. He was the most secretive philanthropist in
history.
In acting in this manner he was adhering to the purest form of giving as defined by different
religions.
There are several recognized levels of giving, ranging from the lowest form – writing a cheque to
enhance one’s standing in society (we are all familiar with that) - to the highest form - giving
anonymously to enable the recipients to become self-reliant.
For years Feeney worked at the highest level, giving anonymously, mainly to universities and
medical institutions, enabling countless thousands of young people all over the world to benefit
and become self reliant, without ever knowing his name.
He directed over a billion dollars to such good causes in Ireland alone and through his
foundation donated massive amounts to build similar institutions for learning and medical
research in Vietnam, Australia, South Africa and the United States
His lawyer would tell university presidents or hospital directors they must not ask where the
money came from, if they found out they were not to say, and if they did say, the funding would
cease. His name was not to appear on any building, nor would he accept any honorary degrees.
Feeney himself lived – still does at the age of 80 – like a Benedictine monk. He does not own a
house or a car, travels as cheaply as possible in his never-ending quest to put the money to good
use, lives in tiny apartments rented in different countries by his foundation, and wears off-thepeg clothes.
Unlike some well-known high-profile members of our banking fraternity he had no desire to
flash an expensive wrist watch. To this day he wears a plastic watch costing about 20 Euro.
But Chuck Feeney at one point ten or so years ago realized that if no one was aware of what he
was doing, he could not inspire other rich people to do the same - to adopt his example of giving
while living - of using their entrepreneurial skills to ensure their fortunes were put to good use
in their lifetimes and to discover the pleasure that giving provided.
He wanted this to be his legacy, and that is why he decided to end the anonymity and agree to
cooperate with me on his biography. If no one knew about him how could he be emulated!
Feeney himself by the way was inspired by reading the advice of the great philanthropist
Andrew Carnegie, famous for an essay on wealth in which he warned that “the man who dies
rich dies disgraced.”
Actually when Chuck agreed to the idea of a biography I had a problem finding a publisher in
New York because no one there had ever heard of him, and worse still, no one there had had
ever heard of me.
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But it came to pass, and by going public Feeney has become the model and inspiration for two
of the richest people in the world, Bill Gates and Warren Buffet, who are undoubtedly also
thinking of their own legacies.
Two years ago Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet pledged that all their vast wealth
would be dispensed to charitable causes within a given time.
They began campaigning to persuade other high net worth individuals to put most of their
wealth into philanthropy, rather than give vast sums to their children who have done little to
merit it.
Buffet delights in relating what Chuck said to him about his desire to give everything away in his
lifetime. “He told me,” said Buffett, “he wants his last cheque to bounce.”
Chuck Feeney’s legacy is also to remind us that in these hard times, when we are so disillusioned
and dispossessed by the practitioners of the “greed is good” philosophy, there are good people
who turn that on its head.
Putting earthy wealth to good use when alive at least ensures that it won’t be misused by others
when you are gone.
I recently came across the story of a man who decided to put aside part of his fortune for a
lavish send off when he died. He earmarked 100,000 Euro for this purpose. This was to be his
legacy.
His wife told a friend later she spent 10,000 on the funeral and 90,000 on a memorial stone.
“My word,” said the friend. “that must have been a big stone.” “Yes she replied, “two and a half
carats.”
Throughout my career it has been an enormous privilege for me to come into contact with
people like Chuck Feeney, whose intervention in Ireland Seamus Heaney has called “epochmaking”.
Part of Chuck Feeney’s legacy is linked to the subject with which this Forum is concerned – the
end of life – and supporting the most vulnerable in sociaty.
His foundation, Atlantic Philanthropies, has granted many millions of euros to palliative care in
Ireland, north and south, and is co-funding the Irish Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA) with
Irish Life and the Government.
This is a large-scale, nationally representative study of people aged 50 and over in Ireland
carried out by Trinity College Dublin in association with other universities.
