Madam, - We voted for the Good Friday Agreement. Then in the North we voted in politicians to implement it. But they failed. They let us down. First the UUP and SDLP could not sustain it. Then last year the DUP and SF could not even get it off the ground.
What has gone wrong? The answer is that the spiritual dimension has been ignored. In 1799, following the failure of the United Irishmen's rebellion, a moderate Presbyterian, Whitley Stokes, who tried to bring Catholics and Protestants together, said: "Only mutual forgiveness can save Ireland".
Nothing has changed today. Instead of offering blame and demanding "sackcloth and ashes", as Christians we should be offering forgiveness, as Michael McGoldrick and Gordon Wilson were able to do when their children were killed.
In 1973 a booklet entitled Tribalism or Christianity in Ireland? was published by the New Ulster Movement (which gave rise to the cross-community Alliance Party of Northern Ireland). It emphasised the need for forgiveness and suggested: "This change in attitude could best start, perhaps, by the four leaders of the churches, publicly, asking the forgiveness of each other for what has been done in Ireland in the name of religion, in a symbolic act of repentance."
This was never done. Perhaps it is time to do it now. The ending of apartheid in South Africa was achieved only after much prayer, mutual forgiveness and the public repudiation of the Apartheid Covenant by the Dutch Reformed Church.
The Protestant church leaders should now rescind the theologically flawed Ulster Covenant of 1912 (signed in blood) and the Catholic Church should rescind the similar "blood sacrifice" of the 1916 Rebellion, which was a sort of pagan covenant. - Yours, etc.,
BRIAN EGGINS, Rostrevor, Co Down.