The Road To Peace Is Paved With Teacups

The Twelfth of July is a time of sparks and short fuses here. It’s the day when loyalist Northern Ireland commemorates the Battle of the Boyne, where the Protestant Dutch king William III defeated the Catholic James II on the 12 th of July 1690, vanquishing the Irish for the British crown and ramping up the Protestant Ascendancy in Ireland. King Billy had been invited to the English crown by Protestant opponents of James. He came, with 40,000 men and the blessing of the Pope who didn’t like James’ ally, king Louis XIV of France. He sailed across the North Sea with a huge fleet in 1688, and pursued James when the latter retreated to Ireland. The great bonfires lit on the night of the Eleventh of July mimic the fires lit to pilot Billy’s 300 ships into Belfast Lough in 1690. ‘Séamus An Chaca’ (James the Shit) didn’t put up much of a fight and deserted his Irish soldiers in an escape to France, delivering Ireland to easy conquest by Billy at the river Boyne. Though a st...

In my last piece on language I quoted Elif Shafak who wrote that wars arise over little more than semantics: “In a world beset by mistranslations, there is no use in being resolute about any topic, because it might as well be that even our strongest convictions are caused by a simple misunderstanding.” I hold in high regard such Buddhist equanimity. But not without question. To balance things out, let me dedicate this writing to the opposite movement in me, and juxtapose Shafak’s quote with one from Martin Luther King Jr., who once argued against impartiality in quite unambiguous terms: “The hottest place in Hell is reserved for those who remain neutral in times of great moral conflict.” This is the paradox between the bridge builder and the warrior, one that I embody as my own most poignant inner conflict. The bridge builder I am characterised by a genuine interest in the wide range of human expression, a social scientist and philosopher with an ability to hold...