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Date Posted: 10:45:24 11/09/08 Sun GMT
Author: Lynn
Subject: A peace of their minds (Boston Globe)

KEVIN CULLEN
A peace of their minds
By Kevin Cullen, Globe Columnist  |  November 6, 2008

Tom Hachey is a historian and runs the Center for Irish Programs up at Boston College, and he was looking forward to introducing a fellow named Anthony McIntyre to BC students this semester.

McIntyre is a thoughtful guy who spent much of his life as, and 18 years in prison for being, a member of the Irish Republican Army. He just wrote a book, "Good Friday: The Death of Irish Republicanism," explaining why he doesn't oppose peace but opposes the sacrifice of deeply held principles to get it.

But McIntyre can't get into the United States to visit BC or anywhere else because he has been deemed by someone with a visa stamp an enemy of the peace process, an unrepentant IRA man.

Shane O'Doherty is a repentant IRA man, and he can't get into the country to talk to the students at BC either. O'Doherty joined the IRA when he was 15, served 14 years in prison for terrorizing England with mail bombs, but renounced violence and apologized to his victims. O'Doherty just had his redemptive memoir, "The Volunteer: A Former IRA Man's True Story," published in the United States and Spain.

He especially wants to come to Boston because there is so much interest in the Troubles, both as history and as a possible blueprint to end other conflicts, here in a place where the IRA used to pass around the hat in a handful of bars in Southie and Dorchester.

"People in Boston get this, not just in an Irish sense, but in relation to other conflicts," he said, pointing to the efforts of Padraig O'Malley, a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, to use politicians from Northern Ireland as mentors for Iraqis.

Martin McGuinness, who actually ran the IRA, who was Shane O'Doherty's commander in Derry, who has made no secret that he used violence for political purposes, regularly visits Boston and other cities in the United States, as do others with similar backgrounds, but McIntyre and O'Doherty are on the outside looking in.

McGuinness, as deputy leader of the local power-sharing government in Northern Ireland, is now regarded as a peacemaker, not a paramilitary. And so he should be. McGuinness risked a lot to lead the IRA out of the cul-de-sac of violence, to fully embrace politics. He is part of O'Malley's project to help Iraqis find the political vocabulary to end their war.

McIntyre and O'Doherty have contributed mightily to the transformation of Northern Ireland. But by speaking their minds before there was a peace process, in O'Doherty's case, and after there was one, in McIntyre's case, they have alienated former comrades. There's hardly anyone sticking up for these guys on either side of the Atlantic.

"Here's the irony," Hachey says. "Anthony and Shane travel to England regularly. They waged war against the British government and that British government allows them to travel to England. The idea that they can't come to Boston, can't get into the United States, is mind-boggling, and it seems to me to run counter to the very essence of any peace process, that people should be encouraged to speak openly and honestly. Ideas should be heard and challenged."

George Mitchell, the great man from Maine who presided over the end of the Troubles, will speak tonight at the annual American Ireland Fund dinner at the Westin hotel on the waterfront, the same waterfront from where a boat loaded with weapons for the IRA sailed out of Boston Harbor 24 years ago.

Mitchell is still a diplomat, and he's not about to go off on an American government that encourages free speech around the world but won't let a couple of Irish guys come to Boston to sell a few books and open a few minds. But, as usual, he sees a bigger picture.

"I don't know anything about those two cases," Mitchell said over the phone. "But it is clear that the transition to a peaceful, open society is going to be a long one. It will take longer than we think. It will take a complete generational change in leadership. And it will take a generation that didn't live through combat."

Kevin Cullen is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at cullen@globe.com. 


© Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company

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