In the town of Nis in Yugoslavia stands a tower, the Cele Kula.
Nis is a meeting place and and a point of conflict between Turk and Serb, Bulgar and Greek. Constantine the Great was born there, but that does not give the town any particular significance to us on this last Saturday morning of the last November in the last year of this century. Cele Kula, the tower of skulls, does.
It was constructed from the heads of those who died after the Serb defenders in the siege of 1809 chose to blow themselves and their Turk assailants into a common perdition rather than to surrender. However, at the end of that not-quite-common-perdition, the Turks still held the field, and in due and grisly course constructed the Cele Kula, composed of hundreds of skulls, to remind the Serbs of the consequences of war.
Unionist Council
This day, the Ulster Unionist Council may gaze in awe at the magnificence of Northern Ireland's Cele Kula, the mountain of skulls - approximately 3,700 of them - before which it makes its deliberations. Many of the council's members are revolted at the deal which lies before them; and I share their revulsion. It is in many respects a foul contract, both a plenary absolution for those who have committed the most deliberately terrible acts, and a passport into enduring power for their representatives.
We know now that those who planned mass IRA atrocities such as Bloody Friday, Claudy, the Birmingham bombings, the Coleraine bombings, the Donegall Street bombings, the Whitecross slaughter - in which a total of over 60 people were killed and several hundred injured - will never do a day in jail. Not one single guilty person was ever apprehended for those killings. Some time ago, I met a man whose wife, the mother of seven children, was killed in one of those bombings. He said to me: "Will somebody please tell me what me and my family went through all that suffering for? How did these people think they had the right to leave bombs all over the place?"
The answer to the first question is simple enough. Nothing justified it. As as for the second question - "How did these people think they had the right to leave bombs all over the place?" - the answer is: they consulted their dead forefathers, and those ancients nodded their grizzled locks in approval. Bomb; kill; maim: these are the Fenian ways, the ways lauded in song and verse. The Fenian way is known to historians as the physical force school, but more truthfully it is the clan of Cain, Cuchulainn's tribe slouching bloodily down through the ages.
Pearse needed to consult nobody before he led the Easter Rising, other than the dead generations which preceded him and who, being dead, had no particular objection to others joining them. Those who slew the poor policemen at Solohead Beg in 1919 consulted nobody. Those who butchered over a dozen unarmed officers in their beds one Sunday morning in 1920 consulted nobody. Those who. . .
Opportunity
But enough of lists. My drift is clear. While dead generations are to be consulted, the advice they will always give is: kill.
Today the Ulster Unionist Council has a remarkable opportunity to still the voice of the dead generations gone before, to banish them from the political life of this country and theirs, this island and Britain. In small, homicidal covens of the dissident, to be sure, the dead will still be consulted, ancient duties commanded from the grave. But in the main, that organisation and those individuals who have operated on the divine mandate issued from dead Fenians are now prepared to cancel that authorisation; they are saying they will attend to the obligations of law and duty and government. Will that not do? Is that not a start?
And of course your stomachs are revolted by the thought of the unpunished guilty and unrequited deaths. You would not be human if you didn't have these feelings. But this is the deal. It is by far the lesser of two evils; it is not the least evil course, but the least evil course is a theoretical abstraction, not available anywhere in this world, and certainly not in Ulster.
Lesser evil
Have you as British citizens not approved of the lesser of two evils before? Do you not accept the strategic necessity that Britain had to make an ally of a man as consummately evil as Stalin? Were the allies of the British not the NKVD, in bloody depravity and inhuman wickedness more than a match for the Gestapo, and far more routinely sadistic than the vast majority of your home-grown terrorists in Northern Ireland? You have supped with the devil before. Where, now, is communism today?
Members of the Ulster Unionist Council, it is a horrible deal. But it is the only deal. It will bring in from the dark most of the creatures of the night. They will sit at your tables, and you will come to understand something about them. Some of them will be sorry for what they did. Others will not. They received their mandate to kill from the dead, and in peace, they seek no forgiveness from the living. Don't hold out for perfection. Be content that they are offering an end to war. Say yes, that Ireland's Cele Kula grow no higher.