The ghosts of hate

Twelve ghosts are haunting Gerry Fegan. They include a woman with a child in her arms, three British soldiers, two Ulster loyalists and a policeman. Every waking hour, sober or more often drunk these spectres stalk Fegan's every move.

Gerry Fegan is a fictionalised IRA killer whose dozen victims have come back to spur him on to kill again. This time his new victims are those in the IRA he colluded with in the 12 murders, the ghosts only leaving Fegan alone once he has completed his mission and dispatched his old comrades to their graves.

In Stuart Neville's harrowing and critically acclaimed first novel The Twelve there are plenty of truths, coarse blood spattered brutal truths but little or no reconciliation. And plenty of food for thought for those who argue that what post-Troubles Northern Ireland needs is a South African-style official public Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

It is no coincidence that Neville's book, which will be published this autumn in the United States as The Ghosts of Belfast, focusses centrally on the issue of the recent troubled past.

No country that has seen bloody civil conflict can just draw line under its past

In August another book that deals with the backwash of the Troubles and how it impacts on the career of a Scottish Minister in the devolved Assembly at Edinburgh will be published. Liam McIlvanney's All the Colours of the Town is less gruesome than Neville's, the body count is far lower. Nonetheless McIlvanney touches on similar themes, of how one's involvement in terrorism (this time as a loyalist paramilitary) can rebound on you in later life.

Moreover, another Belfast-based writer who must remain anonymous for now is current re-crafting a novel in which an ex-IRA man turned solicitor, just like Fegan, goes after one of his old bosses, now a respectable Sinn Fein politician. If this third book gets published it will certainly make for uncomfortable reading for at least one famous Sinn Fein leader who is remarkably similar to the character in this novel.

This spate of novels with the theme of the violent past haunting a relatively peaceful present raises questions over how a society like the North of Ireland copes with what went before during its mini civil war.

Certainly no country or community that degenerated into bloody civil conflict can just take a red pen and draw line under its past. Spain tried this after democracy was restored in the 1970s and in particular when the left gained power following the Franco dictatorship years. 

In his first victorious election speech, the new Socialist Prime Minister Felipe Gonzales urged the Spanish nation to draw a line under the civil war and move on. Yet following the years of forgetting Spain is currently undergoing a fresh round of historical soul searching mainly through the arts. Civil War themes are being examined through the medium of cinema (think of Pan's Labyrinth) or various novels dealing with old atrocities and scores settled.

Spain's re-examination of the 20th century and particularly the Franco era is interesting in terms of what is or may be about to happen in Northern Ireland. At present unionist and nationalist parties nominally working together in a power sharing coalition squabble about many things on a daily basis, most notably over the past. The best example of this is the fate of the Maze prison outside Belfast which used to hold thousands of IRA and loyalist inmates.

The British government promised to pour tens of millions of pounds into local sport if the parties could agree that the Maze be rebuilt as a national stadium housing all three major sports, Gaelic, soccer and rugby. However, Sinn Fein insisted that a Robin Island-style museum be built at its entrance commemorating the role of the jail in the conflict and in particular the deaths of 10 republicans who died on the 1981 hunger strike.

Unionists of all hues objected to this claiming it would be a temple of homage to terrorists. As a result the Maze stadium project is effectively dead and the danger now looms that Northern Ireland may not have a new home to play in over the next few years with international 'home' games played in England.

So the past isn't just another country in Northern Ireland where they do things differently. It is two other countries whose versions of history are radically different. All of which bodes ill for any detoxifying Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Perhaps it might be better then, in the interests of the latter concept that the Truth about the past is filtered through the imagination of writers, artists and filmmakers rather than politicians, lobby groups and lawyers.

Henry McDonald is author of 'Gunsmoke & Mirrors: how Sinn Fein Dressed Up Defeat as Victory', published by Gill and Macmillan ·