I also found another article on line from 1994, almost thirty years ago, about Hugh McElwain and his Irish cousin from County Monaghan, just like my first cousins from Monaghan. He had mixed feelings about patriotism and war. I am sorry that this is a little longer than usual.
Six years ago (1988) when Hugh McElwain read a newspaper story about the killing of a young Irish Republican Army provisional named Seamus McElwain by British security forces in Northern Ireland, he wondered whether the slain nationalist was a cousin. McElwain, chair of the department of philosophy and religious studies at Rosary College in River Forest, knew that his father's family was "pretty anti-British, anti-partition and all the rest," so when he learned that Seamus McElwain was indeed his first cousin's son, he wasn't surprised. But he was troubled. "I thought about it, and it had a kind of negative impact on me," McElwain recalls. "A year or so later I got a videotape of this young man's burial. It was covered by several Irish television stations. And it was then that it really hit me. I saw this hero's burial-or terrorist's burial, depending on your perspective-in a place where my father had grown up. I had all this confusion in my emotions about this terrorist who is a hero and my commitment to non-violent action. In my own family I had a terrorist. That was hard to take."
Although he says he dislikes the term "pacifist," McElwain, 62, who has been teaching at Rosary for 20 years, has embraced a non-violent philosophy since he was a graduate student in Europe in the late 1950s. As he worked on a doctoral dissertation on the justifiable war, he discovered the longstanding pacifist tradition and had a tough time defending his dissertation because he ended up not believing in the justifiable war as strongly as he believed in non-violent action. Returning to America, he says, "I saw in concrete, day-to-day action that non-violence worked. I saw Martin Luther King. I heard about Mahatma Gandhi and read Gandhi extensively." McElwain, who says he doesn't know whether he would have gone into the military had he been asked, was a draft counselor during the Vietnam War and started teaching college courses on the philosophy of non-violence.
"This violence in my family confronted me in a very direct way, because I felt attacked by it, I couldn't let it go," McElwain says. "I could appreciate the power of dying for what one believed, but to kill for any ideology-even the highest-I could not accept for myself." As chair of the board of representatives of the Chicago Center for Peace Studies, McElwain had a chance to travel to Northern Ireland in July with an ecumenical group sponsored by Chicago's Fourth Presbyterian Church, which spent five days working at a conference center known as the Corrymeela Community, a group dedicated to bringing Protestants and Catholics together. It was a psychologically complicated pilgrimage for McElwain, the son of Irish immigrants who grew up listening to stories about atrocities in his parents' homeland and assimilated the prejudices of a native. He was able to assess the Irish situation firsthand and, for the first time in 25 or 30 years, visit with his cousin James (father of the slain Seamus), who lives just over the border separating Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland in Knockatallon, County Monaghan. "I started getting close to his home and knocked at a door in the middle of the day," McElwain says. "A woman answered and I asked for directions and she said, 'Who there do you want to see?' "I said, 'I want to see my cousin Jimmy McElwain,' and she said, 'The famous James McElwain?' I didn't know what to say because you never know who these people are, and I said, 'I think he's known around here.' I found myself playing their game. It gave me a clue as to how they appreciate this hero.
"I got there eventually, and it was uneasy because (my cousin) wanted to know what I was doing in Northern Ireland: 'What are you doing up there? Getting brainwashed?' That's what he believed. Thus, I tried to tell him it was an educational tour and sort of played it cool. I didn't want to lay it all on the line. I didn't want to hurt him in any way. And then we started talking about the son and the death and everything."
Seamus McElwain, 25, had escaped from Mays Prison in Belfast, where he and 35 others were being detained in the killings of British security officers. All 36 escaped, and all but 12 were caught almost immediately. Seamus eventually was found in Rosslea, County Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. When they caught him, the story is he had 300 pounds of dynamite on him, so they killed him in cold blood, McElwain says. "That's not my cousin's version of it. My cousin's version is that they found him and killed him. Of course, without the dynamite. Thus, he was shot in cold blood." McElwain's family took him into the rolling green hills to show him a stone monument that was built in memory of Seamus by the people in the area. "It was quite a difficult moment," he says. His mother was pretty much destroyed by it. But his father was proud of his son. There's no doubt about it. "How are you going to solve the problem when these people whom I know are good people by any criteria that you use-holy, decent people-are so incredibly entrenched in what they believe to be right? And they'll kill and die for it." While growing up, McElwain listened to his parents talk about Ireland. His mother told what he considers a greatly exaggerated story about not being able to look out the windows after dark for fear of being shot by English soldiers. His father, he says, "was just deeply prejudiced. I'm sorry. He was a terrific person. He gave me the equipment to overcome the prejudice that he taught me, interestingly enough. I never take anything for granted, I always search it out, which is what he taught me. But in effect, my parents believed that the English were the cause of all the problems of the world because that's what they experienced. See, they go back to the Reformation with penal laws. If you didn't go to a Protestant church, they charged you a 15-pound fine. They remembered all the history of the colonization of Ireland by England. The English thought the Irish were barbarians, and so they were going to civilize them. All of this stuff is in the memory of the people. I always say to my students that prejudice is learned and it will never go away. I can handle it intellectually. I lived in England. I have no problem, but down here," he says, pointing to his midsection, "I still have that prejudice." The roots of the current Irish unrest go back to 1920, when Ireland was partitioned and separate parliaments were set up for the north and the south. The Republic of Ireland was proclaimed in 1949, and in 1973 it acknowledged British sovereignty over Northern Ireland as long as this was the wish of a majority in the north. But fighting has continued between Protestants and Catholics in the north. "The situation is a religious problem no matter how you slice it," McElwain says. "People often say, no, it's political, that England caused the disruption by dividing Ireland and if they get out everything would be fine. That's far too simplistic. It's also a religious problem in that those who are nationalists or who want a united Ireland generally are Catholics and those who want union with England to continue are Protestants. There are extremes on both sides. The extremes on the Protestant side are afraid that if there ever were a united Ireland that they would be under the jurisdiction of the Irish Catholic bishops and, therefore, they would have to follow all the strictures of the Roman Catholic Church. You can understand their position."
With the group from Fourth Presbyterian Church, McElwain was able to meet with people from all over Ireland to gain a deeper understanding of the tragically complex conflict and the ways in which individuals and groups are responding to sectarianism, hatred and violence in Northern Ireland. He says he left Northern Ireland "very, very impressed" by the grass-roots activity aimed at working out a solution that someday could stop the violence. But, he says, "There's a place in the New Testament that says that Jesus has come to divide families, etc., and I thought: 'Is this the sword that divides families? And how do you extract that sword?' These are all Irish. They're not different kinds of people. Some of them consider themselves British in that they want to be under the United Kingdom, but they are Irish in terms of their race. You understand what they want. And you cannot begrudge them their own heritage, which is part of the United Kingdom. Thus, you leave with this unbelievable ambiguity."
Do you know anyone who has a first cousin in County Monaghan, Ireland, like I do?
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