This year’s Dominican Peace Action summer school was held at Carlingford, a small coastal town just south of the border with Northern Ireland, a few miles from Newry. A useful vantage point from which to learn at first hand from those who have had to live with ‘The Troubles’ for more than two decades; and to hear from groups and participants engaged in conflict-resolution and the search for further, long-term ‘solutions’—bearing in mind the old adage that Northern Ireland has a problem for every solution’. On the principle that pilgrimages should be made to harassed as well as holy places, we made ours both to St Patrick’s grave at Downpatrick and to the R.U.C. training establishment in Belfast.

Families travelling from the U.K. were joined by Irish ‘residents’, Dominican sisters and others, who shared their experience and concentrated our minds. Hosts and guests may have come with differing agenda; but it may be fair to say that our reasons for coming together were three-fold. First, as workers for peace, it would be inconceivable to ignore or turn our backs on the unresolved conflict within our own jurisdiction: the denial of human rights which sparked off the first Civil Rights march in August, 1968,with the repercussions - military intervention, the suspension of Stormont, internment, the Anglo-Irish Agreement etc., with which we live today.

Second, considering the physical proximity of the two islands and their intimate historical association, much of that history must fill us with shame and compel us, the ex-colonial power, to metanoia. As Christians we must share in the responsibility for past crimes committed against the Irish people. And if, as the contributors to the Evangelical statement ‘For God and His Glory Alone’ recently declared, ‘the essential nature of repentance is losing face’, then we have, each in our own way, to confess that ‘we are not just victims of history—we have been wrong’.