LAST Christmas the euphoria of President Clinton's visit to Dublin and Belfast tended through the holiday period offering the prospect of permanent peace on our island. Van Morrison's song Days Like This sung with such passion on that idyllic day in Belfast, seemed an anthem for a shared and harmonious future.

What a contrast this year as we prepare once again to celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace. The events of the past year show we are still in thrall to the old ogres. People who long for peace are near despair, having seen it hover so tantalisingly close.

Why did the seeds of peace find such infertile ground here? The analysts have offered their answers. If only the paramilitaries had agreed a time scale for decommissioning arms. If only the composition of the Irish government had not changed at a crucial time. If only John Major was not so dependent on the Ulster Unionists for the survival of his government. If only ... ad nauseam.

It seems to me that the analyses were superficial and often self serving. Protagonists indulged in the pleasurable but unrewarding tendency to examine every conscience but their own. In Ireland we are adept at during from the ample archive of historical recrimination to justify present positions.

The resonant phrase from Luke's gospel story of the native there was no room at the inn is an apt metaphor for our condition. We hug our history and our hurts close to our chests and have little or no room for the corresponding experience of the other side.

It is important to recognise the efforts of the ecumenical movement to foster understanding in Ireland. There is the painstaking work of the inter church bodies..The School of Ecumenics is a beacon bravely casting light on dark areas, though it is a travesty of our common Christianity that it has to struggle so hard for funding.

How deeply has the ecumenical spirit penetrated through our denominations.

It is fair to ask the question, for it is only when understand ing of difference deepens in our minds that peace can flourish in our hearts. May I, as an Irish Catholic ask how well does my community understand religious and cultural heritage of Protestants in the north and south? Can we identify and celebrate their contribution to the common Irish experience?

The answer, I fear, is not very well. Some years ago on his election as moderator of the Irish Presbyterian Church, John Dunlop gave an interview to the London In dependent. Asked whether he saw him If as Irish or British, he replies.

In some senses you are Irish and some British. I can identify myself with being Irish if the Irish is sufficiently wide to be inclusive to me.

But if on the other hand, the Irishness is Catholic and Gaelic, it is hard to know where I fit into that. Even though I live in Ireland, I do not have an enriching and appreciative understanding of Irish culture. Two things are required here first that I move out across the frontiers to understand that, and second that people in that culture move across the barriers to try and understand me.

John Dunlop's words are a challenge to all in Ireland to engage in dialogue with different denominations and traditions to seek points of connection, to recognise and celebrate difference and to say sorry for the hurts of disdain and indifference. His words have inspired m9, as an Irish Catholic brought up in a mild nationalist to examine where I stand today.

GROWING up in Mayo in the 1960s and 1970s, Protestants were thin on the ground. We did not know much about them. They went to different accents. They did not seem much interested in Gaelic games. There were few points of contact between us. Mixed marriages were seen as a problem rather than an, opportunity to celebrate diversity.

Our interpretation of history told us that they had usurped our land but justice had eventually prevailed. We were told more of how we differed in religious belief than, what we shared. In sum, to echo Yeats, there was more substance in our animosities and misunderstand in than in our loves.

Within this perspective Unionism was seen as a particularly virulent form of Protestantism. The Stormont government had created a system where Catholics were second class citizens. We pointed with pride to how we had done things differently in the South since 1922.

We gazed upon Ulster Unionists with smug Olympian detachment. We adjudicated and found them severely wanting. Our own embarrassments, such as the brusque impositions of the Ne Temere decree, the excessive catholicity that seeped from some of our laws and sections of our constitution, and Archbishop McQuaid's ban on Catholic students attending Trinity, we swept aside as irrelevant. That past was a different country and we did things differently now.

Oh, if only this were really true.

As a priest of the majority denomination in Ireland, I was pained by the failure of our leadership to seek some common understanding with the other churches in the acrimonious moral debates of the 1980s and 1990s.

From a position of numerical strength I had hoped they would have had the courage to work towards a consensus that would have been visionary. Yet in 1983 our leadership supported a proposal to have inserted in the Constitution a clause on the rights of the unborn although the other churches, whose opposition to abortion is as credible as our own felt that its problem in the Constitution was not proper matter for such a document. The appalling mess caused by the insertion shows that theirs was the wiser counsel.

Surely too in the divorce referenda the churches could have evolved a unified approach this could have allowed for the provision of civil divorce while also formulating proposals to enhance and protect marriage in a consumerism society which disdains the idea of permanent commitment.

Ireland has inspired its people to make great sacrifices. Perhaps the greatest need today is not economic progress, but the breaking of stereotypes set in stone and the healing of wounds that have festered for generations.

Much has been done, but the easy sundering of the frail togetherness of the peace process shows that more is, needed. For it is only when we begin to experience the exquisite diversity, of Jesus Christ made flesh in the different denominations and traditions of our country that true peace will find fertile roots in our hearts and minds.