It is the most ambitious study of ageing ever carried out in Ireland and aims to gain a better
understanding of the lives of older people so that policy, research and resources can be targeted
to where there is greatest need.
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As Professor Rose Anne Kenny, TILDA’s principal investigator, told me, the hope is that this will
enable us to make Ireland a better place to live in and to experience growing older.
Another point I want to make here today is that we all have our own legacy, however modest.
We all hand something down from the past when we die.
Famous writers and thinkers have pontificated on the subject. The 19th-century Freemason,
Albert Pike, said: “What we have done for ourselves alone dies with us; what we have done for
others and the world remains and is immortal.” Thomas Mann admonished us to “Be ashamed
to die until you have won some victory for humanity”
But “what we have done for others” can be a simple act of kindness.
A “victory for humanity” can simply be helping someone who is destitute or resisting evil.
As the philosopher Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must
be lived forwards.”
How our legacy is defined, and our obituaries are verified, depends on how we put to use the
talents we inherit – whether in public service, bringing up children, passing on wisdom, giving
example, or simply living a decent and honest life.
In fact Shakespeare wrote: “No legacy is as rich as honesty.”
Perhaps with this in mind a lawyer called Strange once asked that his legacy be summed up on
his tombstone with the words: “Here lies Strange, an honest man, and a lawyer.”
The inscriber thought this could be confusing, people might think that three men were buried
under the stone. He suggested an alternative: “Here lies a man who was both honest and a
lawyer.” That way, he reckoned, anyone walking by and reading it would be certain to remark:
“That’s Strange”.
A person’s legacy is also shaped by morsels of memory.
Take my father, Benignus O’Clery-Clarke, for example, another person I want to mention here
today. That’s my full surname by the way but the “Clarke” bit has sort of dropped off over time.
My father was a primary school teacher. He died fifty years ago. As you might imagine, being a
schoolmaster, he didn’t leave behind the material sort of bequest that makes for rich and
spoiled children.
He left a richer legacy, one of gentleness and tolerance.
He taught in a non-denomination school in Annsborough, Co Down. It was owned by the local
linen mill which built the school to educate the workers’ children irrespective of religion- which
was why, unusually in Northern Ireland, it had both Catholic and Protestant pupils.
Page 7 of 8
A past pupil called McPhillips wrote a short story about an incident concerning my
father in the relatively tranquil days before the Troubles began. He described him as a
mild-mannered teacher who lost his temper only once.
That was when a rare sectarian confrontation occurred in the school yard. My father
heard that someone had suggested ‘beating up the Protestants.’
“The effect these words had was stunning,” McPhillips wrote. “The master
straightened up slowly, deathly pale, visibly shaken, like someone who had come
face to face with a lifetime dread. An awful tirade followed.”
My father clearly knew what passions could be unleashed by such incidents.
I have never forgotten that. The important legacy he left to me, and the children in
that school, was to beware, to be afraid of, sectarianism and violence in any form.
He did not live to see how his lifetime dread became reality in the form of murder and
mayhem as the Troubles erupted.
This Forum is about the End of Life, a time when legacy issues become uppermost in
people’s minds.
The end of life can come suddenly, and by the merest chance, as it did to friends of
mine who died violently working as journalists, like David Blundy, killed by a stray
bullet in El Salvador, and Sanders Thoyens, hacked to death in East Timor by soldiers
who had let me pass by unharmed shortly before.
Or it can come slowly, as with another journalist colleague of mine, the polemicist
Christopher Hitchens, who is today dying from terminal cancer. He put the fact
succinctly. ‘I’m dying,” he said. “Everybody is, but the process has suddenly
accelerated on me.’
Sadly Ronnie Drew, who sang with me at Mary’s burial, has passed away after
losing a long battle with cancer. His legacy is his music which lives on.
When he died three years ago a group of musicians — including Bono of U2, Christy
Moore, The Pogues' Shane MacGowan, and Sinead O'Connor - released "The Ballad of
Ronnie Drew" with all profits from the single went to the Irish Cancer Society.
