Rite and Reason: The sins of the Troubles can be resolved in the perspective of a brighter future, writes John Scally.
As I look back on my Catholic childhood, I realise that the most formative influence was not what I learned in school or at church, but what I observed from listening to, and especially watching, my grandfather. In particular, I loved when he talked passionately about animals.
One day, walking in the fields with him, I spotted a rabbit with its leg caught in a snare. It was alive but whimpering. My grandfather delicately held the creature and tried to loosen the snare.
He whispered softly to the rabbit, but he knew that it could not separate the pain of the snare from its efforts to be free of it.
It was an intimate moment, a primitive communion with a desperate creature which needed a friend. With each convulsion, the snare bit deeper. My grandfather got the snare wire off the leg. At first the rabbit remained there, shivering. Then it realised it was liberated and fled, bruised but free. Its struggle remained with me as a metaphor for the human capacity to inflict pain and suffering on others. Growing up in the 1970s, when paramilitary killings dominated the news, that capacity was evident.
Watching the heights Irish rugby has reached in recent months made me recall the events of April 25th 1987, when the Troubles cast a dark shadow over that game.
One of Northern Ireland's most senior judges, Lord Gibson, and his wife, Lady Cecily, were killed by an IRA landmine close to the Border as they drove home to Drumbo, Co Down. Claiming responsibility for the killings, the IRA cited the "shoot-to-kill" trial of three RUC officers who shot dead IRA members Eugene Toman, Seán Burns and Gervaise McKerr. In his controversial career, Lord Gibson clashed with nationalist and civil liberties groups, including the SDLP and the late Monsignor Denis Faul.
Irish rugby players Nigel Carr, Philip Rainey and David Irwin were in a car travelling in the other direction, on their way to a training session, and were injured in the blast. Nigel Carr was a leading light in the Triple Crown triumph of 1985. He never played rugby seriously again.
A year later, the Hanna family from Hillsborough - Robert, his wife Maureen and their six-year-old son James - were killed by a bomb on the same stretch of road when the IRA mistook their jeep for one owned by high court judge Eoin Higgins. Both incidents are recalled in If This Road Could Talk, to be broadcast on RTÉ Radio One tomorrow.
As we were reminded at Easter, almost with his dying breath Jesus uttered words of forgiveness, elevating forgiveness to the centre of Christianity. However, one of the issues raised in the programme is the high cost of forgiveness. The tyranny of the past can be broken; the sin of the past can be healed in the future - not by minimising the seriousness of the past, but by putting the past in the perspective of a different future.
What happened on the road to Killen can never be forgotten, nor should it be. However, our challenge as Christians is to ensure that these events are seen as a summons to build a new future together that acknowledges the hurt of the past on both "sides" of the divide.
Dr John Scally is Beresford lecturer in ecclesiastical history at TCD.