Much has been written about the Northern Ireland peace process, particularly on securing the peace. However, as Senator George Mitchell commented in relation to the Good Friday agreement, “If you think getting this agreement was difficult, implementing it will be even more difficult.” Twenty-one years after the signing of the Good Friday agreement, those have proven to be prophetic words.
Dr. Mason will explore what reconciliation looks like in a contested space, the power of memory and story in keeping the pain of the past alive, and how theology can move into that contested narrative in a way that brings about dialogue, honesty, and healing. He will also address the current Brexit situation, exploring how Brexit has been a very difficult experience for these two islands.
Event sponsored by Religions and the Practice of Peace (RPP) and Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School.
Speakers
- Rev. Dr. Gary Mason, director of Rethinking Conflict; senior research fellow at the Kennedy Institute for Conflict Intervention at Maynooth University in Ireland
- David N. Hempton, Dean of the Faculty of Divinity
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FULL TRANSCRIPT:
[MUSIC PLAYING]
DAVID HEMPTON: Good afternoon, everyone. And welcome. Thanks for coming out on a cold Cambridge afternoon. It's pretty frigid out there. So today's the day you get to hear two accents like this.
[LAUGHTER]
You thought there wasn't another one in the world, didn't you? So good afternoon, everyone. Before we begin, please note that we're video recording and photographing this session. So if you'd prefer not to be videotaped or photographed, please tell our video technician and photographer. And we will excise you. So thanks for that.
And so our schedule today is that I will introduce our guest speaker. And then Gary Mason will speak for about 40 minutes or so. And then we will have a short dialogue for a 10 or 15 minutes at the front, where we will be reminiscing over old times, probably. We both grew up in East Belfast during the troubles. And as I found out today, we actually attended the same church for a while. [LAUGHS].
Anyway enough of that. We can reminisce later. And then we'll have a time of 20, 25 minutes for more open questions. One of the reasons I think it's a particularly apposite time to be talking about these things is with the Brexit negotiations, which you know quite a lot about and the role of northern Ireland and Ireland and those negotiations is really quite fraught.
It is as the economist magazine put on its front cover, the mother of all messes. And as I was saying to Gary earlier, that you say one thing today and by 24 hours later, the situation's changed already. So it's a very complicated and mobile situation.
So welcome to this special event hosted by the RPP on the title, "The Rule of Reconciliation Memory and Theology and Shaping the Public Stage." So I'm David Hempton, Dean of the Harvard Divinity School. And I'd like to extend a very warm welcome to our featured speaker, Reverend Dr. Gary Mason, and his wife Joyce. Thank you for being with us. And also welcome our co-sponsor of the program on negotiation at the Harvard Law School. Thanks so much.
And we'd also like to thank RPP's generous supporters, including Karen and Al Budney, for helping to make these and other religions and practice of peace activities possible. As always our appreciation goes as well to our RPP student assistants and staff for their work in organizing this event. A tremendous amount of hard work goes into putting these events on-- arranging for refreshments and rooms and speakers-- and so thank you so much, everyone who's played a part in that. We really appreciate your work.
So much has been written about the Northern Ireland Peace Process, particularly on securing the peace. However, as Senator George Mitchell commented in relation to the Good Friday Agreement, if you think getting this agreement was difficult, implementing it will be even more difficult. 21 years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement-- and I was in Belfast then as chair of the history department in Queen's University Belfast back in 1998-- I left for the United States about three months later, having survived the troubles, and then peace broke out.
So 21 years after the signing of that agreement, those words of implementing it being difficult have proven to be prophetic words. So Dr. Mason will explore what reconciliation looks like in a contested space, the power of memory and story in keeping the pain of the past alive, and how theology can move into that contested narrative in a way that brings about dialogue, honesty, and some healing. He will also address the current Brexit situation-- so far as we understand it-- exploring how Brexit has been a very difficult experience for Britain and for Ireland, and especially north and south Ireland.
So Gary Mason is a Methodist minister and directs a conflict transformation organization based in Belfast called "Rethinking Conflict." Prior to this he spent 27 years as a Methodist clergy person in congregational ministry in Belfast. And he has played an integral role in the Northern Irish peace process. He played a key role in establishing the Skainos project, which is a world class urban center developed in a post-conflict society as a model of coexistence and shared space. It is acknowledged as the largest faith-based redevelopment project in Western Europe.
Gary is also a close advisor to Protestant ex-combatants on the civilisation efforts of paramilitaries. He was instrumental in facilitating negotiations with paramilitaries and government officials. And in 2007 his contribution was formally recognized by the Queen.
In 2009 Gary Mason's church was the stage from which Loyalist paramilitaries announced their weapons decommissioning. So Gary has lectured and political and economic forums throughout Europe, South Africa, the Middle East, and the USA on lessons that can be learned from the Irish peace process. He's been interviewed on CNN, BBC, ITV, and various radio programs.
He holds a PhD in psychology from the University of Ulster, completed his theological studies at Queens University Belfast-- where I taught-- and a bachelors in business studies in the University of Ulster. He also holds an honorary doctorate from Florida Southern College.
He is a senior research fellow at the Kennedy Institute for Conflict Intervention at Maynooth University in Ireland. And he is an adjunct professor at the Candler School of Theology at Emory, lecturing on reconciliation, peace building, the history the Northern Ireland Conflict, racism, sectarianism, and conflict transformation. He is a faculty advisor and partner to the Negotiation Strategies Institute, a Harvard University program on negotiations.
So we're very glad to have him here. And I'm going to turn over the podium and leave his notes. And, Gary, thanks so much for being with us. Appreciate it.
[APPLAUSE]
GARY MASON: David, thank you so much for those words of welcome. And thank you for coming out, as David has said, on such a cold day. I think honestly this is one of the coldest days I've ever experienced in my life. I was saying to some people that normally the Irish temperature is just pretty bland. It's sort of 35. And if you're really lucky, 75. And there's no extreme. So for me this is freezing.
I left our little apartment yesterday, David, to leave down a few shirts for the dry cleaners. I thought I was going to die. And I said to the young woman, can you get me an Uber back to my apartment? I just couldn't bear to walk 600 meters back. I felt it was so cold.
So for a few moments, I want to try to tease out this whole concept of reconciliation and memory, also asking the question, is theology confined to the rarefied spaces of Harvard Divinity School or Queens University or Candler School of Theology? Or can theology, which sometimes people think is a kind of fusty, musty, dusty discipline of another generation, actually spill into the public space and really make a difference?
South African professor of reconciliation once said, reconciliation is no cheap matter. It does not come about by simply papering over deep-seated differences. Reconciliation presupposes confrontation. Without that, we do not get reconciliation, but merely a temporary glossing over of differences. They suggest that the running source of society cannot be healed with the use of a Band-Aid.
So reconciliation presupposes, he suggests, an operation, a cutting to the very bone without anesthetic, because the infection is not just on the surface. The abscess of hate, mistrust, and fear between black and white, nation and nation has to be sliced open.
As David mentioned we're 21 years celebrating the Good Friday agreement in a couple of months time, April the 10th. And northern Ireland statistics-- I often allude to these at the beginning of many lectures-- northern Ireland, as many of you know, is a very, very tiny space-- during the conflict 1.5 million people. But over that 30-year period, we had 47,000 injuries, 36,000 shootings, 22,000 armed robberies, 30,000 plus went through our penal system, 16,000 bombings, and almost 4,000 deaths.
