TOM COOPER (Letters, February 14) refers to the the intolerance that has poisoned relations between Christians on this island for generations and polluted the good name of Protestantism.

VOICING his disappointment and disapproval on the Joe Duffy radio show at the sale of rosary beads in the shop in St Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin, Wallace Thompson of the Evangelical Protestant Society, Belfast, said “rosary beads have no place within Protestantism and ought not to be found, for sale or otherwise, in a Protestant church.”

A special adviser to a senior DUP minister in the North is coming under fire after an anti-Catholic outburst.

A DUP special advisor to the Northern Ireland Executive was today at the centre of a bizarre religious row.