THE Church of Ireland and the Presbyterian Church have confirmed that they hold investments in a number of large British firms manufacturing arms and defence equipment.
However, the Catholic Church said it had "virtually no direct investment in foreign commercial firms" and it would not want to be associated, either directly or indirectly, with arms production.
The Methodist Church said it had given ethical investment instructions to the firms handling its investments that there should be no shareholdings, directly or indirectly, in armaments, alcohol and tobacco firms.
The statements followed a report in yesterday's Examiner, based on research carried out by the justice and peace organisation AFrI, that the Church of Ireland Representative Body, the organisation which runs the church's property, owns more than 50,000 shares in GEC, Vickers and GKN.
Of these, 46,000 - worth more than £150,000 - are held in GEF, the second-largest defence equipment manufacturer in Britain and the 12th-largest in the world. An AFrI researcher discovered from British company records that GEC shares are also held by the Cork, Cloyne and Ross diocesan board of education, Protestant Aid, and the St Stephen's Orphans' Society.
In a statement yesterday, the Church of Ireland said management of the Representative Church Body's wide range of international investments was "delegated to professional managers with discretionary powers to invest in what is a highly complex and sophisticated investment market." It said all investments were periodically reviewed, and "it is intended to review issues relating to ethical criteria in the near future."
The Presbyterian Church said yesterday that its trustees and orphan society held just over 100,009 shares in GEC, worth more than £400,000. They also held a small number of shares in Racal. In a statement the church said its latest financial information showed that 28 per cent of GEC's turnover and 17 per cent of Racal's turnover were involved in defence production.
There are prohibitions on the Presbyterian Church's trustees investing in companies involved in, alcohol, tobacco or gambling, a spokesman said yesterday, but not in armaments firms.
In an RTE radio interview, the chief officer of the Church of Ireland's Representative Body, Mr Robert Sherwood, said the companies referred to in the article represented less than a quarter of 1 per cent of its total investments.
He said companies such as GEC and GKN were huge multinational corporations which produced, as well as defence systems, useful products such as telecommunications equipment, consumer goods, and health equipment.
There was also a gradual merging of advanced technology in both the armaments and non-armaments fields. It was "a problem of definition", he went on. "I don't think there are any black and white answers to all these questions."