The first chorus, sung by Bono, celebrated hiss gravelly voice: "Here's to the Ronnie, the
voice
we adore; Like coals from a coal bucket scraping the floor; Sing out his praises in music
and malt; And if you're not Irish, that isn't your fault."
As we all know, death is as inevitable as taxes. And just as inevitable is the fact that we
who are still living will judge a person – and will formulate their legacy - by their best
use of their talents and their resilience in the face of life’s setbacks.
Which again sums up the legacy of Mary Holland, who continues to inspire
us today. Thank you very much.
Page 8 of 8
Mary Holland Lecture
Chris Patten
Democracy and Terrorism
It is a great privilege to be asked to deliver this lecture which bears the name of a brave and
honest journalist, and a tireless campaigner for social justice, communal reconciliation and
dignity for the dieing. She was one of that small band of journalists who have done great
honour to their profession. She also served the interests of all those of us who want to share
this archipelago in peace. Mary Holland was on the side of reason and moderation. She tried
above all to tell the truth, not a bad goal for a journalist to set for herself. I want today to talk
about a subject democracy and terrorism about which she often wrote.
When does contemporary history, the modern world, begin? The study of history is divided
into convenient chunks – the Homeric Age, the Roman Empire, the Mediaeval World, the
Renaissance, the Enlightenment and so on. The last nugget of the past is followed by our own
times. But when did they start? When did a new shape or pattern to our lives first emerge?
When did events leave the rails and spin off in a new direction? Which deed roused us from
complacently assuming that we knew what our world was about and surprised us with the
recognition that things had changed, that all was now different, that nothing would ever be
quite the same again.
The eleventh of September, 2001, is for many of us, the real beginning of the millennium, the
dreadful opening of a new century. Had those nineteen terrorists changed everything with the
murder of almost three thousand men and women? There was no shortage of people to tell us
that that was indeed the case, that things would never be quite the same again. “Night fell on a
different world”, President Bush said just over a week later, “a world where freedom itself is
under attack.”1
This was a world where evil-doers lurked in the shadows, a grim battlefield where only the
fittest would survive. It was not enough to think that we in the civilised world would inherit
the kingdom of the earth because of the strength and universal validity of our values. We
would have to fight tooth and claw for what we believed and take that fight to our enemies.
God was after all on our side; the God of the Old Testament; the God that smote His enemies.
“Saul hath slain his thousands, and David his ten thousands.” Divine pre-emption would
scatter our foes.
The scale of the murderous 9/11 attacks was certainly unprecedented. But while the body
count was horrendous, and the act itself as terrifying as it was meant to be, the world did not
become as “night fell” a much more dangerous place nor was the murderous activity itself an
entirely new manifestation of evil. For forty years after the Second World War, we had, after
all, lived in what one UN Secretary-General, Perez de Cuellar, called “a world of potentially
terminal danger.” Like the Abbé Sieyes in the French Revolution, we could say with relief at
the Cold War’s end that we had survived, thanks to mutual fear in Washington and Moscow
that each side was capable of destroying not just its adversary but our planet.
So there does not seem to be more original sin about these days than there was, nor of course
is its manifestation in acts of terrorism a new phenomenon, as we know from the history of
this island.
It is not helpful in my view to talk about a war on terrorism. First, you do not need to be a
grammarian to know that you do not fight wars against common nouns but against personal
ones. You fight a war against this or that country or enemy. Wars on drugs, wars on poverty,
wars on waste - all these things are idle if grandiose ways of describing usually doomed
political ventures. The ambitious, clapped-out cliché subordinates the prosaic policy. The
additional problem about a war on terrorism is that the mindset that produces the metaphor
makes it less easy to implement a successful policy. The opponent is unique – uniquely evil,
for example – so any normal war-time rules of engagement are discounted. The prisoners of
this war are not to be treated like the prisoners of more conventional engagements. Since
anything goes for the terrorists, anything goes for the rest of us too – like teaching Iraq a
lesson - with consequences that can make achieving the primary aim more difficult. In real
wars, there are battles, advances, retreats, parleys, communiqués, surrenders, victories, spoils,
reparations. That is not at all what we are about in dealing with terror. Britain’s Director of
Public Prosecutions, Sir Ken Macdonald, noted at the beginning of this year ‘the fight against
terrorism on the streets of Britain is not a war. It is the prevention of crime, the enforcement
of our laws, and the winning of justice for those damaged by their enfringement.’