If I was to extrapolate those figures and put them into the US context-- so simply put, the conflict that David and I grew up in as kids and young man, had it taken place in the United States, it would have been 800,000 dead and 6.4 million political prisoners. So suffice to say today when I'm back home on the island of Ireland, primarily the main thing I am dealing with is legacy. How do we deal with the past, with these painful memories, which I'll address in a few moments?
I want to highlight first of all-- I'm just simply calling the role of toxic and transforming theology. Way back in the early 1990s, the Irish Council of Churches-- which was based on Elmwood Avenue, literally facing the university in which David spent so many years in-- put together a working party on sectarianism. For two years I was the youngest person on that.
It was actually chaired-- David, if you remember-- by Mary McAleese, who went on to be president of Ireland on two occasions, and John Lumpin from Derry were the two co-chairs of that committee. But very soon-- almost literally in the first couple of months of looking at the roots of sectarianism-- we find ourselves pretty quickly back in the 16th and the 17th century. And we ended up playing abide with these three doctrines here, the doctrine of that one true church.
And I guess most of us in the room are pretty familiar with that one. Our church is the only true church. And if you're outside my church, your chances of salvation are much diminished at best.
Interestingly, though, the doctrine that err has no right is a lot less well-known. It was developed by Saint Augustine, really to justify the use of state coercion to suppress his heretical opponents. Simply put, if they are radically in err, they have no right to express or hold their beliefs. And for those of us in the Christian tradition who want to embrace honesty, we need to say categorically, err has no right is the doctrine behind penal laws, inquisitions, forced conversions, and many similar ugly stains on Christian history by Providence. We mean very simply, I guess, that God is at work in the world and the fearful, discerning Christian believer can discern God's will and purpose by reading the signs of the times.
Let me twist this a little. Let me combine one true church with the doctrine of err has no right. So I guess all of us could say today, quite openly and honestly, one true church, it's really just simply what all of us in this room would say a truth claim. And like every truth claim it automatically carries with it the dangers of arrogance and imposition. But they're only dangers. They're necessarily outcomes.
So everything depends on how your truth claim is made. So if you make it very consciously and humbly, you don't have to impose it on other people. But if you believe that err has no right, invariably the chances are that your truth claim will be made disastrously, because if your church is the only true church and err house no right, it is your duty to see that error is suppressed by whatever means necessary. So tolerance isn't a virtue, tolerance actually becomes a deadly vice.
Combine one true church there with providence. Providence, as we mentioned earlier, simply teaches God is at work in the world. But if providence is interpreted in conjunction with one true church, it's very easily reduced to this mantra, God is on our side. So if we were to rewind the DVD today, in the early part of the 20th century, when the British were going to disengage from Ireland onto the third Home Rule Bill in 1912, as many people here who are historians of the Irish conflict, on the unionist side we ended up with a militia army of 100,000 men determined to fight the British to stay British, but also on the other side with 100,000 men, Irish nationalist.
The motto of the Ulster volunteer force was, "For God and Ulster." God was on our side. They signed the Ulster Covenant-- my grandfather signed it in the city hall in Belfast. Some people were so determined to stay British that they signed it in their own blood.
Religion was brought into it, so it was called Home Rule. And the mantra of the day for the Protestant mindset became, "Home Rule is or Rome rule." We will not be ruled by the papists in Rome.
But the 1916 Easter Rebellion, as many of us know in this room, even the words, how that was bathed with a religious context. It was interesting-- actually the last time I was here, along with David, in 2016, I was doing something at the Edward Kennedy Institute, and a number of Catholic theologians were trying to address how Catholic theology was steeped in the whole concept of the Easter Rebellion. And they were then saying this was fundamentally wrong. We should not be using theology in this way. And interestingly, going back to the 17th century, 17th century France makes a very interesting comparison with the island of Ireland, because French Protestants, in a very distinctly Catholic state, were suffering a similar set of disabilities under the French penal laws that Irish Catholics were suffering in Ireland under the English penal laws. And the irony of it is the two rival regimes kept a kind of eye on each other across the English Channel to ensure they were outdoing the other person.
So where do those roots of sectarianism actually lie? Someone has once said that Ireland is frozen in the premodern. So really the roots of modern Irish problems lie deep in the past. So let me just ask you a question, and we'll tease aside a little bit later. Do some of the current problems within the United States today-- we're not going to answer this just now-- possibly lie deep in the past?
Let me just flip up something else in relation too. If we move from Ireland, just for a moment, to Nazi Germany, the second chapter of Mein Kampf-- let me quote Hitler's exact words. And Hitler was not a card-carrying evangelical or even a card-carrying practicing Catholic, but he wrote these words-- "Today I believe and I'm acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty creator by defending myself against the Jews."
So really, in reality, what Hitler was very cleverly doing was taking what most of us in this room would call religious anti-Semitism and developing it into racial anti-Semitism. And if you were to ask me a question during discussion later on, or ask David a question, was the conflict that David and I lived through a religious war? The answer is categorically no. It was primarily by land and identity. but I would still argue strongly that what I call toxic theology was feeding into this situation. So on my side of the fence, the British Protestant, unionist, loyalist tradition, we had tough fundamentalist, booming preachers, telling us to liquidate the enemy on the other side and using theology as a bulwark in propping up a system of violence.
[AUDIO OUT] said to me-- if you excuse my language in a divinity school-- who ended up being involved in political violence, You know, Gary, when you were taught Catholics were shit in Sunday school, it was much easier to kill them. And to balance the books there, prior to Vatican II, people from my tradition, from the reform tradition, were classed as heretics, not just simply separated brethren. And I don't need to remind this audience the church's track record in dealing with heretics.
So, OK, it was not a religious war per se, but I do want to argue quite strongly that bad theology or toxic theology fed in to that. Another person I know who got involved in paramilitarism, or terrorism, or political violence-- whatever phraseology you want to use-- he heard a right-wing fundamentalist preacher, whose name I don't need to mention, with an incredibly loud voice. And he said to me, you know, Gary, it stirred a fire within me. I remember saying, you know, Billy, it's not the fire of the Holy Spirit. It was the fire of rampant sectarianism.
So many young men of that generation-- 16, 17, 18-- because of toxic theology of "the other," were driven into paramilitarism to defend their side against the enemy. And interestingly, one French historian uses the phrase, talking about Judaism-- it's a very interesting phrase-- he calls it "the teaching of contempt." So how many people then Protestant fundamentalism or Catholic fundamentalism in my context were using a "teaching of contempt," about "the other" person.
An interesting one, a Jewish historian, puts it like this-- he said, the missionaries of Christianity had said, in effect, you Jews have no right "singular" to live among us. The secular rulers who came later said, you Jews have no "rights" to live among us. And finally, as we all know, the Nazis finally decreed, you Jews have no right to live.
So let's be honest, the process begins with the attempt to drive Jews into Christianity, the development is continued to force the victims into exile, and it's finished when the Jews were driven to their deaths. So the German Nazis didn't discard the past, they simply built upon it. They didn't begin a development, they simply completed it.
