Why forgiveness?

In the early 1970s a colleague of mine found himself Permanent Secretary of the new Northern Ireland Office. I took him out to lunch to find out how he had got on.

I said: 'I hope you realise it is a political conflict, not a religious one'. He said: 'I learned that straightaway'.

He told me he'd been having dinner early on in the Culloden Hotel with Willie Whitelaw's Minister of State, when the manager came in, in great agitation: 'There's a crowd of women outside, who call themselves the Protestant women of the Shankill Road, and they've got their wee lads with them and the wee lads have half bricks and they want to see the Minister'.