Is it actually possible to “win” the war on terror in whose exact name American gallantry
medals for brave service in Iraq and Afghanistan are struck? Perhaps the Cold War and its
dramatic end encouraged the over-use and abuse of words like “war”, which suppose a
conflict of limited duration which we will inevitably win. But the “war on terror” like those
other wars on drugs, poverty and waste, is a process. While we should be able to “hold the
peace of the border line”, there may never come a moment, as came at Checkpoint Charlie,
when the last guard stands down and the patrols go home. The Cold War, after all, was about
a particular ideology, a particular monstrosity. By contrast, terror begins life and grows in the
heart, beyond the reach of pickets and munitions. So the “war on terror” is essentially unwinnable; any time you declare victory you can find that your crowing is the precursor to this
or that extremist strapping bombs to his or her body and descending into an underground
system to cause death and maiming. Prime Minister Zapatero discovered this in Spain at the
end of 2006 when, shortly before an ETA bomb killed two people at Madrid airport, he
praised the success of his peace talks with that organisation. If it is a war we are fighting – a
war on a tactic and a cast of mind – how can we ever win it? Before ripping that statement of
the blindingly obvious out of context, the fact that we can never win “the war on terror” - let
alone “the war on evil” - should not lead us to the conclusion that the battle against terrorists
is un-winnable too. Indeed, we have arguably made some progress in that battle.
What definitions of terrorism can we agree? Unlike conventional politicians, terrorists use
violence or threaten to do so in order to accomplish their political objectives.
The amount of violence actually employed by terrorists varies and the options available to
them have clearly been increased by technology. Semtex is easier to handle and use than the
wheelbarrow of gunpowder detonated by Republicans at Clerkenwell in Queen Victoria’s
reign. Terrorists have to decide how much violence, injury and death are required to carry
their message, because murder is the manifesto.
In her excellent book on terrorism, Louise Richardson suggests that there are three overriding
motivations for most terrorists: revenge, renown and reaction. The four young British Muslim
terrorists who attacked London on 7 July 2005 cannot have expected that this would bring
about the early establishment of the caliphate. They presumably believed that they were
revenging wrongs done in the Muslim world by the British government for which its citizens
should pay, including Muslims like themselves. They certainly achieved renown, not – as Sir
Ken Macdonald said – as ‘soldiers’ but as ‘criminals and fantasists’. Thankfully, partly
because of the tolerance and calm of the British public and partly because of a mostly sensible
reaction by the government, the response did not inflame the situation and encourage support
for subsequent copy-cat atrocities on the heels of the July attacks (though other attacks that
month were undoubtedly planned and thwarted).
Revenge has been a potent force in the conflict in Northern Ireland. Catholic terrorists have
responded to what they have seen as Protestant attacks on their community; Protestant
terrorists have responded with their own bombs and bullets. One pub is burned out for
another; a family bereaved in Belfast’s Protestant Shankill Road matches another in Catholic
Andersonstown. Other divided communities have experienced similarly emotional charges.