And so, in my context, as David, and Leanne, and Joyce, and those of you who have been to Belfast, there's a mural quite close the Skanehouse building there that David alluded to. It's the UVF wall mural. And as well as the Forgotten Ulster, it says, in a little caption above two hooded gunmen, dressed in dark, carrying AK-47s, "We are the pilgrims, master," we will always go that little bit farther. So evoking what we would call language in the New Testament, or spiritual language of the pilgrim. And for those of us who are here in the Christian tradition, we often know the phrase was often used by the disciples of Jesus-- rabbi, master, what do we do?
So toxic theology, while I'm suggesting it was not a religious war per se, bad theology fed into our situation. And Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the British Commonwealth, said this-- "On one point, and it is a substantial one, the critics of religion are right. Religion has done harm. It has led to crusades, jihads, inquisitions, and pogroms. It has shed the blood of human sacrifice in the name of high ideals. People have hated in the name of the God of love, practice cruelty in the name of the God of compassion, waged war in the name of the God of peace, and killed in the name of the God of life. These are undeniable facts, and they are terrifying."
Interestingly, the great believers have always known this. I mean Pascal once said, "Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction." Jonathan Swift, who was Dean of Christ Church in Dublin, probably known to most of us when we were little kids as the author of Gulliver's Travels, but he said this-- "We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another."
And C.S. Lewis, who David and I will proudly remind people was born in Belfast and at one stage did speak exactly like David and me. But when he went to become professor of medieval and renaissance literature at Cambridge University, he began to speak a little bit different-- probably more like this. But Lewis once said this-- "I think we must really face the fact that when Christianity does not make a man very much a better, it invariably makes them very much worse."
And that happens not because religion is religion. But human beings are human beings-- they're certainly not God. And Sacks comments this-- he says, "Religion has power. It bonds people as a group. It moves people to act. It changes lives." And then he says this very succinctly, Whatever is power "can be used, misused, or abused." He comments, "Religion is like fire-- it warms, but it also burns. And we are the guardians of that flame."
So I guess the preacher in me has to ask all of us today, no matter what our religious tradition, or perhaps none, if we are the keeper of the flame and we defined it as a faith tradition, are we using our faith to warm people or to burn people? When a Methodist clergy person and Wesley, the founder of Methodism, when he had his conversion experience at 843, in the City Road in London, in the 18th century, used the phrase, "I felt my heart strangely "warmed.
But how do we use our religion today? In modern day America, with your linguistic violence in the public space? How do we use our religion today within Europe, within the British Isles, with our linguistic violence around Brexit? So there are questions that both of us need to wrestle with.
Let me highlight, just for a moment, racism and sectarianism. A professor there up in Union Theological Seminary in Upper West Side there in Manhattan a number of years ago wrote this little article. And he said this little phrase-- and I sort of pulled the line, where he sad-- "No one in the United States wants to deal with the legacy of slavery." I says, there's a really interesting S-word.
Let me tell you about mine. It's called sectarianism. Because many of our religious leaders did not have the courage to deal with the legacy of sectarianism, people like David and I, growing up as kids, were tossed into a bloody -30 year sectarian civil war. And I don't buy this. I often use to hear clergy-- and I don't say this in any nasty, critical way-- but people used to remind me, older clergy persons, when I was going into ministry and saying, oh, Gary, in the '50s and '60s our churches were filled.
I go, oh really? Well, I had to kind of quite cynically ask the question, what were you doing? Stuffing yourselves with gospel blessings? Singing hymns, rating the organist, giving them points out of 10-- or the preacher of the choir, when outside we had a rampant sectarian society? So I suppose I had to ask the question, why was faith not spilling into the public space and making a difference?
So I want to suggest that racism and sectarianism have been twin evils running through the history of humanity and the church. And to me, in reality, there are linkages between sectarianism and racism. Each one relies on what I would sort of call a kind of ideology of superiority-- so the greater entitlement one group over another group. They emanate from a politics of difference, almost kind of escalating upwards through this pyramid of hatred-- prejudiced attitude towards others, acts of prejudice, discrimination, harassment, violence.
So really, in terms of lived experience, racism and sectarianism, they feel alike. They also feed on common factors, such as a denied or eroded entitlement. You know the phrases-- they're taking our jobs, insecurity unemployment, fear of the future, loss of faith in public authorities or the political establishment. And it could also be argued in our context that the conflict, or "The Troubles," as we call it, have really desensitized individuals. Sadly, a few years ago, and thankfully it is changing, Belfast was classed as the racial hate center of Western Europe. Because with Eastern Europeans-- Poles, Lithuanians, Estonians-- coming in, there was another "other" coming into our space.
I'm doing some work at Emory University in the Carter Center in Atlanta really around racial reconciliation. And I read an article a couple of years ago by a woman called Erna Hackett. And interestingly, she argues quite strongly-- and most of the faces in this room today are white, so tune in-- white theology is anchored in what she calls a "pathological individualism."
So here's how it goes. She says, "Jesus died for my sins. Jesus went to the cross for me. I knew the plans He has for me." And she's pretty balanced. She says, of course, there's "a place for the individual in theology." But she's concerned at white theology, within American culture or even Western culture, distorts the Bible to be solely about individual redemption.
So the verse I just quoted there, Jeremiah 29 and verse 11, it was not individual. It was written in a community context. It was addressed to a group of people, namely the Jews. So all scripture sometimes within white theology is reduced to interactions between God and a person, even although many, many times they're between God and a community or Jesus and a group of people.
And she comes up with this fascinating phrase. She says, I think white Christianity suffers from a bad case of what she calls "Disney Princess theology." So she says, "As each individual reads the scriptures, they see themselves as" guess what, the little princess in every single story.
So we're always Peter. We're definitely never Judas. We're always the woman anointing Jesus's feet, we're never the Pharisees. We are the Jews escaping slavery, we are definitely never Egypt. So she suggests that perhaps-- and you may agree or disagree-- do we have a very profoundly broken theology.
Let me tease out for a few moments the power of memory. At my age, I will never, ever, ever, ever-- and my wife will not let me, I know-- do another PhD. But if I was, I would actually do it on memory-- the role theology in memory, psychology in memory. Because we're people of memory in so, so many ways.
History would teach us, I think-- so this comes with a health warning initially-- that denial is wrong. So we could say amnesia is the enemy of reconciliation, because it refuses victims the public acknowledgment of their pain. It invites offenders to take the path of denial. It deprives future generations of the opportunity to learn and understand from the past.
But memory in many ways is a kind of two-edged sword. I mean it undoubtedly-- and I knew this from personal experience-- does play a crucial role in making reconciliation sustainable. But I do know this, it also has the capacity to actually hinder reconciliation processes. Because there really is the danger of too much memory. Andrew Rigby, the scholar, says too greatly concerned with remembering the past can ensure that the divisions of old are never healed, the wounds never addressed. And in such circumstances, the past dominates the future, and hence, to some degree, determines the future. Memory is often selective, and worst it can be manipulated and it can also be abused.
