From the Tablet: Churches in Northern Ireland

Mass was cancelled this week at Our Lady’s and the doors were bolted. I met Fr Paul Symonds, one of the parish priests (although after a number of attacks no priest lives in the presbytery at Harryville). He spoke of the inspiring signs of Christian love that have emerged from the darkness of Ballymena’s summer. When the church was smothered in paint and graffiti this July a group from the Methodist, Church of Ireland, Baptist and Presbyterian churches worked together to clean it. One man in his seventies came from Clogh, a rural village, on his tractor with a power hose. After Mass that Sunday, local Presbyterians handed out red roses to parishioners as a sign of love to counter the hate.

Fr Symonds is one of Ballymena’s great mediators. Born in Ascot, Berkshire, he felt called in 1988 to serve in Northern Ireland: “It was a calling as strong as the calling to the priesthood.” He works closely with clergy from the other churches and believes the awful events of the summer have brought them closer together. The Church of Ireland bishop, Alan Harper, came to Mass at All Saints and Harryville. “There was a spirit there I have rarely experienced before. A spirit of real joy.”

He compares the divisions in the province to “two jealous brothers”. “The violence we have seen is the negative fruit of the defeatist view that we are two communities. We have to accept we are one community and learn to rejoice in our differences.” He is in dialogue with some of the perpetrators of violence in the Unionist community.

Working alongside him is Billy McKay, 55, who has served 16 years in prison for paramilitary crimes committed when he was in the Ulster Volunteer Force. He has now converted to “secular Unionism”, he said, and believes passionately that religion and politics must be separated in Northern Ireland. He runs a quango – Community Voice Transforming Conflict – and seeks to influence the loyalist paramilitaries at street level.