What is it possible to say about the loss of lives resulting from the Northern Troubles? This. That so far, it has all been in vain; quite purposeless. No cause was advanced in any way which would have not been better served by peaceful means. Who can say what this island would have been like if the depraved culture of violence had not once again taken root? Aside from the 3,600 lives lost, how much else has been lost? What opportunities to learn, to be civilised, to create art and order, were squandered in the cretinous squalor of war?
We cannot know what civic or cultural achievements were not reached because of 30 years of violence. But the loss of lives - that now, is palpable. That is a measurable commodity, as it has always been in these regular immersions in bloodshed. If we had listed the dead of 19161922, described who they were and how they died; if we had studied the barbarous injustice of their fate, if we had dwelt on the sufferings of their families, if we had made the immorality of political violence a keystone of our political culture, we would have not tolerated the violation of law and life of the past 30 years.
Catalogue
There might be an excuse for being ignorant of the events of 1916-1922. There is no excuse now for ignorance over the events of 1966-1999. The definitive catalogue of who died in our Troubles, how, where and when they died, who their families were, and how else those families might have suffered, has been produced by David McKittrick and published by Mainstream Publishing. It is the saddest, most sobering, most heartbreaking book I have ever read. Not a page on it is without an almost unbearable tragedy; each tragedy is real, each one was lived by actual people, each one spread vast repercussions through family, friends and the broader community to which they belonged.
Numbers numb. Very soon after one starts counting deaths, they lose meaning. Three hundred, four hundred, five hundred; people become ciphers, their identity, their purpose in life, the people they loved and the people who loved them in return vanish behind the metronome ticking of digits passing through our minds. That is how we have been able to bear the unbearable during these Troubles. We let the shutter of statistics conceal the mountain-range of human suffering behind it.
In the greatest single piece of historical scholarship in either journalism or in historical studies that has ever been conducted in this country, David McKittrick has liberated the dead from the limbo of statistics. The unliving live again. He has followed up each death, back to the first killings in 1966, and up the most recent, that of Charles Bennett this last summer: the numbered corpses, and their poor, bereaved families, come back to life on the page. And in their merely literary resurrection, they serve as a terrible indictment of the culture of political violence which finds so many apologists throughout Irish life.
Utter futility
A page of David's masterwork should convince any civilised person that a resort to violence to solve the communal problems of Ireland is no more than a celebration of idiot-barbarism. And it is not enough to say this is the case today. The resort to violence in the name of the Republic has been marked by two enduring features. The first is the enormous suffering it has caused; the second is its utter futility. The war for a united Irish Republic has been going on intermittently now for nearly 85 years. It is no closer to achievement today than it was when the violent accounts were opened in Dublin in 1916, and two unarmed police officers - Constables Lahiffe and O'Brien - were murdered in the centre of Dublin.
How are those murders commemorated today? They are not. Children are not taught about these poor men butchered while doing their duty. They are not taught about Countess Markievicz capering around the body of the policeman she had just shot in St Stephen's Green, joyfully shrieking, "I shot him, I shot him." There is a statue to her not far from where she gunned down this blameless man; he has vanished from history, as have the hundreds of others who died that Eastertide.
Those who are ignorant of the realities of the Easter Rising and of the violence of 19191922 could be forgiven their ignorance. The source material which could strip violence back to its heathen uselessness was and is not to hand. And the same was true of our present generation of Troubles. Those who justified murder could always cite this atrocity or that atrocity to explain why they were authorised to engage in violence.
The issue is not individual atrocities. The issue is violence itself. That is the atrocity. It is the atrocity which we have to live with for the greater part of this century, an atrocity which in each generation has re-emerged. But until the publication of Lost Lives, it has always been possible to hide the true evil of violence. Not any more. There can be no more searing indictment, not merely of the individual deeds of violence, but of the political culture which justifies it, than this book.
Monstrosity
I defy anyone to browse through the pages of Lost Lives without being stunned by the sheer monstrosity of all that we have done, or allowed to be done, over the past 30 years. Evil, unspeakable evil, rose in our midst, and we as a people were to weak, too indecisive, too pusillanimous to deal with it. And here now is a record of the consequences; in its encyclopaedic detail, in its towering integrity and in its moral compassion, it could be the most influential study of Irish history that has been ever been presented.
I know of no work which can alter behaviour as this one can, should, must. The argument it presents against the use of violence, for all that it is implicit, is compelling and complete. Nothing more needs to be said. Buy Lost Lives. Nobody on this island can have an excuse for not knowing of the evils of violence. Nobody who can work through the 1,600 pages of murder it covers will ever find an excuse or a pretext for political violence again.