Irish Irenics

Earlier this year Peter Brooke, the British Government's Secretary of State of Northern Ireland, started talks between local Catholic and Protestant politicians in the hope that they would eventually agree to share power in a new regional administration. But the talks had to he abandoned, thus bringing to an end, it would seem, what was the latest in a long line of attempts to reconcile Catholic Nationalists and Protestant Unionists in Ireland and in Northern Ireland.

It is 200 years since William Drennan, writing in October 1791 from Dublin to his sister Martha Mc Tier in Belfast, first mentioned a political society, the Society of United Irishmen, in which members of the established Protestant Church, the Church of Ireland, might combine with Catholics and Presbyterians to promote parliamentary reform and civil rights in Ireland. Drennan, himself a Presbyterian, was disheartened when he saw early signs of the United Irishmen becoming an armed conspiracy, particularly after his own trial for sedition and his acquittal. He would rather have seen the claims of the democrats promoted by propaganda and the lobbying of Irish MPs.