The Church of Ireland
Press Release

That purpose is, first of all, to remember and honour the dead, During the course of my work as Victims Commissioner in 1997 and 1998 I received letters from, or encountered face to face, many hundreds of the people most directly affected by the violent death of loved ones. Indeed I see here tonight not a few of those I encountered at that time. To you I would offer my heartfelt thanks for helping to guide me in that difficult and painful task. In those exchanges what was communicated above all else was the unique value of an individual human life.

Those who have studied with meticulous detail the cost of our so-called "troubles" have pointed out that although the victims have come from many different elements in our community, the heaviest losses have been sustained amongst young men. This has had two consequences The first of these is that in very large measure it has been the task of women to bury the dead and care for the living. Mothers have been left to mourn their sons and young widows to grieve for their husbands. I want to pay a heartfelt tribute today to the remarkable way in which the women of Northern Ireland have borne these terrible burdens. Many of them, far from withdrawing into the privacy of a diminished family, have thrown themselves into a life of voluntary work for the good of our community. In the worst of times many such women have discovered within themselves new talents and new resources. This evening I salute them all.

But the preponderance of the young, and particularly of the young men, amongst the dead has another significance, All through the Twenties and Thirties countries like Britain and France, which suffered such enormous casualties in the Great War, lived with the reality that they had lost many of the best and brightest of their generation - men such as Raymond Asquith, son of a prime minister and a person of infinite promise. Our countries had lost in that awful holocaust so much potential for good, so many talents better suited to build than to destroy. The world was cruelly robbed of all these victims might have been, of' the happy marriages they might have formed, of the children they never had, of the promise snuffed out.

And so it is that all these unnecessary and utterly unjustified deaths in Northern Ireland have robbed us of so much, not just as individuals, as relatives or friends, but as a community.

With this hard-earned knowledge of the malign effects of terror, we look across the Atlantic to our friends in America. Forty years ago I had the great privilege of working in that amazing country, living in Manhattan but travelling to many different areas of the United States. From a window of our apartment I would look out at night to the twinkling lights down town, and from my fiftieth floor office in the Chrysler Building, I could see the great ocean liners of the day coming up past the Statue of Liberty into the port of New York. Here s a country which opened its arms to succeeding generations of the poor and dispossessed from every continent. Here is a nation which carries on its great national monuments the noble words of Lincoln and Jefferson and other great men. Here is a country where freedom of speech is cherished and exercised; where the mightiest in the land can, if the need should arise, be made to bow the knee to the rule of law.

In that short and terrible hour on the 11th of September, more human beings - our brothers and sisters on this earth - met their deaths than we have suffered over the endless decades of our troubles. There can be few families in this community who do not have friends or relatives in America, and so we share in their grief and we stand with them in denouncing the utter and inexcusable evil of such acts.
I do not know whether any members of our small Muslim community have been able to join us here. Let us not make the mistake of confusing one of the world's great religions with the activities of a network of fanatics. In 1998 Deborah Cassidi, who used to live and work in Omagh, published a small book of "Favourite Prayers" chosen by people from all walks of life, not all of them Christians. In that book Princess Alia Al Hussein of Jordan reminds us of the words of the opening prayer of the Koran:

"In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful,
Praise be to God, Lord of the Worlds,
The Compassionate, the Merciful,
Master of the day of Judgement".

I am not one of those so naive as to accept the notion that "violence never achieved anything". Certain evils which threaten us all may themselves, as a last resort, have to be opposed by violence. No community can be expected to surrender its hopes and aspirations in the face of brutality. But what violence can never do is to enable us to live happily alongside neighbours who differ from us. It is an easy enough thing to govern a jurisdiction with a single identity, a common language and religion, a shared tradition, a mutual purpose. All over the world, however, there are communities which do not enjoy that luxury. In the Middle East, in the Balkans, in the Philippines, in many parts of Africa there are divisions which lead all too often to conflict and reciprocal atrocity.

In areas of conflict, whether it is domestic conflict or political conflict, history has a terrible habit of repeating itself. How often in reading the account of a conviction of some criminal for violent abuse, have we discovered how the prisoner himself was violently abused long before? Violence begets violence; hatred begets hatred; prejudice begets prejudice. it is the most difficult and yet necessary thing to break out of this endless cycle. I know that some of you tonight must still carry with you deep feelings of righteous anger. But the time has surely come to cry "enough", to resolve that we will not carry forward into generations to come all the accumulated bitterness of the years.

This does not mean that we should forget, for a moment the sufferings undergone by so many in this cathedral and so many others outside it. Nor does it mean that we should cease to honour the memory of those of our fellow-citizens who placed their lives at risk for the common good.

When I accepted the Dean's invitation to speak this evening I did not know in what context we would meet together. It seemed all too possible that the machinery of local democracy would have ground to a halt once more, exposing us yet again to an uncertain and dangerous future. Of course no single act, however striking, can make our future secure. Many challenges and difficulties certainly lie ahead for all of us. We shall have, on occasions, to bite our lip for the common good. We need to move ahead to the only secure and meaningful decommissioning, in which hatred for "the other" will be put beyond use.

As our community - I hope and pray - moves ahead, those who have suffered most must not be left behind. I entitled my 1998 report "We will remember them", and I will continue to argue for that cause as long as I have a tongue in my head. I continue to believe that we need a Commissioner or Ombudsman for victims, a person wholly independent both of national and provincial government, who can ensure that the interests of the victims will never be overlooked. Since prisoners have been released and persons suspected of serious crime are to be free from prosecution, we can no longer tolerate the exile from Northern Ireland of people forced out by threat and intimidation. Mean-minded and malicious attacks upon innocent families by blast-bomb or arson must cease, The education of children involves an inalienable right to travel safely to school without let or hindrance, threat or abuse. The awful "punishment shootings" or "punishment beatings" cannot be allowed to continue. Let the private armies strike camp at long last and return to the ways of peace. Even now, at this late hour, I appeal for any further information about the fate of "the disappeared" which would restore to grieving relatives the remains of a loved one, lost so many years ago.

It is for the rest of us to ensure that we continue to comfort and support the victims, not just in the short term but for many years to come. We must fight to ensure that this cause is properly recognised in the expenditure priorities both of Stormont and Westminster.

That great American Martin Luther King made a speech in Memphis on the 3rd of April 1968. He could not know that this would be his last full day on earth, or that next day he would fall victim to an assassin's bullet. Yet he said this:

"I've been to the mountain top. I've looked over, and I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land".

My prayer today is that we, too, may put our sufferings behind us, and turn at last to the constructive tasks of peace.