December days: Hope
miriammoules asked me about "hope", which is, wow, quite a broad prompt.
The original prompt of course reminded me, intentionally or otherwise, of 1 Corinthians 13, because Paul did manage to have some good lines; on the other hand he didn't really go on there to say much about hope. Hope for me is the antithesis of depression; the times when I've been depressed (as I've recently been coming to realise I was, in a low-grade sort of way, for some time) have been the times when I was just trudging along and there didn't seem much hope of anything changing significantly.
I didn't so much want to talk about personal hope or hopes, though. Instead, I thought I'd follow on from part of my earlier post on faith and talk a bit more about Northern Ireland.
I grew up through the Troubles; I wasn't among the worst affected by any means, as we lived in a relatively quiet suburb well out of the way of the worst of it, not to mention that I was born too late to experience the 1970s which had a lot of the really terrifying conflicts. (Though I almost wasn't born at all, as my family narrowly escaped a car bomb that was left outside the church while they happened to be there for my older sister's baptism and that went off a matter of minutes after they left, but that's another story.) And of course actual everyday life in Belfast wasn't exactly how it appeared if all you saw of it was the occasional apocalyptic news item they showed in the rest of the country. Still, it was always something in the background. There were bomb scares every so often at my primary school; I always had to be cautious about talking too much about what Dad did for a living, since I was at Catholic schools and he worked in court administration which wasn't always too popular in some quarters; Dad's offices were attacked several times in one way or another, and a policeman who lived down the street from us was killed by a bomb left under his car one morning. I still vividly remember the forensic lab bombing in 1992 which was a good three or four miles away from us and shook our windows.
The IRA ceasefire in 1994 was a big deal, and I remember sitting waiting for a music lesson at the time and thinking of that as a real ray of hope. Of course it was always ridiculously delicate and a year and a half later the ceasefire was broken, and there were a variety of dissident groups who never accepted the ceasefire in the first place, but it was still an indicator of change. All the same, by the time I was applying to university in late 1996, there really wasn't much question of it: much though it was my home and remains my roots, I didn't feel my future lay in Northern Ireland. Not only was the economy still pretty shaky so that I didn't have much expectation of finding good jobs there, but I also just didn't have much fundamental hope of change. I went to university in England, and later settled there. Particularly since my immediate family are all in England now too, I can't really honestly say that I've looked back very much, though now and again I do miss something about Belfast and there is still indisputably something of home about it for me.
The road has still been pretty hard for Northern Ireland since then. In 1998, after the Omagh bombing (we have relatives in and around Omagh who all mercifully escaped uninjured, although a friend of my cousin had to literally run over dead bodies to get out of the area of the blast), I wrote: "To be quite honest, I'm beginning to lose hope for this country of mine. It seems that, every time things start to improve, some other bunch of homicidal maniacs decide they don't want peace. We struggle for peace, we pray for peace, we even beg for peace - but all we get is murder and mayhem. Does anyone know how these people sleep in their beds at night?"
And yet. There was the Good Friday Agreement earlier in 1998, which may not have prevented Omagh but it was the start of something better. Within ten years people were talking of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, formerly implacable enemies, as the "Chuckle Brothers" because their partnership as First and Deputy First Ministers was so jovial. The British Army essentially pulled out of Northern Ireland in 2007. Nearly all the significant paramilitary groups decommissioned their weapons by 2010. It's been seven and a half years since the Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended.
There's such a long way to go, but there is, I think, finally room for hope.
This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!
This entry was originally posted at http://cjwatson.dreamwidth.org/9866.html. Please comment there using OpenID.
The original prompt of course reminded me, intentionally or otherwise, of 1 Corinthians 13, because Paul did manage to have some good lines; on the other hand he didn't really go on there to say much about hope. Hope for me is the antithesis of depression; the times when I've been depressed (as I've recently been coming to realise I was, in a low-grade sort of way, for some time) have been the times when I was just trudging along and there didn't seem much hope of anything changing significantly.
I didn't so much want to talk about personal hope or hopes, though. Instead, I thought I'd follow on from part of my earlier post on faith and talk a bit more about Northern Ireland.
I grew up through the Troubles; I wasn't among the worst affected by any means, as we lived in a relatively quiet suburb well out of the way of the worst of it, not to mention that I was born too late to experience the 1970s which had a lot of the really terrifying conflicts. (Though I almost wasn't born at all, as my family narrowly escaped a car bomb that was left outside the church while they happened to be there for my older sister's baptism and that went off a matter of minutes after they left, but that's another story.) And of course actual everyday life in Belfast wasn't exactly how it appeared if all you saw of it was the occasional apocalyptic news item they showed in the rest of the country. Still, it was always something in the background. There were bomb scares every so often at my primary school; I always had to be cautious about talking too much about what Dad did for a living, since I was at Catholic schools and he worked in court administration which wasn't always too popular in some quarters; Dad's offices were attacked several times in one way or another, and a policeman who lived down the street from us was killed by a bomb left under his car one morning. I still vividly remember the forensic lab bombing in 1992 which was a good three or four miles away from us and shook our windows.
The IRA ceasefire in 1994 was a big deal, and I remember sitting waiting for a music lesson at the time and thinking of that as a real ray of hope. Of course it was always ridiculously delicate and a year and a half later the ceasefire was broken, and there were a variety of dissident groups who never accepted the ceasefire in the first place, but it was still an indicator of change. All the same, by the time I was applying to university in late 1996, there really wasn't much question of it: much though it was my home and remains my roots, I didn't feel my future lay in Northern Ireland. Not only was the economy still pretty shaky so that I didn't have much expectation of finding good jobs there, but I also just didn't have much fundamental hope of change. I went to university in England, and later settled there. Particularly since my immediate family are all in England now too, I can't really honestly say that I've looked back very much, though now and again I do miss something about Belfast and there is still indisputably something of home about it for me.
The road has still been pretty hard for Northern Ireland since then. In 1998, after the Omagh bombing (we have relatives in and around Omagh who all mercifully escaped uninjured, although a friend of my cousin had to literally run over dead bodies to get out of the area of the blast), I wrote: "To be quite honest, I'm beginning to lose hope for this country of mine. It seems that, every time things start to improve, some other bunch of homicidal maniacs decide they don't want peace. We struggle for peace, we pray for peace, we even beg for peace - but all we get is murder and mayhem. Does anyone know how these people sleep in their beds at night?"
And yet. There was the Good Friday Agreement earlier in 1998, which may not have prevented Omagh but it was the start of something better. Within ten years people were talking of Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness, formerly implacable enemies, as the "Chuckle Brothers" because their partnership as First and Deputy First Ministers was so jovial. The British Army essentially pulled out of Northern Ireland in 2007. Nearly all the significant paramilitary groups decommissioned their weapons by 2010. It's been seven and a half years since the Northern Ireland Assembly was suspended.
There's such a long way to go, but there is, I think, finally room for hope.
This post is part of my December days series. Please prompt me!
This entry was originally posted at http://cjwatson.dreamwidth.org/9866.html. Please comment there using OpenID.