As I mentioned, I grew up in that British, Protestant, unionist loyalist culture. Sure, that's what shaped me as a human being. And I remember, as a little boy, being dragged or taken every single year, on the 12th of July, to watch those orange men celebrating that very recent victory in 1690. So I remember as a kind of six-year-old kid, standing in the Lisburn Road, watching the bands and the colorful banners, and dour-faced orangemen, walking in dark, gray pinstripe suits with bowler hats on one of the warmest days of the year. And they're sweating, and they call it a celebration? OK, I kind of get that.
But I remember this banner-- 1641, which was a Catholic uprising against the Protestants who were taking their land, of the Protestants up to their necks in water, in a river, about to be pushed under and murdered by the Catholics. Now, what impact did that have on me as a six-year-old kid? It was a truly historical narrative, there's no question about that.
But I guess I digested in saying the context-- ah, you can't trust those Catholics. They push Protestants onto the water and they drown them. However, several weeks later, on the "other" side of the fence, there undoubtedly was another little boy who was Catholic, and nationalist, and Irish. And he was seeing his banners of Oliver Cromwell, the Puritan, the Lord Protector, sweeping through Southern Ireland, sticking spears through the chest of Catholics. And I know that kids narrative became, you can't trust Protestants, they stick spears through the chests of Catholics.
The writer David Rieff-- I don't know whether you've read his book, he's a New York journalist-- he's written this book entitled-- it's a very strange title-- In Praise of Forgetting. He wrote an article in The Guardian that I emailed to a young student there in Harvard last night I was chatting to, and the article was entitled The Cult of Memory-- When History Does More Harm Than Good. I remember a number of years ago speaking in Atlanta, and a friend of mine, who is an architect and his wife is a pharmacist-- highly educated-- he's says, Gary, I must take you to the Cyclorama, which I'd never been to. The Cyclorama in Atlanta, if you've been to it, depicts Sherman's burning of Atlanta.
So you sit in this kind of almost like massive sort of theater. It's a 360 degree, where you kind of sit, and you go around, and you look at all these brilliant paintings. Walking out of the theater, Michael turned to me and said, Gary, isn't it awful what those damn Yankees did to our city.
So I said, how long ago was that, Michael? And he said, mm, probably about 160 years. And you worry about us darn Irish on our obsession with dates and memories?
So how do we do history? And so, I guess, in many ways, it makes me talk about the question, should we actually minimize memory? And yet as you look at the Bible and remembering. You look in Daniel 9, for example, where Daniel confesses the sins that happened in another location, in another generation, and yet he considered it important to include himself in that, even though he wasn't alive. And Nehemiah is another classic example.
So how do we deal with this concept of memory? I mean, George Santayana's dictum, David Ervine was the best known loyalist politician. He was a bomb-maker who became a peacemaker. And there's a mural in Belfast not far from Skanehouse, and it uses Santayana's dictum-- "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it." David Rieff suggests, but what if this is wrong-- If not always, then maybe, maybe at least part of the time?
He suggests what if collective historical memory as employed by communities and nations leads more often to war than it actually does to peace-- to rancor and resentment, rather than reconciliation. The book's a very honest read, because he said, I am not suggesting easy solutions. "I am not prescribing moral amnesia." But he uses this fascinating phrase, quoting a scholar, where he says, "The terror of remembering-- versus the terror of forgetting," and ask, "which one is best."
He tells a story that as a journalist in a room in the early 1990s, with a group of nationalistic Serbs, he leaves the room. And as he leaves the room, some enthusiastic Serb runs out after him, shoves a piece of paper into his hand. He opens it. He looks at some data-- be it the Battle of Kosovo or whatever-- he doesn't know what it is-- he's a New Yorker.
He goes back and he says, what is this? He says, you don't know? And remember the Serbian nationalist says, take away the battle of Kosovo and you take away the soul of the Serbian nation. And I think most commentators would say today that the breakup of Yugoslavia, a lot of it was evening old scores from the past-- for some of those battles, the assassination, the murder, the genocide of 10,000 Bosnian Muslims, was remembering a battle. Because the Serbs lost the battle of Kosovo. It was revenge for something that happened in another generation.
So the Bosnian war was fueled in so many ways-- a slaughter fueled by collective memory. So I have a few minutes left. My wife is a very methodical timekeeper. [ANOTHER LANGUAGE] Give me two minutes. And then we'll cuff this.
I think theology has a place or a space to play in relation to this. John Brewer-- David, who you would know-- I did a lot of work with at Queens. And he would often address Israeli-Palestinian groups, and I have in Belfast. And we're working on this thing called Remembering Forwards. It's a very simple analogy. It's called rear-view mirror syndrome. So when I'm driving my vehicle, and I know all you safe drivers do exactly the same, you spend 90% of your time looking through the front windshield and probably 10% looking in the rear-view mirror.
In post-conflict societies, invariably we spend 90% of the time looking in the rear-view mirror and only 10% looking forwards. So how do we begin to shape a future while acknowledging the past? So very, very quickly, I want to suggest that the whole concept of lament or grieving is absolutely essential. I think sometimes, particularly within our Christian tradition, we're not allowed to express anger or disappointment with God. And Jewish rabbis would say, a person who has not been angry with God is a person of little faith.
So sometimes in our sterile, cerebral church services, we need to have a space. I've nothing against worship bands. I use them. I fell under the spell, slightly, of that church growth movement, and have a fancy, sexy worship band-- it will increase your church, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I didn't have to ask myself the question, why have I not got a lament band. Because a third of the Psalms, let's be honest, have a dark, brooding tone.
I think too many of our churches really don't want a Gary Mason for their pastor. They'd probably prefer like Jerry Springer or Oprah Winfrey-- just come along and just let me feel good on a Sunday morning. I member Will Willimon, who is the dean of chapel at Duke University where I'll be in a few weeks time, and he spoke to my congregation at East Belfast Mission, said, Gary is not here to meet your needs. Too many people want a pastor who is there to meet their needs. And my Wesleyan tradition-- my role, I believe-- was to make people holy, not to meet their needs.
How do we create a space to tell our stories? How do we allow sacred space to be used for that? Goskyle, the writer, says that science has proven that storytelling is one of the most powerful mechanisms for bringing about healing. And you think of the phrase, when we were all little kids, those four magic words, when mom or dad, or granny and granddad, said at the edge of your bed, "Once upon a time," your eyes lit up. So I want to suggest that our faith communities, be they mosques, or churches, or synagogues, or temples, or whatever, we need to create spaces for once-upon-a-time stories.
Forgiveness is such a complex mechanism, I'll not even go into detail for the sake of time. But according C.S. Lewis, again, he did say, everyone says forgiveness is a lovely idea until we have something to forgive. And this whole concept of acknowledgment of wrongs and apology, there's something incredibly cathartic or disarming about saying, this was wrong, and I'm sorry. It works in my marriage, and I'm sure, David, it works in yours.
I remember once standing up in a meeting, and some of my own Unionist people being annoyed when I said, do you know what, the Unionist governments did to Catholics in Northern Ireland, it was wrong. In education, in housing, in employability, it was wrong. Oh, I knew all the reasons-- the fear of the South, and the papacy, and all the rest of it, but it was still wrong.
