Dr. Gary Mason:

I would like to make this more conversational when I deal with the next point on the slide. Delving into what Professor McBride was saying, memory and how we tell stories is crucial when we deal with the past. I have often illustrated this going back to the late 1980s. I will take the committee members to the Balkans and paint a little story.

We will assume these three are a family of Serbs. Professor McBride and I will be the Croats for the day and the committee members will be the Muslims. It is the late 1980s and we are going into their homes at 9 p.m. The kids have been playing together on the street during the day. I often give this lecture in the States entitled When the Curtains are Closed. Let us listen to the stories in the Serb house. The kids are playing and Mum and Dad are chatting:

Those Croats, catholics, allied themselves with the Nazis during the Second World War and how dare they say they are the one true church. Us Serbs are the one true church. We're orthodox and they are not. As for those Muslims, look at what they did to us under the Ottoman Empire.

We go into the home of Mr. and Mrs. Croat:

Those Serbs, we are the one true church. Everyone knows the Catholic Church is the one true church. We can trace it back to Peter. We're the one true church. As for the Muslims, look at what they did to us under the Ottoman Empire.

In the home of the Muslims, they say, "Those cursed Christians with their crusades butchered us as they swept across western Europe, eastern Europe and into the Holy Land". The kids hear the stories and the stories are told and the memory and pain are perpetuated. This underlines what Professor McBride said about the trigger of the flag protest.

I have a friend who made a choice that I did not make as a young person growing up in the trauma of the 1970s. He served 18 years as a member of the Ulster Volunteer Force. He said to me recently, "Every night I go to sleep with the faces of the dead on my ceiling." I condemn violence and what he did was categorically wrong but every night he goes to sleep with the faces of the dead on his ceiling. Statistically, one in five ex-prisoners is drinking himself to death. Professor McBride and I were chittering in the car on the way to the meeting and we said PEACE II probably came too early. I was in west Belfast at the time meeting Tom Hartley, Jim Gibney and many others to facilitate dialogue groups. That is why PEACE IV is crucial. We need a rerun of what the Dutch reform professor said, namely, "Reconciliation presupposes confrontation."

I have often said to the church that reconciliation is not going to some ecumenical service in Dublin or Belfast. Reconciliation means hard, meaningful dialogue where republicans and loyalists can sit in a room together and ask themselves hard questions. It has been more difficult for me to do that in the past two years. I have taken former republicans and loyalists away on overnight trips to ask those hard questions but some of the stuff I have had to deal with in east Belfast over the past few years has been more difficult, even though I have been doing this, taking people away, for 26 years. There is more fragmentation between loyalists and republicans today than when I took senior republicans and loyalists just three years ago. Professor McBride and I have been having these conversations. The committee and other bodies in Northern Ireland need to be a spearhead to facilitate constructive dialogue that will take us somewhere. This does not need to be done piecemeal.