Bosnia, which witnessed recent examples of ethnic cleansing in the 1990s is, in the words of
the Nobel Laureate Ivo Andric, “a country of hatred and fear…hatred acting as an
independent force: hatred like a cancer consuming everything around it.”2
The intellectual godfather of modern Islamic terrorism was Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian writer
who was partly educated in the USA. Sentenced to death after being implicated in a plot to
overthrow Colonel Nasser’s government in Egypt, Qutb expressed gratitude when he received
the death sentence at his trial. “Thank God.” he said, “I performed jihad for fifteen years until
I earned this martyrdom.” Nasser realised the likely impact of hanging him, and offered him
mercy and even the post of education minister in his government. But Qutb knew how he
would make the greatest impact. “My words”, he told his sister, “will be stronger if they kill
me.”3 Others, who have had less intellectual influence that Qutb, have been equally clear
about the public impact of their activity and their death. I recall , when I was a Minister there,
visiting homes in Northern Ireland where photographs of Bobby Sands and other Republican
hunger strikers hung on the walls alongside pictures of the Pope, the Sacred Heart and the
Blessed Virgin Mary. Sands’ renown was sufficient for him to win a by-election for a seat at
Westminster while starving himself to death. The families, friends and confessors of some of
those who were committing suicide urged them to break their fast; others encouraged the
strikers to continue it, embracing a hero’s death.
The response to terrorism committed by Muslims, in many cases directed by or in imitation of
Al Qaeda (described by Colin Powell as a holding company), is not helped when it is couched
in the crude and illiberal terms of identity politics. Whether or not terror is a response to
“globalisation”, the assertion of identity and meaning by those who feel threatened or left
behind by predominantly western cultural and economic homogeneity, it certainly seems to be
the case that terror based on religion is closely linked to asserting a particular kind of identity.
It does not seem to embrace any legitimate or negotiable political goal. Some commentators
talk of Al Qaeda’s aims being “limited” politically and territorially to the eradication of Israel,
the expulsion of America from Saudi Arabia and the erection of a new caliphate stretching
from Morocco to Indonesia. These objectives surely stretch the word “limited” well beyond
breaking point. The pursuit of, say, regional autonomy, may be defined as a “limited” one,
because it possesses certain characteristics: the objective itself is viable; the objective has a
degree of political legitimacy; the objective may be negotiated; various parties to that
objective are willing to negotiate it, and so on. Chechen terrorists, who have used ruthlessly
wicked tactics, could be said to fall into this category; they want an independent Chechnya.
But Al Qaeda’s aims, with respect to Saudi Arabia, are the only ones that come close to
satisfying some of the criteria just enumerated.
Here, then, are the ends of many of the new terrorists in the 21st century: to make us
acknowledge the legitimacy of a division of the world along religious lines; to compel us to
acknowledge them as the spokespeople of the Muslim community; and, finally, to make
Muslims acknowledge them as their natural leaders by the will of God.
We may defeat this or that group of terrorists, but we won’t overcome what Louise
Richardson calls “transformational” terrorism if we accept the legitimacy of identity as the
basis for international society, for a transcendental world-wide view connected to that
identity. The point has been well made by Amartya Sen in “Identity and Violence: The
Illusion of Destiny”.4 He argues, “While religious categories have received much airing in
recent years, they cannot be presumed to obliterate other distinctions, and even less can they
be seen as the only relevant system of classifying people across the globe…The difficulty
with the thesis of the clash of civilisations begins well before we come to the issue of an
inevitable clash; it begins with the presumption of the unique relevance of an inevitable
clash.” Sen goes on to warn against those who “present a superficially nobler vision to woo
Muslim activists away from opposition through the apparently benign strategy of defining
Islam properly and appropriately. They try to wrench Islamic terrorists from violence by
insisting that Islam is a religion of peace, and that a “true Muslim” must be a tolerant
individual (so come off it and be peaceful). The rejection of a confrontational view of Islam
is certainly appropriate and extremely important at this time, but we must also ask whether it
is at all necessary or useful, or even possible, to try to define in largely political terms what a
true Muslim must be like? Substitute for Muslim, Christian, Buddhist, Confucianist, Hindu,
agnostic, aethist or consumerist and the point is even more obvious.