So in that context, we need to have the courage to have an acknowledgment of wrongs and apology. And I guess I've spent my life-- and I'll just finish with this-- being a critical friend to those people who pursued political violence. I've had my critics for doing it, but I find I'm in very good company. Because within the model of Jesus and my faith tradition in the New Testament, I find that Jesus often spoke to people with whom he fundamentally disagreed.
And so I've often said that engagement is not endorsement. I totally abhor political violence. I could keep you here until midnight, as David knows, telling you pastoral stories of death, destruction, bombings, murder. I've seen too much of it firsthand. But I still have to be honest. I have to ask myself the question, why did so many men-- and it was primarily men-- of David's generation and my generation make what I call wrong choices for allegedly the right reasons? As a friend of mine said, someone in the late 1960s, did not fly over Northern Ireland and spray us all with lunatic gas, and we all woke up some morning and decided to start killing each other, that there was a context.
It was a context about politics, it was a context of bad religion, that massaged that fertile soil in that tiny, little space called Northern Ireland. And then finally, out of those 30,000 to 40,000 people that went to prison, 90% of them never would have been anywhere near a prison if it hadn't have been for our messy context. So in other words, if they had been born in Boston, or Mexico City, or Paris, or Berlin, they wouldn't have been there. 10% would have.
And interesting-- and finally-- out of those 35,000 to 40,000 people that have come out of prison, do you know how many have reoffended? Between 1% and 2%. Now, do you know the reoffending rates, that are 40, 50, 60%? So there was something wrong or there was a darkness on our island. And I think only now our people are painfully and slowly having the courage to actually deal with.
OK, I will finish there or my wife will [INAUDIBLE]. OK.
[LAUGHTER]
[APPLAUSE]
DAVID HEMPTON: Gary, thanks so much--
GARY MASON: OK, thanks to you.
DAVID HEMPTON: --for those very interesting and penetrating reflections around theology and memory. A few questions-- maybe rear-view mirror and looking forward. I mean, from the '98 Peace Accord and building on this Mitchell comment about how much more difficult reconciliation is, what have you seen that's encouraging and what have you seen that's depressing in those 21 years in Northern Ireland in terms of reconciliation-- around the themes that you've been playing with today?
GARY MASON: I suppose it introduced a little bit of romance into it on a cold Wednesday afternoon. I know, David, when we were kids, if I had of dared date a Catholic, apart from anything, my granny would have probably slapped me around the years, because it wasn't the done thing to do. When I tell that story in America and people have a sharp intake of breath, I can't resist saying, oh, yeah, there are a lot of blacks and whites dating here in the '60s, weren't there? So don't you American dare lecture me about dating in relation to that.
So it wasn't a done thing to do. I mean, I knew people and you knew, David, as well-- if people fell in love from working class backgrounds, they had to, as we say, clear off to England to continue their relationship. Beside my grandfather's grave there are two young partisan boys, age 18 and 19, who were dating Catholic girls. The IRA murdered them-- age 18 and 19. So today I think it's 20%-plus the intermarriage between Catholics and Protestants.
So I think, in a sense, maybe the Beatles are right. Maybe "All You Need is Love." Bit I think that generation, because there are spaces now in the city of Belfast, and many other places, where people can actually meet, and be together, and humanize "the other." Like when David and I were kids, as soon as darkness fell, Belfast City center was absolutely a ghost town.
I think, looking at the whole reconciliation process, I've often looked at the whole model of AA, which I think is a brilliant model. I often say, AA is a much more honest place than the church will ever be, even after 31 years-- 32 years, actually-- I'm ordained now, I do have to say, sometimes I have found churches to be the most dishonest places on the planet. I just want a space where people can stand up and say, my name is Gary, I'm an alcoholic. Can you help me?
The problem is sometimes churches believe in what I call "amputation rather than reconciliation." When there's the problem, it's get the person as quick as possible out the door, rather than actually dealing with what is happening there, in case you ruin our testimony-- whatever that actually means. So I think, David, the first thing is just that kind of openness and honesty.
And to be honest about that, the people have primarily who've lead the way in that are the people who were involved in political violence. So lots of ex-prisoners groups in the inner city have spearheaded-- and, I guess, in many ways, because they know the cost of conflict sometimes in a way that other people don't. I think of Alan McBride, who all of us here would know from the Irish contingent. I did Alan and Sharon's wedding in the late 1980s-- co-officiated at that. And Alan's wife Sharon and her dad were murdered in a ball, 23rd of October, 1993.
And Alan initially took out his venom primarily on Gerry Adams. So if Adams was in Boston, Alan was standing there with a placard protesting against the spokesperson for the IRA. He wrote Gerry Adams nine letters in English-- never responded. He wrote him the 10th one in Irish, and Adams did respond.
But then what Adams actually did, he said, Alan, I understand your opinion, but you need to understand Republicans have pain too, and no one is working harder than me for peace. Two weeks later, the IRA blew up a car in Lurgan, killed the janitor who just happened to be working at a police station, no security connection, and put his three-year-old daughter, in the back of the car, on a life support machine. So Alan asked the question, is there a double-think here?
And it was only two years later when he was in Edinburgh with a former UVF and former IRA volunteer, where after a couple of pints the IRA volunteer reached over, put his hand and Alan's knee, and said Alan, the Shankill Bombing was wrong. No justification of Republican ideology or loyalist ideology-- it was wrong. And that actually began a process in him that allowed him to begin the change, where he then began to ask the question, well, what made an 18-year-old kid plant a bomb in my father-in-laws fish shop that killed my wife and my father-in-law?
So I often think there, David, I often say, real change takes place in the context of a meaningful relationship. So a lot of my work back home is really, I suppose, very simply creating listening circles for people to hear one another's story, one another's pain. I mean, I read a quote by Einstein this morning there on LinkedIn, where he said any person can know, but you need to understand.
So I disagree with political violence, but I want to understand what possessed normal people-- kids here in my class in school-- to make abnormal choices. And I think the way that comes about is through just that engagement of understanding. And I suppose as well we'll get onto the Brexit thing eventually, but David was using the phrase there, The Economist, "the mother of all messes." I'm not a Star Wars fan, so I'm not offending you people that are, but someone said, "Brexit has created a disturbance in the force."
So relationships between Britain and Ireland, up until four years ago, were at an all-time high for hundreds of years. Now, they're at an all-time low. I mean, one of the main reasons is, as I mentioned earlier, because of what I call linguistic violence in the public space. That there is now, sort of the phrase I use, these kind of verbal hand grenades we're flinging across the border at one another. So a lot of my work I do for the Irish government is bringing down unions and loyalists to Maynooth University, where people hear each other in the privacy of a quiet space, and where people can ask questions and understand.
So linguistic violence-- well, you only need to look at your context here in the United States. It just doesn't work. We need to encounter the human. We need you encounter the other. So you folk need to wrestle with this in your context as much as we do in ours.
DAVID HEMPTON: Thanks, Gary. So you raised Brexit. I assume you have your ear is pretty close to the ground in Belfast. How dangerous do you think this moment is for the peace process and for reconciliation? And what do you think might happen? Which, of course, is a million dollar question.
GARY MASON: OK, yeah. I'm a firm remainer, unashamedly. I think it's a disaster in more ways than one. And I suppose the complexity-- I was speaking to some young undergraduates last night from the program on negotiation and just saying to them, it wasn't even thought of when the Good Friday group was put together that in the future that the UK may disengage. So we can say it was a monumental mistake. I just don't know. Historians and political analysts will look at that in relation to the future.
