THIS book is required reading for anyone seriously interested in peace and reconciliation in Ireland. Its five essays cover unionist political and legal views on obstacles in the Republic to North South reconciliation the experience of the Catholic and Protestant churches and the Jewish community in the South since independence and the factors in the numerical decline of minority religious communities during the same period.
For space reasons, and because they encapsulate the difficult dilemmas facing those seeking reconciliation on this island, this, review will concentrate on two of these essays Arthur Aughey's unionist view of developments in the Republic, and Dermot Keogh's short history of the Catholic Church in the South since 1922.
Aughey shares his community's mistrust and more surprisingly, in one of the North's brightest young political scientists apparent ignorance of many contemporary trends south of the border. He makes it clear early in the essay that as far as most unionists are concerned anything emanating from the Republic, even those developments which might appear to make them less fearful of this traditionally Catholic society, continue to be deeply suspect.
His advice is "a counsel of despair for moderate nationalists. Trying to persuade unionists of the value of a closer relationship with the South, in the hope that one day in the distant future they might also be persuaded of the value of Irish unity, is an impossible task, he says.
This is because even the most benign, "Redmondite" form of Irish nationalism, in that it wants to "kill" Northern Ireland "with kindness", is only another variant of triumphalist Catholic nationalism.
The Catholic bit is important. Fear of Catholicism is very close to the surface of Aughey's argument, and in that he is a good representative of his people.
Unionists, he says, tend to believe that the interests of the Catholic Church are inseparable from the political project of Irish nationalism which is ultimately in separable from the designs of militant republicanism. All of them have designs on Protestant Ulster.
Change in the Republic towards a more liberal and pluralist society is suspect in that it is seen as an effort to woo the North. Even the clearest evidence of change for its own sake cannot be taken at face value. Thus Aughey cannot even welcome Mr Justice Hamilton's ruling last year in the abortion information case, that Catholic "natural law" could not be seen as superior to the Constitution, as a move towards a less Catholic ethos. Astonishingly, he insists on seeing it as an indication of ambiguity towards pluralism in southern society.
Aughey and unionist commentators like him suffer from a view of history that is cripplingly static. His snapshot of the Republic in this essay owes more to the 11.9205 and 1950s than to the 1990s. There is hardly a mention of that youthful, liberally minded, enthusiastically European section of the population, most of them impatient with and uninterested in the North, who are becoming increasingly influential in the Republic nor of the deep crisis currently being experienced by the Irish Catholic Church.
There is not the glimmer of a suggestion that the two Irish societies, both liberal capitalist democracies within the EU, might conceivably have something to say to each other about, for example, the common curse of high unemployment.
It is also unfortunate that, like Unionist leader David Trimble, Aughey allows his contempt for the Republic and all its works to show in his use of language. Talking about Irish cultural separatism "belonging to the dustbin of history" and citing the "begging bowl" as the symbol of Ireland's EU membership is not the language of reconciliation between ancient enemies.
Dermot Keogh's meticulous historical research into the Catholic Church in the first 50 years of the Irish State comes as a refreshing change after the pessimism and immobilism of Aughey's views.
Keogh paints a picture of a church which until recent decades did all it could to confirm Northern Protestants' worst fears about its influence in the southern state the "informal consensus" between the hierarchy and the leaders of both main political parties in the early decades the influence of John Charles McQuaid in the writing of the 1937 Constitution the extremist stance of the church's leaders during the Mother and Child controversy and other church state tensions in the I950s the appalling statements of some bishops during the Fethard on Sea boycott of Protestants.
Keogh feels less secure in his judgments on later decades, when archival evidence is not yet freely available. But his preliminary conclusions about hope coming out of the crisis of rapid changing true, even if they are partly based on optimism that the broad Christian humanism of men like Enda McDonagh and Dermot Lane can win the arguments inside the church on ecumenism and the role of women.
Let us hope that Keogh is right when he says that rather that turning in on itself, " depth of the crisis in the Catholic Church ought to make it more open to dialogue and co-operation with other churches on the island".
There is not space here to analyse the excellent contributions by Brice Dickson Terence Brown, and Jerry sexton and Richard O'Leary. Two points only from these Brown pays tribute to Martin Maguire's unjustly unknown research on that fascinating but forgotten element in early 20th century Ireland, the Dublin Protestant working class and Sexton and O'Leary point out that while in the 1980s religious minorities in the Republic increased significantly in numbers, according to the 1991 census the proportion of children of mixed marriages brought up as Catholics was still a surprisingly high 78 per cent.