With God on our Side

Taal: NL
Categorie: reportage

On the centenary of Partition, Mary McAleese, the Belfast-born former President of Ireland, examines the role religion has played in creating and resolving conflict in Northern Ireland. In a series of encounters - with politicians and peacemakers, with perpetrators and victims of violence - she asks what religion has done for us, and to us, and assesses the role it could yet play in sustaining peace. In the last interview before her death, Pat Hume, widow of the late Nobel Peace Laureate, John, discusses the faith and vision that sustained him. Mary finds common ground with her ex-student, the former DUP First Minister, Arlene Foster, whose family, like her own, was forced from their home by paramilitaries, but who sees a positive role for faith in building mutual understanding. Alan McBride, whose wife and father-in-law were among 10 people killed in the Shankill fish shop bomb, later agreed to meet Gerry Adams, who had helped carry the coffin of the bomber, Thomas Begley. Alan's faith has inspired him to a life of cross-community support for victims of trauma. Former Sinn Fein President, Gerry Adams, discusses the role played by Clonard priest, Fr Alec Reid in engineering secret talks between himself and John Hume, to create a pathway to peace for the IRA. The Rev Harold Good, who was one of only two people trusted by all sides to verify weapons de- commissioning, talks of the need for Churches to leave their silos and engage with people with whom they disagree in what he calls the No Man's Land of a divided society. Russell Watton, who was given 3 life sentences for a Loyalist gun attack on a Catholic bar, is now committed to peaceful, democratic politics as a PUP councillor. He questions the extent to which the Loyalist cause was ever "For God and Ulster" as the UVF motto declared. Seana Walsh served 3 sentences for his role in the IRA and was a close friend of the hunger striker, Bobby Sands. But was he a Provo because of his Catholic faith or in spite of it? Catholic, British/Irish labels are no longer adequate.