I don't think we'll go back to violence. But my concern is-- and I've said this. I mean, I know Gerry Adams, and I know Mary Lou MacDonald well. And I said to Mary Lou in a coffee in Dublin, just last year, that I think Sinn Féin are completely wrong in using Brexit and calling for a border poll at the same time. I have no issue if-- a United Ireland comes about through democracy, I will embrace it. Absolutely, no question about that.
But the issue dealing with Brexit at the moment is monumental, rather than using it to call for a border poll. So five, or six, or seven years time we want to have that built around a border poll, I'm totally up for it. But I just think it's pure political opportunism. And I understand politics is about opportunism in that sense, but I do just think it's reckless. Within sort of my side of the fence and the sort of Democratic Unionist Party, the concern in relation to that, being perfectly honest, is the Tories, at the moment, have a love-in with a Democratic Unionist Party, and many commentators would say that it's not going to last forever.
So I don't think we'll go back to violence. The concern is if we end up with a new deal, I think it does definitely raise the temperature, David. There's no question about that. So the hope is-- I mean, I'm hoping for another referendum, and that's really a pipe dream in the sense. My next choice is a very, very, very soft Brexit.
And it's interesting. It's this kind of often-- it's the same here-- what I call the public versus the private. Privately, senior DUP figures would be saying, maybe we should stay in the customs union. But because of toeing the party line, they can't say that in the public space. So those sort of private versus public conversations are very, very difficult as well.
Today, I'm just smiling because my wife is saying, what a day to be in Harvard. So in parliament in London, there's-- and I don't know what's happened, how many votes have been taken, and what the speaker is allowed through, and you're enjoying the chaos of Robert Mueller. What a world in which we live-- enough to put you crunching Prozac before midnight when you look at what's happening in our kind of parliamentary affairs here at the moment.
I think, David, hopefully, we'll end up with a soft Brexit. And that's my prayer. I can't see us getting a referendum to be honest. But the irony of it all is, let let's be honest-- and I think for all of us who are people of faith or people who have no faith but are people of integrity-- Brexit was built on deceit. There were lies told about 350 million per week-- wasn't it Joyce-- or per day, whatever it was, going into the health service, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
The fear of the immigrants-- I mean, you guys know this. "They're taking our jobs." I did a panel in September at a university there in West Virginia, and the panel was on that little book Hillbilly Elegy. And we were just kind of saying, in many ways they sort of working class loyalist community that those of us here in the front row don't know about, in many ways are exploited by sort of upper class unionism and so as. And I think many people-- white poor people here-- were exploited politically in so many ways within your system here as well. Promises being me that, as many of you people know in this room, just have not been delivered in a sense.
So I often say, as well, looking at negotiation and deals, politicians assume that once the deal is done, societal healing automatically follows. And yet, in reality, nothing could be further from the truth. Politicians-- and we need politicians, and there may be some in the room, so bless you-- by and large, you're a people have short-term vision. The most important thing in most politicians lives is the next election, be that Donald Trump, Theresa May, Jeremy Corbyn, Benjamin Netanyahu-- those are the most important things in their lives.
And John Brewer, as you know, has developed this kind of political peace process versus the social peace process. So I want to say to all us people in this room here, who are people of civic society, that one of the key things to our peace process was the rule of civic society. So people like David as academics, people like myself as religious leaders, women's groups, NGOs, who played a role. So in other words, we really worked hard to hold our politicians accountable.
We elect these darn people and we ignore them for four or five years. We need to hold our politicians accountable. And we need to create mechanisms to allow that to happen.
DAVID HEMPTON: So going back, and then I'll open it up for questions, the peace agreement was really forged by some external actors helping and two main political parties that have virtually disappeared from view now-- the SDLP and Official Unionists. So the parties now in the ascendancy in Northern Ireland, Democratic Unionist Party, and Paisley's old party, and Sinn Féin, which Gerry Adams was president of for a considerable period of time. And of course there's no government now in Northern Ireland. That government broke down a couple of years ago-- that power-sharing executive. Do you see any way that that government will be restored, or do you think that the two current leading political parties, and their supporters, and their religious backers, simply can't find a way of building a new kind of political arrangement? It's another way of asking the question of how dangerous the moment is.
GARY MASON: It's a good question. And I know some of you younger people in this room may end up doing PhD theses on some of this. Here's my analysis of it-- the key to the Good Friday-- there are three types of peace processes, I often say. Sort of like Sri Lanka, where you do get a peace process-- you crush your enemy completely, the Tamil Tigers. So there's no peace deal officially, but you win. Second, South Africa-- where you kind of get colonial regime change at the top, but economically not a lot of difference at the bottom. So high poverty rates, still in townships, sexual violence against the LGBT community and women in townships at an all-time high.
Or peace process was what was called a second preference peace process, where no one totally got their own way. So in that sense, it was a very intricate, fragile peace process in so many ways. But the key to it was that people could designate themselves as British or Irish. The principle of consent-- democratically, if a majority eventually want a United Ireland, we begin to explore that. The curse of Brexit, David, is so people who were not Sinn Féin, who were moderate nationalist Catholics, because their Irishness was recognized in Northern Ireland, the kind of sociological phrase was economic Catholics. So they saw the benefits economically of being part of Britain.
They were comfortable enough. As I used to say, maybe after four or five pints of Guinness on a Friday night and a couple of old Republican songs, they loved a United Ireland. But come Monday morning and the British government was paying my salary, I was happy enough to be flexible for the time being. However, Brexit has changed all that. Because the concern from many-- I had a meeting about this three, four weeks ago with moderate nationalists, who were saying to me, as a moderate Unionist, you know, Gary, some of us don't even want storm back up and running again. I was like, oh, really? Like, this is not republicanism, David, this is not the IRA, this is not the people of armed struggle-- these are moderate, well-meaning, no-hidden-agenda nationalists who were willing to try the Northern Ireland experiment and see is it going to work.
And this is where I think the DUP are getting this wrong. Because there is no longer a Unionist majority in Northern Ireland. So Peter Robinson, who's the former leader of the DUP, who's been doing a significant amount of work with me around the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Peter Robinson's a brilliant strategist. And his idea, he said, was if we're going to maintain the union, we have to appeal to these moderate, middle class economic Catholics to maintain the union. Brexit has done the darn opposite. It has driven them all away and made them more green and nationalistic than what they were five or six years ago.
So my concern is that ultimately this will come back to haunt the DUP in another way. So what happens over the next few days or weeks? I can't see them exiting on the 29th of March, but yet the hardline Brexiteers-- although I see Jacob Rees-Mogg has said that he may be willing to consider a little addendum. The irony of all this, the humor of all this-- it's funny too. And somebody was talking about humor today actually, a Syrian person, when we were at that last lecture. I had a group of very, very senior loyalists, who were basically senior figures within the UVF, that was the most lethal Protestant terrorist force down meeting the Dublin government there a number of months ago.
