Fergus Finlay: Respect for difference is the vital ingredient to create real peace

Twitter, or X as it’s called now, not so much. I send my column there too every week, but increasingly it’s just a space for abuse. It doesn’t just reflect the polarisation of society and politics, it adds to it. In times of major stress and difficulty in the world, when you’d like to say something to add to the discourse, you have to be very careful.

There are people lurking all the time in the X undergrowth, and if anything you say gets noticed by them, brace yourself. It’s never about disagreement, it’s always about labelling, smearing, attacking.

Facebook on the other hand has room for humour, nostalgia, and story-telling alongside the opinions we all love to offer. It’s a great place to be, for instance, when tension is building up about a certain quarter-final.

One of my favourite people on Facebook is Eanna Brophy. I know him as a journalist — I think he’s retired now — but I’ve never met him. He writes funny stuff, sad stuff, nostalgic stuff. He’s a wordler, like me, and he’s an Irish rugby fan. He’s clearly a compassionate man. On the night we lost to New Zealand, when I was in mourning, he posted something along the lines of “what was that quote about a hill of beans?” I knew immediately what he meant. Humphrey Bogart’s line at the end of Casablanca — “I’m no good at being noble, but it doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”

And he was right. It didn’t, and hasn’t, stopped me mourning for the loss of hope. Many of us, I’m guessing, were devastated by the end of Ireland’s fantastic journey to the World Cup and throughout the competition.

And if I’m being honest, it didn’t stop me from struggling with the thought that I’d be even more devastated if England had managed to overcome a clearly exhausted and out-of-sorts South Africa team.

I know we have acquired a bit of a reputation in the rugby world for having a bit of a strut about us — New Zealanders, of all people, appear to think we have notions about ourselves. On the one hand, why the hell not? And on the other, they’re nothing to the notions the British media would have if England had managed to make the final. It would be unbearable.

Inexplicable war

But while I was grieving the (hopefully temporary) end of a great adventure. a terrible brutal war was unfolding, in which thousands of children and adults have already died.

 I have thought about little else but that war and its appalling consequences for the last two weeks. I wrote about it here last week, and I still find it inexplicable.

I’m also indebted to Eanna Brophy’s Facebook posts for reminding me that John Hume used to say that all conflict is about difference, and all difference is an accident of birth.

The world knows what the only possible solution to the conflict is — because a two-state solution is the only possible way in which irreconcilable differences can still be respected. But nobody seems to know how to find a process to get to that solution. Centuries of hate seem more deeply embedded in this conflict than ever before. The actions of Hamas, who knowingly betrayed the Palestinian cause by launching a war they cannot win, have led to a situation where any support for Palestine is seen as a crime in Israeli eyes.

It’s a political tragedy within a humanitarian catastrophe. Not only is no end in sight but it can only get worse. The only possibility of a breakthrough right now would be an act of total surrender by Hamas, or an act of supreme statesmanship by one of the people in the world least likely to be capable of it, Benjamin Netanyahu. Instead, it seems inevitable that this conflict will spread, that thousands more will die and that the ramifications for the rest of the world could be profound.

In the middle of this, Paddy Cosgrave’s decision to issue a cack-handed tweet, effectively ignoring what Hamas had done in the interests of his own moral superiority, and then to double down on it (“I refuse to relent”) was a catastrophically stupid thing to do. He has the clout to get away with that kind of thing here, but in the middle of a terrible conflict his comments could have only one outcome.

Cosgrave has built a really good company, an enterprise of which Ireland can be proud, even if he severed his connections with us after one of his rows. I really hope that they can steady the ship now. And I have to say that there is something really sad about the instant “cancelling” that took place here. If we were all to get cancelled like that for saying something stupid and insensitive, there wouldn’t be many of us left.

But it is all a hill of beans, when compared to a conflict that no-one can win, where the only thing left to do is for each side to inflict as much pain as possible on the other. It isn’t possible, and everyone knows that, to root out Hamas without inflicting enormous suffering on an entire population. And the more ruthlessly Hamas is treated, the more certain it is that another Hamas will rise in its place.

We know that from our own experience. Thirty years of trying to crush IRA terrorism only resulted in thirty years of suffering and catastrophic economic damage. Peace, no matter how fragile, has enabled both parts of our island to deal with all sorts of challenges — a pandemic, for example — much better than our nearest neighbours. Peace is the key to an awful lot.

To quote John Hume again, none of us chose to be born and we certainly didn’t choose to be born in any particular community. That’s why difference is the essence of humanity. And that’s why respect for difference, in his words, is the first and deepest principle of real peace.

There is another quote also, often attributed to Yitzhak Rabin, a fiercely combative Israeli general who became Prime Minister and ultimately a leading peacemaker. He said: “You don’t make peace with friends. You make it with very unsavoury enemies.” There is no other way. The world knows that a way has to be found to enable bitter enemies to talk to each other. When that will happen, nobody knows. But it must.