Why do we behave as Professor Sen has described? Because we forget that the only way to
“win” the war on terror is to remember our humanism, the foundation of any global civil
society. The first goal of terrorists may not be to force us to give up our civil liberties, but to
lose our civic ideals. In open, liberal and tolerant societies, we need to beware binding the
expressiveness of an individual to the expression of a single, given community. Our proper
desire to recognise and respect the identity which people choose may easily become the very
means by which we deprive individuals of rights in favour of artificial collectives, in which a
variety of self-appointed leaders are deemed to speak for their communities. Stressing
identity, which is where their power lies, these “leaders” control the debate, the airtime, the
resources and the individuals. This twisted reading of politics has converted some murderous
thugs into community leaders, in the Balkans for instance. Who knows? Perhaps one day we
will sit down with the Janjaweed from Sudan and respectfully ask them for their views of
their community and its needs.
The Iraq war is a terrible example of how terrorism can provoke a government into taking
actions which do much more damage to it and its country than the original terrorist assault. As
was both predictable and predicted, not least by intelligence agencies in Washington, London
and elsewhere, the Iraq invasion has in many respects increased rather than diminished the
terrorist threat. The conflagration, in part a civil war, predominantly between Sunnis and
Shiites, and in part a fight to expel American and allied forces, has provided a magnet for
jihadist terrorists. It has sadly confirmed the unfair caricature of America as hostile to the
Arab world, mainly because she is a friend of Israel, but also because of America’s alleged
wish to steal Muslim resources, mainly oil. Bin Laden had hoped to provoke the US into an
expensive, and militarily and morally draining, invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. He
cannot have believed his malign luck when Iraq became the scene of the neo-conservatives’
grievous and foolish error, taking attention away from Afghanistan and the adjoining Pakistan
border regions where Al Qaeda continues to find refuge. There are other factors as well as the
encouragement of terrorism that make up the price paid for Iraq. There has been the money
itself, the costs of the invasion pushing America’s federal deficit through the roof. There was
the discrediting of American hard power, with troops tied down in a confrontation they cannot
win and unable to be deployed to the more important front in Afghanistan. The satellite
surveillance that should have been telling America what was happening around the world was
largely trained on the fight against insurgents in Iraq. There has been the draining away of
America’s moral authority in Abu Ghraib and Fallujah, in some respects the gravest and most
costly consequence of all, a heavy dilution of America’s previously emphatic soft power. We
got rid of a brutal dictator in Iraq, but further brutalised the country and brutalised the region
and the world. I believe that the Iraq war has made the world less safe and the effort to
contain terrorism more onerous.
The suicide attacks that Saddam Hussein undoubtedly supported financially in Israel and
Palestine are not, as we know looking back to the Sicari and the Assassins, a new
phenomenon, but they have been more frequently deployed in recent years and cause
particular horror both because of their effectiveness and because the fanaticism that inspires
them is so incomprehensible. Terrorism on this island and in Great Britain never deployed
suicide bombers although (as I have said) the IRA claimed their own martyrs with the hunger
strikers in the 1980s. So the public transport attacks in July 2005 in London when four young
men – one a respected teacher, another a young student sportsman – blew up themselves and
fifty-six other people, and injured seven hundred others, caused shock and horror. It was not
only the first suicide attack in Britain but the first in Europe. Between 1981 and 1999 there
were similar attacks in seven countries. Since the beginning of this century, there have been
suicide attacks in twenty. The perpetrators have included Europeans, a husband and wife team
and a growing number of women, whose families in the Palestinian territories receive half the
monthly stipend paid to the families of men, $200 a month in comparison with $400.
The chilling proficiency of these attacks is one of the reasons for public anxiety about
terrorism. You can attempt, while acknowledging the truly appalling nature of the attacks on
9/11, to put the figure of fatalities on that day – 3,000 – in a broader context in order to avoid
hysterical over-reaction to the problem. Louise Richardson herself cites the 16,000 homicides
and the 18,000 Americans killed by drunken drivers each year in the USA. On the other hand
the sheer randomness of the horror, from New York to Beslan, and the ability and willingness
of terrorists to cause so much death and destruction inevitably generate forebodings. These
are aggravated by fear of the results if terrorist groups ever get hold of chemical, biological or
nuclear weapons or are able to build a dirty bomb. Some experts think that sooner or later this
will happen. One of the greatest experts on terrorism, Walter Laqueur, has,for example,
argued that “it is only a question of time until radiological, chemical or biological weapons
will be used more or less systematically by terrorist groups; the first steps in this direction
have been made.”5 But who is it who has actually taken this step, and how do we think the
efforts to pursue this aim would fare?
