Y Safle

Diarmid Logan must count as one of the most irrational of people I have come across on the Internet. He argues for a removal of loyalists in Northern Ireland from their home - sending them to who knows where - as long as it is not in Ireland (where they and their parents and their grandparents were born and raised).

Diarmid is an American. He calls himself an Irish American, but that distinction is irrelevant. I wrote to him and asked him if he supported the forcible removal of European Americans from the USA, so that the land can be handed back to Native American people. His reply was that he is a friend of the Native Americans, and that the Irish immigrants to the USA were not and are not part of a problem as regards the loss of land for these peoples.

Diarmid said:

The indigenous Irish rarely came into contact with the Native American population since the indigenous populations of Boston and New York had been ethnically cleansed by Germanic scum such as the Anglo-Saxons and the Dutch centuries before.

Now I am curious. Leaving aside the rather poor grasp of history that this assertion reveals, could Diarmid or anyone explain to me how we arrive at a concept of just guilt. To what extent is an Anglo-Saxon guilty for a murder carried out by his ancestors? Do we argue that guilt is hereditary, passed from father to son? Why so?

Was Solomon guilty for David’s sin with Bathsheba and murder of Uriah? If so, does that not make Jesus guilty too? And yet no good Irish Catholic (or any other Catholic) would say that Jesus was guilty of any sin - his own or the sin of his forefathers.

So is there some principle by which one imputes the guilt of one generation onto another? If so, what is it?

Let me suggest a more reasonable principle - one firmly rooted in Christian ethics - a man is responsible for his own actions.

We are all guilty of many things, but we are guilty for our thoughts and actions, not the thoughts and actions of others. If this is so then the question is really not to do with who massacred the Native American populations, and evicted them from their homelands, but how do we treat these people now?

For instance, are we willing now to share with them the wealth that we generated from the land of their fathers? Are we willing to look at the world around us, seeking out injustice every bit as heinious as that which was visited upon the American peoples, and take a stand to stop that injustice?

Will we speak up for the innocent people of Iraq? Will we play our part in providing aid to the starving populations of a continent that we have and continue to systematically exploit? Will we take a stand to prevent our profligate lifestyles from destroying the world for generations to come?

These are the kind of questions that we must ask ourselves if we are to take seriously questions of guilt and responsibility, for surely raking over the many faults of people long dead and gone does nothing to effect peace and reconciliation, and if Irish Catholicism really exists, then it must take seriously the call to love our neighbours and be reconiled with our brothers.

If these commandments of Jesus are to be ignored then let us have no more silliness about this being done in the name of the catholic Church, because in such a case the Church is anything but catholic, and anything but Christian.