And here we have the DUP, who, as you know, was headed up by Ian Paisley, who was determined to convince us that the pope was the Antichrist et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So Jacob Rees-Mogg, as a devout Catholic, calls his children after former popes, and here we have the DUP in bed with Jacob Rees-Mogg, and I'm saying Paisley will probably be spinning in his grave. And that's the irony of the whole thing. Some of the allowances are just bizarre at the moment around Brexit. They are weird, to put it mildly-- honestly.
DAVID HEMPTON: Gary, I think this would be a good moment to open it up. So can I ask, just a few questions. If you could make your questions fairly brief. And make sure there's a question mark at the end of them.
[LAUGHTER]
GARY MASON: So no sermons.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: We heard about your role of the outside influence. Are we actually inflamed inside us? For example, in Ireland we heard about Gaddafi actually played a role. Now with Brexit, we're hearing that was Soviet Union playing a role. I guess the real question is, what is the influence of these foreign influences? Which role did Gaddafi play.
AUDIENCE: Use the mic, please.
AUDIENCE: Which role did Gaddafi play, and which role does the Soviet Union play in Brexit.
GARY MASON: I mean this regards-- the speaker there was asking sort of outside influences' roles. So the infamous Colonel Gaddafi was an arms supplier to the IRA. There's absolutely no question about that. And I suppose one of the key things, I guess, republicanism really was internationalizing the conflict. And in a strange way, that did bring it to an end. The British were very much against that initially.
But there's no question about it. I mean, even if you're a Bill Clinton fan here today, in our language, Bill Clinton played a blinder. He was brilliant as regards his political strategy and was very, very influential. So there's no question about it that Clinton did play a very key role, particularly in the '90s, in bringing our conflict to an end. And did pour his heart and soul into it.
And I suppose as well, Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, who were man in their 40s, there as well-- who were ambitious. And ambition's good. Moral ambition is really, really a good thing. Immoral ambition is a very bad thing. So you had a good relationship there, the influence of Clinton. And that really did make a significant difference.
As regards the role of the Soviet Union in Brexit, I haven't heard that one. Whether or not Robert Mueller brings it up today in his conversation when he's being questioned about Russia, he may know something I don't know. But I haven't heard that theory yet. But I've no doubt there will be some conspiracy theory appearing on Netflix over the next few years in relation to that as well.
DAVID HEMPTON: I should maybe not presume that the audience knows too much about how this works or what's going on with Brexit now. And so maybe just say a few things. Correct me if I'm wrong--
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
--because I haven't been living there for some time. But in the referendum that took place around the European Union, you know that 52% overall voted to leave the European Union. 48% wanted to remain. In Northern Ireland, the majority voted to remain, around about 55-56%. And a minority voted to leave. But the voting statistics are such, if you look at where the votes were coming from, most nationalists in Northern Ireland did vote to remain in the European Union. Because the border itself had become a pretty soft border, like a very soft border. If you travel from Belfast to Dublin, you do not know when you're crossing the border. Whereas when we were in our early 20s, this was a heavily militarized border.
And no one really wants to go back to that, a militarized border. But no one's kind of figured out a solution. A hard Brexit would mean some sort of customs and control. A soft Brexit creates some problems, because it might involve the UK and Northern Ireland staying within the Customs Union, which would ease the border crossings but makes the DUP very nervous. Because it really looks as if northern island might be treated as a special category, and you know the DP are unionist first and other things after.
So Brexit has created-- is there to be a backstop or not a backstop? What role does the DUP play in this? What are their actual policies about this? No one really wants to go back to a hard border, but might a hard border come out of this? And if so, what would be the long-term consequences of that? Which are really not very good.
What impact will that have on the economy North and South? And a lot of projections are that both the Northern and Southern Irish economies would suffer a great deal from a hard Brexit. So it's making a lot of the business community extremely nervous. And if you get something like a 5, or 6, or 7% drop in GDP, which some people are predicting, then you get all the economic underpinning of a potentially dangerous situation.
So that and the fact that there's no Northern Ireland government in existence at the moment-- it folded two years ago because of a heating scandal, which we won't get into. It wasn't Brexit itself that caused that, but Brexit is exacerbating it. So all the say, this is an extremely complicated situation, and it doesn't really look very good.
On the 29th of March, if there's no deal struck, as it stands, Britain will exit the European Union. And then something will have to be thought of for Northern Ireland and how that's to function within that new reality. So I'm sorry if that even mystifies you further, but it is important to realize that Brexit isn't just a problem for the European Union and UK democracy, it's a problem for the United Kingdom full stop. Because a majority of the Scots and a majority of people in Northern Ireland voted to remain. And the majority of people in England voted to leave, metropolitan London being the biggest center of remainders.
So knowing something about that electoral geography is actually kind of important. So that's enough of a monologue. Any other questions? Please.
AUDIENCE: My name is Julene. I'm curious if you could talk about any other theological elements that might be operating in a generative way, particularly from the Christian church in your context. And obviously, I know you talked about reconciliation-- that's a huge one.
GARY MASON: The last section of that paper, which was too long, as most preachers do you end up with too long sermons, was more around the whole concept really of theology and how it should be spilling into the public space. I think, looking at the church there back home, pastorally, during the conflict, they did a pretty good job. I think prophetically, they could have done better.
So I think too many of us ended up really what I would call sort of chaplains to our tribes. Because there was always a risk mechanism. It was David, when there was probably about 12 to 15 of us, of which I was the one that was the youngest, that really were involved in what you would sort of call hardcore conversations with those who were pursuing political terrorism in a sense. And I suppose, in many ways, during that, I guess the people who primarily were involved in violence were not necessarily regular church attenders. Some may have been.
But I was always, in those conversations, against trying to create some moral framework and really being quite futuristic about it in a sense. I mean, saying, we can go on to kill each other for another 100 years, and that option is perfectly open to us. But are there possibilities or are there options that maybe, just maybe to use John Cheever's phrase, we can finally "take the gum out of Irish politics." And you know, John Cheever's a very moderate nationalist Catholic, was the person who began the Hume-Adams talks. But again, the venue for the Hume-Adams talks were at Clonard monastery as well.
So those talks-- so I suppose the other question we ask ourselves, be it mosques, synagogues, or churches, can we used sacred space to facilitate what we call back home "uncomfortable conversations." And I think the answer must be yes. And I think in the American context, and I've said this-- I suppose I'm saying whether it's Harvard facilitating dialogue between Democrats and Republicans or your churches doing that. And so I just think that if politicians aren't going to step up and do this-- so I'm asking academics, I'm asking faith leaders-- we need, I think, to be stepping into that gap in relation to that. And I suppose that Brexit initiative that I've sort of spearheaded for I guess 30 months now was trying to create a space where people would actually hear each other.
And in doing that-- so, for example, I've had key people sitting in front of the Dublin government. They were able to ask them face to face what the issues were and then take the proper story back in relation to that. There's a phrase there Jeremiah uses, "moving from being prisoners of history to being prisoners of hope." So you're not kind of denying that sometimes we're all in some form of imprisonment. I would class myself now as British, and Irish, and European. I have a British and an Irish passport.
In a sense, I've had that journey from out of what was a very tight, British Unionist culture in a sense. But that was only through engagement with the other. Again, just David's point there as well that he was mentioning, if we were having this conversation three years ago, the main issue we would have been talking about would have been dealing with the legacy of the past. And I was with a very senior IRA figure, who I'm very, very close to and do a lot of work with just prior to Christmas in the city hall. So we're now dealing with the past-- Brexit, LGBT, the heating scandal, the Irish language.
