The Church Of Ireland
Press Release

Bishop Clarke suggests that Ireland might have the maturity of South Africa, with its Commission for Truth and Reconciliation, and accept that "peace cannot be built on carefully crafted ambiguities that are open to as many different meanings as different people may wish to draw from them.

Only when we face the unpalatable truths of what we have done and what we have been can forgiveness and reconciliation begin."

Drawing from the writing of the Booker prize winner, Nigerian writer Ben Okri, Dr. Clarke asks that all Irish people see that there is a story which began long before Good Friday 1998 and that Christians should not pretend otherwise:

"The whole story" involves churches that have perverted power over communities and individuals alike in order to exercise demonic control.

"The whole story" is if those who have maintained political power by perpetuating myths of death that have indeed brought death.

"The whole story" contains people who have lived in fear for decades and who still live in fear, south and north, on housing estates and inner city ghettos.

We therefore cannot pretend that the story can have a convenient beginning that forgets the past and blurs the present. Nor can we pretend that we are all part of the same story.

The Bishop argues in his sermon that only when people set themselves "to practice peace" can "the vision of peace grow". He suggests that the Church should have a clear agenda of practicing peace  - "between churches and churches, between traveller and settled, between immigrant and indigenous, between economically advantaged and economically destroyed."

Click here for the complete text of Bishop Clarke's sermon