not in any way inferior. Above all, there will need to be some real Christian forgiveness and repentance if we are going to see renewal and get the relationships right.
Getting the Politics Right
In his letter to the Ephesians the Apostle Paul says:
Christ is the peace between us, and has made the two into one and broken down the barrier which used to keep them apart, actually destroying in his one person the hostility caused by the rules and decrees of the Law. This was to create one single New Man in himself out of the two of them.6
Any fantasising about a New Ireland and any political initiative in Northern Ireland which fails to take into account the spiritual and deeply-held beliefs of its people will have only limited impact. Ireland's Christian heritage must be turned to its advantage and reflected in its politics. Just as Adenauer brought together Protestant and Catholic in post-war Germany's Christian Democratic Union and just as Dutch Protestants and Catholics (with an equally bitter past) successfully came together ten years ago in Holland's Christian Democratic Appeal, the same will need to happen in Northern Ireland. Nor is this a distant pipe dream. In the context of Dublin's Dail, or the Westminster Parliament, it might seem an impossibility that Seamus Mallon or John Hume of the SDLP and Official Unionists, Jim Molyneaux and Martin Smyth, could be members of the same party. But, almost unnoticed, this is precisely what has already happened at the European Parliament. In September 1990, in Strasbourg, I met Jim Nicholson, the Ulster Unionist MEP for Northern Ireland. Before Nicholson's election in 1989, his predecessor, John Taylor (also a Westminster MP), had briefly taken up membership of the European People's Party (the Christian Democrats). Nicholson applied for membership of the group - where he sits with Irish MEPs from Fine Gael - including the former leader of the Alliance Party in Northern Ireland, John Cushnahan, now MEP for Munster, and Pat Cooney, the formidable and well-respected Leinster lawyer, a former Irish Justice Minister and past Chairman of the Fine Gael group in the Irish Senate. So, as part of the same political group in Europe, Catholic and Protestant men and