So there's a lot of fault lines, really, as David has said, running through-- a bit like the San Andreas fault-- running through Irish society at the moment. But I do think, when we get back to the whole theology concept, that there's been a number of key initiatives. When I use the word evangelical, I don't use it in the American context, because evangelicalism here is fundamentalism. It's most certainly not. It's not the evangelicalism of John Wesley and the warmed heartedness sense. But a number of sort of moderate evangelicals I was involved with in the '80s-- and David will know-- a coalition called ECONI, which was Evangelical Contribution on Northern Ireland. And it was really asking questions about how are we reading the Bible in a conflict situation, and looking at questions of identity, and repentance, and citizenship. So what does that actually say?
So this if you're into-- I'll give you my card. There's a lot of resources. In fact, they're moving, actually, to the Union Theological Seminary, the whole resource, which is the Presbyterian seminary there. So there are a number of resources around that, where theology was used, in a sense, to stop people being so darn nationalistic. So I'm happy enough to email some of that to you if that's helpful.
DAVID HEMPTON: Some more questions.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much for that enlightening talk. You started off by saying that reconciliation presupposes confrontation and some kind of operation. I'm assuming you mean like surgery type operation-- cutting the womb.
GARY MASON: Yes, yes, yes.
AUDIENCE: And then you ended up by listing five things which are close to achieving reconciliation. But one thing that I was struck with where is rectification and justice? Where does that come in? Can you talk about that a bit? Thank you.
GARY MASON: Yeah, I will certainly. Can I also just say, in that quotation, I didn't say that. Normally when I use that quotation by that South African professor, I think a better phrase-- and I'm not being critical of him-- would have been managed confrontation. Rather than just when we think of confrontation, it almost smacks of aggression there at times.
The justice question, and our biggest issue around this legacy of the past-- so Good Friday Agreement, very, very, very quickly. was release the prisoners, reform of the RUC, and decommissioning of terrorists or paramilitary weapons. There was nothing in it in relation to dealing with the past. So no doubt historians and social analysts of another generation may say, it should have in. Others would say, but if it was in, the whole thing may have collapsed. We may never have got it over the line in the first place.
So it was very intricate, delicate document in even getting signed up to in the first place. If I had committed a crime in 1977-78 as a paramilitary or terrorist, and I was discovered today that I had murdered 10 people, I would only serve two years in prison. So that was a compromise as well as prisoner releases.
So to give you a very graphic example, it's now illustrated to me-- Joyce and I would do some work with victims in these listening circles-- there are many people today who lost loved ones in the 1970s who simply want what you and I would define as penal justice. I don't care, Gary, if they only serve two years in prison, that's what I want. They murdered my brother, sister, grandfather, whatever.
And I remember being in Enniskillen, not so long ago, with Joyce, and the lady saying I wake up every single day-- I want the person in the IRA who murdered my aunt and uncle to serve two years. I understand that. But I think pastorally, in talking to this person, who's a woman, I'm guessing late 60s now, I tried to widen the circle.
So I said to her, Gretta, I too would probably like them to go to prison. However, the people that committed this atrocity, first of all, may be dead. Secondly, in the 1970s, forensic science was not what it is today. So the chances of them being caught are almost nil. I mean George Hamilton, who's the current chief Constable, who actually is a person of faith and a friend of mine, he was honest, and he said that we will be lucky or fortunate if we get 3% percent convictions.
So really, I suppose you want to put this person's life, this lady's life, psychologically or theologically-- you want to analyze her? She's living in denial, which people do when they're in grief. Now, 30 years later seems a long time, but she still is living in denial in that sense. So you're putting her in a kind of you know William Worden or Elisabeth Kübler-Ross model-- she hasn't moved through the various stages. They only find healing there in relation to that.
So I think it's my role as a pastoral person to gently widen that equation and try to confront her gently with some form of honesty. So I said, Gretta, is there something else that could bring about healing? So in dealing with the past, another mechanism that's in this under the Stormont House Agreement, which is another agreement out of the scores of agreements we've had since the Good Friday Agreement, that allows for what they call-- its an information and retrieval commission. So in other words, the paramilitary or terrorist groupings take ownership of what they did, provide information to the family-- why was your brother shot, murdered, or injured, or whatever-- and tries to create some space around that.
Interestingly, many, many victims groups have said, look, we coped with the release of prisoners. I don't want somebody getting back into jail for two years for murdering my brother, but I really want to know why they did it. Because that would bring me closure in a sense. So in many ways the victims groups have been the unsung heroes too-- in many, many ways, showing remarkable fortitude.
And the other thing as well, they have often wrestled with this, the one thing I don't understand-- and I say this is as a human being with emotions probably of revenge, like every other human being from time to time in the room-- I really don't know why we haven't had more revenge killings. Because we're now in such a small space. I could probably list-- and I can't do it for intelligence reasons-- people that did murders, because people knew through different sources. So this is not this is not Texas going up to Massachusetts. The person that killed my brother, sister, lives three streets away from me.
So in some strange way, and maybe in a spiritual way or theological way, there has been some faith restraint or moral framework that has stopped just somebody saying, I'm going to watch where they're going, and I'm going to kill them. That really, honestly, in that context, you know it really has really been a blessing, that, and, not being over-spiritual about that, that there hasn't been more sort of evening the score so to speak in so many ways.
But it's a great question that some of them are going to wrestle with for a while to put it mildly. Is there one other question there. I know you guys have a watch on time as well.
DAVID HEMPTON: Thanks. Yeah, one more question. You've got the last word. Better be good.
[LAUGHTER] No pressure here.
AUDIENCE: Turn around this plane.
[LAUGHTER]
AUDIENCE: Is it religion or is it these religions? Is it theology or revealed theology?
GARY MASON: Keep it simple there. Look, there is no question about it. I think it was James Denney, who was a theologian of another generation, David once said, human nature loves a monopoly. We're all too ready to un-church or un-Christianize others.
So I think in many ways, while it was never a religious war, as I underlined earlier on-- so this was not 16th-17th reformation, counter-reformation stuff-- there was no doubt there was a demonization of the other. So to quote two things there. Just as another quote, the Jewish theologian, Abraham Joshua Heschel, who as you know, walked with Martin Luther King Jr., he said two things. He said, dehumanization precedes genocide. So if you dehumanize a person theologically, sociologically, psychologically, it's really much easier to kill them. So it is.
But the other phrase he used, which was a haunting phrase for all of us. He said, it was words, not machines, that created Auschwitz. It was words, not machines, that created Auschwitz. So final thought for the day or sermon, as I finish, for all of us, we need to be really, really careful, particularly people of religious faith, how we speak, and particularly how we speak in the public space.
Going back to what Jonathan Sacks was saying, you can use or you can abuse religion, and we just need to be so, so careful. So I want to be a person that speaks words of healing into the public space, words of reconciliation, words that can redirect and make a difference in people's lives. And I just think it's so important that we're able to do that. So we'll finish there, and thank you for coming out, as David says on a freezing day.
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