We do have one clear example of a terrorist group that has sought to develop this terrible
capacity to kill in very large numbers.6 The fanatical Japanese religious group, Aum
Shinrikyo (or Supreme Truth), had upwards of 60,000 members, assets in Asia of one billion
dollars, and specifically recruited members with scientific and engineering backgrounds
(especially from Japan). It possessed a large R&D budget dedicated to developing weapons
ranging from sarin (they had enough sarin to kill 4.2 million people), and other powerful
nerve agents . They were developing pathogens like anthrax possibly even Ebola. They also
had a nuclear programme; they had bought a 500,000 acre sheep station in Western Australia
where they hoped to mine uranium and where they practised gassing sheep. Their
conventional capabilities included a helicopter (with chemical spray dispersal devices) and
they were in the market for robotic manufacturing plant, for tanks, for jet fighters, for rocket
launchers and for a tactical nuclear weapon. Despite this vast array of kit, cash and expertise,
the group totally failed in its efforts to weaponise and disseminate biological contaminants.
Even the infamous sarin attack on the Tokyo subway was undertaken by the laughable if
horrific means of storing the agent in plastic bags and poking the bags with sharpened
umbrella tips. While it is true that twelve people died in that attack, roughly three quarters of
the 5,000 “affected” in some way were found to be suffering from shock, from upset or
psychosomatic symptoms (as well they might have). But Aum Shinrikyo would have enjoyed
greater success, if we can call it that, had the organisation placed its faith in old-fashioned
incendiary or fragmentation devices.
This is not to discount the worry felt about the use of these new weapons; the fears that
followed the delivery of the anthrax letters in the wake of 9/11 (which killed five people)
were wholly understandable. Nor can we argue from the example of the Japanese terrorist
group that there is no threat from chemical, biological or radiological weapons. However, the
fact that organisations might include them in their overall strategy, does not mean that they
have surmounted the considerable operational obstacles in acquiring the relevant material or
the necessary expertise to weaponise it. We do, although it is a lot less romantic, live really
still in the Kalashnikov age, not the nuclear age.
The bloody and blundering effects of the strategic response to Al-Qaeda and 9/11 have been
costly – financially, politically and morally. Commentators very often refer to the alleged
resemblance between Vietnam and Iraq, a comparison initially resisted by the Bush
administration and its supporters since it implied that America was up to its eyebrows in a
quagmire from which escape would prove immensely difficult. I have always worried that the
comparison failed on another count. Vietnam was clearly the end of a process even if we
could not see it at the time. Communism as a system and an ideology was about to crumble
away. Technology and the opening of markets were set to transform the global economy and
the living standards of tens of millions in Asia. Capitalism in a variety of forms – from
Leninist party control of the process to market gangsterism – would dig the graves of
Marxism and Maoism. The troubling aspect of the Iraq war is that it reflects what the
American writer, Audrey Kurth Cronin has called “the coincidence between the evolving
changes of globalisation, the inherent weaknesses of the Arab region, and the inadequate
American response to both…”7 It is unfair to refer solely to America here; Europe is culpable,
too. What we have managed to do, is to give credence to Samuel Huntingdon’s thesis of “the
clash of civilisations” by aggravating the Muslim sense of grievance in a part – admittedly the
smaller part – of the Islamic world. Unless we make some strategic adjustments, we shall
discover that we have started something that we cannot easily finish. That is why Vietnam is
irrelevant.
Yet tactically, despite some political and strategic blunders, some argue that the containment
of terrorism has been moderately successful. What is controllable has been controlled.
