Articles - From the Vicar

One of my earliest radio memories is of a newsreader announcing that something called 'direct rule' had been imposed on Northern Ireland. I had no idea what this meant at the time: I was not even a teenager in March 1972. Nor could I have known that Northern Ireland would rarely leave the news for the next thirty-five years, that the Troubles would claim thousands of lives or that I would be a middle-aged Vicar by the time peace had been secured.

The Northern Ireland conflict has often been analysed in terms of religious division, as a struggle between Protestants and Catholics. I think such an analysis, though superficially plausible, is actually rather lazy. The conflict was (and the underlying argument continues to be) not about religion so much as about fundamentally irreconcilable political aspirations: should Northern Ireland be re-united with the rest of the historic province of Ulster and become part of a united Ireland, or should it remain part of the United Kingdom? Of course, it is true that people in Northern Ireland draw much of their cultural and political identity from their denominational affiliation; true, too, that there were (and are) religious bigots both in the unionist and nationalist communities. But the moral authority on both sides has always rested with those who have sought, often against overwhelming odds, to bring a truly Christian perspective to bear.

The Corrymeela Community is one such group of Christians, active in Belfast and elsewhere in Northern Ireland. Central to the Community's work is the healing of social, religious and political divisions in the province, and increasingly in other places of communal conflict. For the last forty years or so the Corrymeela Community has offered, and lived out, an ideal of what it might mean to live together as Christians, sharing a common witness and a ministry of reconciliation. Now the politicians seem finally to have caught up. Thanks be to God.

© St Edmund's Church, Roundhay