Daly embarrased to come from North

Former church leader Cardinal Cahal Daly today highlighted the “embarrassment” of coming from Northern Ireland.

He told an inter-church carol service that people outside Ireland could not understand how the northern part of the country was still involved in a religious war.

The cardinal declared: “It is very embarrassing for us northerners when we travel abroad to find that almost universally people perceive that we have been for 30 years waging a religious war against one another, and that we are still driven by inter-religious hatred and strife.

“People outside of this land cannot understand how, in the 21st century, we can still be caught up in the religious war syndrome which most European and Americans thought had been left behind in the 16th and 17th centuries.

“I have always found it very difficult to convince people overseas to the contrary.”

Cardinal Daly, delivering his address in Cushendall, Co Antrim, said the people of the province would like to think and argue that their conflict was not really religious and sectarian.

“We often try to refute the charge of religious war by arguing that our differences are political, not religious in nature.

“There is truth in this – and yet difficult and painful questions remain.

“People ask about Christians being harassed on their way to Mass, or about children needing police protection on their way to a school of one denomination; or about people being refused what they see as their right to walk along certain streets on what they see as a religious parade characteristic of a different denomination.”

The Cardinal added: “I still believe that our conflict is not primarily religious, but political, cultural, economic; it is to do with questions of national identity; it is about questions of political control and political power.

“Nevertheless, the interlinking of these factors with questions of religious denomination is so close as to raise very grave problems for the Christian churches, and to pose very serious problems for all of us for whom our Christian faith is of central importance.

“We need to realise, and never to forget, that bigotry and sectarianism are a serious threat to the Christian faith for all of us.

“Campaigns to combat sectarianism have been called for by many churchmen from nearly all churches, over the past 30 years.

“These have certainly produced good results, and in many quarters relations between churches have improved out of all recognition.

“We thank God for that. Nevertheless, we must admit that there has been an element of rhetoric about some of these calls and too little real change.”