Reverend Gary Mason:

I thank the Chairman for his words of welcome. I will set what I want to say today in the context of my life. For seven years I was based in Springfield Road Methodist church right on the interface at Workman Avenue, which, as many of us know will be open this Saturday to facilitate the Whiterock parade. In the 1990s I and a Catholic, a Dominican nun, Sr. Noreen Christian, spearheaded a cross-community project called ForthSpring. I remember walking through the interface one wet November night and a little Protestant girl saying to me "Hey Gary, I'm dating a wee boy from the other side" which simply meant that she was dating a Catholic. I guess this kid was 15 or 16 years of age and I remarked "Isn’t that great?" and walked the 50 steps to the ForthSpring centre and into my church and said to myself how normal yet how abnormal, that sectarianism has created a society where the most basic human emotion, falling in love, is actually wrong in some people's eyes. I am not asking people in this room to put up their hands but I am sure that all of us have been in love. Hopefully we all are in love to some degree or another. I want to show how vile and difficult it is to deal with that concept of sectarianism in which the basic human emotion of being in love is also categorised as being wrong.

A couple of weeks ago Francis Teeney used a fascinating phrase on the blog of the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice, the new centre that has just been set up at Queen's University. He said we have been pretty good at ending the war but we are not so good at building the peace. I want to tease that out in conversation with the committee today. I am a Methodist clergy person, and have been for 26 years, and reconciliation seems to me to be pretty difficult to achieve. A Dutch Reform professor commenting on South Africa said:

. . . reconciliation is no cheap matter. It does not come about by simply papering over deep-seated differences. Reconciliation presupposes confrontation. Without that we do not get reconciliation but merely a temporary glossing over of differences. The running sores of society cannot be healed with the use of sticking plaster. Reconciliation presupposes an operation, a cutting to the very bone without anaesthetic. The infection is not just on the surface. The abscess of hate and mistrust and fear, between black and white, nation and nation, rich and poor, has to be slashed open.

There is no question that the flags issue brought to the surface how deeply divided and sectarian a society Northern Ireland still is.

I remember a conversation with Liam Maskey who was honest enough to say to me, "Gary, the kids that are growing up in inner city Catholic areas - we are producing another generation of bigots." It is exactly the same on the Protestant side. Sectarianism is rampant in Northern Ireland. I will tease it out in a religious context and carry out a critique of the church. Billy Mitchell who, as many members know, was former OC of the Ulster Volunteer Force in Long Kesh died a few years ago. He was a tragic loss to loyalism. He used to use a quirky phrase in saying, "In the late 1960s, someone just did not fly over Northern Ireland spraying loony gas on us all and we all went mad." His point was that there was a context to it. Many commentators have many times painted the conflict as being purely nationalistic. I suggest there was a religious context to it also. There were religious overtones. I have often said the fertile soil of religious sectarianism in many respects provided the basis for the conflict.

On this wet Thursday, I will bore the committee with three church doctrines. I hope members will hear me out as I tease through them. I am sure every person who has grown up on this island has heard of the doctrine of the one true church. It holds that our church is the only true church and that if a person is outside it, his or her chances of salvation are much diminished at best. The doctrine that error has no right is perhaps less well known. It was developed by St. Augustine to justify the use of state coercion to suppress his heretical opponents. They were deemed to have no right to express or hold their views. Ever since, the doctrine has been put to similar use as the principle behind the use of coercion, particularly state coercion for religious purposes. The doctrine of providence simply means that God is at work in the world and beyond that the faithful Christian observer can discern His will and purpose by reading the signs of the times. Religious sectarianism lies in a combination of these three doctrines.

Consider the first doctrine of the one true church when combined with the doctrine that error has no right. The doctrine of the one true church is simply a truth claim and, like every such claim, carries the danger of arrogance and imposition. If one believes error has no right and that one's church is the one true church, it is one's duty to see that error is suppressed by every means necessary. I highlight this by reference to the life of a person. A senior loyalist paramilitary once said to me, "Gary, when you were taught [excuse my language] Catholics were shit in Sunday school, it was much easier to kill them." People argue that phrases like "one true church" and "error has no right" are irrelevant in our context. However, there was a toxic religious formation to our conflict. Combine the doctrine of the one true church with the idea of providence, which teaches that God is at work in the world. If one interprets providence in the light of the doctrine of the one true church, it is easily reduced to the concept that God is on our side. Phrases emerge such as "For God and Ulster" or "For God and Ireland" and easily eat their way into the whole concept of our conflict. This is illustrated on the world stage in the religious anti-semitism which Hitler converted into racial anti-semitism. That paved the way for the Holocaust, or Shoah.

The church has not put up its hands to the divisions it has caused within society. As a clergyperson, I am happy to say the church needs to do a lot more business on this. The working party on sectarianism which the Irish Council of Churches put together in the early 1990s teased out a great deal of this concept. A number of recently published books containing interviews with those within loyalism and republicanism have indicated that there was a religious concept to the conflict. I call it "toxic" or "bad" religion. We must be honest that in the 1950s this island had the most conservative brands of Catholicism and Protestantism in the western world and there is no question that they fed into the conflict.

Professor McBride will tease out the issue of trauma and discuss memory and the way forward in terms of dialogue on these matters.