This should encourage us to recall that counter-terrorism can and does succeed. It worked in
Malaya and the Philippines in the 1950s; it worked against the Red Brigades in Germany and
Italy in the 1970s; and it had some success against the IRA and the Protestant paramilitaries.
Terrorist campaigns do end, as Professor Sir Adam Roberts had noted, 8 though claiming
victory is an unwise provoker, as I said earlier, of any terrorist who may be left, as well as a
provocation to the gods. In any campaign, the keys are good intelligence and police work in
which the public should have confidence; it is a particularly bad mistake in a democracy,
where public faith in the basic integrity of government is vital for the defence of freedom, to
abuse intelligence as happened after 9/11 and in the run up to the Iraq war. To conclude a
terrorist campaign, you need to know who you are fighting, and you also require achievable
goals in your operations – closing down cells, winding up networks, drying up sources of
financing.
It is always possible to create more causes of grievance by the way that governments respond
to terrorism. Sir Robert Thompson, one of the architects of success in Malaya in the 1950s
wrote of the crucial importance of the government functioning within the law. International
legal standards matter as much as national ones. In his account of overcoming the Communist
insurgency, Sir Robert noted that – “There is a very strong temptation in dealing both with
terrorism and with guerrilla actions for government forces to act outside the law, the excuses
being that the processes of law are too cumbersome, that the normal safeguards in the law for
the individual are not designed for an insurgency and that a terrorist deserves to be treated as
an outlaw anyway. Not only is this morally wrong, but, over a period, it will create more
practical difficulties for a government than it solves.”9That was advice, I think, we took very
much to heart when we were putting forward our proposals for reorganising the Police
Service in Northern Ireland.
My last point.
When Donald Rumsfeld in 2002 said of the prisoners in Guantanamo that he did not have
even the slightest concern over their treatment, and when it became apparent that American
forces had not only used torture but that their commander-in-chief had debated with his
advisers just how much torture was legitimate, the anti-terrorism cause was heavily
discredited. In Nasser’s Egypt, terrorists were tortured and became jihadist fanatics. In Putin’s
Russia, the human rights of Chechens were massively abused, driving more of the
diminishing population into the terrorists’ arms. Massive brutality can probably scotch
terrorism for a time. Crassus put down the revolt of the slaves in Rome by lining the Appian
Way for a hundred miles with their crucified bodies. Spartacus was defeated. But on the
whole, history does not suggest that you eliminate grievance by creating more of it – the sort
of grievance that is passed on down the generations in grandmothers’ and mothers’ milk.
Martyrs make bad enemies.
So as Mary Holland argued, democracies should live by their principles in fighting terrorism.
It is those principles and the values they incorporate that distinguish the leaders of free
societies from terrorist fanatics and psychopaths. Holding on patiently to that precept, and
having the sense of prudence and perspective advocated in her life and writings by Mary
Holland, there is no reason to conclude that the main threat to us all in future decades will be
posed by terrorists. But a knowledge of history should inform us how best to deal with them,
it should encourage us not to be dispirited in our campaigns, and it should remind us (without
plunging us into pessimism) that terrorism itself is something that is very unlikely to be
completely expunged from our lives.
Thank you very much.
1
Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American People, 20 th September 2001
2
Ivo Andric, “The Damned Yard and Other Stories”, - ed. Celia Hawkesworth, London 1992
3
Lawrence Wright, “The Looming Tower”, Knopf, 2006
4
Amartya Sen, “Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny”, Allen Lane, 2006
Walter Laqueur, “No End to War: Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century” (New York: Continuum,
2003)
5
Bruce Hoffman, “Rethinking Terrorism and Counterterrorism Since 9/11”, Studies in Conflict and
Terrorism,” vol. 25, 2002
6
7
Audrey Kurth Cronin, idem
Adam Roberts, “The ‘War on Terror’ in Historical Perspective”, ‘Survival’, vol. 47, no. 2, Summer
2005
8
Robert Thompson, “Defeating Communist Insurgency: Experiences from Malaya and Vietnam”,
(London, Chatto and Windus, 1966)
9