05-07-2025
- Politics
- Sydney Morning Herald
Thugs who perform violence over distant atrocities have no place here
Imagine it's 1972. Thugs try to set alight the front door of Melbourne's old St Francis Catholic Church while 20 worshippers, including children, are inside.
Up the street, more hoodlums storm a Celtic pub, screaming that the IRA are terrorists and should be eradicated.
Or reverse it. Thugs try to set alight one of Melbourne's Protestant churches and a gang invades a British-style tavern in the CBD, terrorising patrons and chanting that British soldiers responsible for shooting civilians on Bloody Sunday in Derry should themselves be killed.
The shock and righteous outrage of Melburnians would be without end.
Happily, it never happened. Not in Melbourne.
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Yet 1972 was the height of what were known as the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Innocents were dying in bombing campaigns and being massacred for protesting. There seemed no end to the fury and the suffering, fuelled by hatreds going back hundreds of years.
Melbourne's population at the time was still substantially tilted towards the descendants of British Protestants and Irish Catholics, both old and new.
Most of them, however, had left old grievances behind and were determined to live beyond the contemporary blood-letting, whatever their feelings about the Troubles.
