President deplores negative cross-Border views

Too many people in the Republic and in Northern Ireland have been influenced by negative views of each other, President Mary McAleese told a Belfast conference on the issue of Northern and Southern identity.

Mrs McAleese told the Irish Association - which was formed almost 80 years ago to promote greater understanding between the two communities in the North and between North and South - that people were significantly shaped by their places of origin.

"Too many people have been shaped negatively by images or impressions of that part of this island which they did not know or did not want to know. Old images, if they were ever true, may no longer be true," she said.

Mrs McAleese said unionist and nationalist identities were not affected, notwithstanding the increasing North-South co-operation that followed from the Belfast Agreement and the setting up of the powersharing government on May 8th this year.

"At the end of all these partnerships, collaborations, discussions and initiatives, unionists are still unionists, nationalists are still nationalists, but now they are good neighbours doing what good neighbours do for one another and with one another," she added.

"Instead of the generations - centuries even - that we have spent on this island, and in this part of it, blocking each other, negating each other, cancelling each other, we now face into an era in which we put our respective genius to work for each other, with each other."

The Church of Ireland Bishop of Kilmore, Ken Clarke, provided an amusing insight into how some southerners had not quite figured what he called the "paradigm that is the Protestant tradition in Ireland".

He recalled how he brought his wife's car in for its NCT test in Co Cavan, where he lives, while wearing his bishop's garb.

The Nigerian and German workers at the centre could not understand how a man of the cloth could have a wife, as Catholic priests did not have wives, he said.

"Oh, is it because you are not a Christian?" one of them asked.

Then there was the time he was having lunch in a hotel with his wife. "The waitress called me 'Father' and winked at me," he said.

"I think there is a mindset [ in the Republic] that does not really think of Protestant customs, cultures and traditions," he added.

Overall, however, he said it was a "good time to be a Protestant in the Republic".

The conference, entitled Cross Border People: Southerners in the North; Northerners in the South, explored a wide range of issues, with identity as its central theme.

Speakers included the North's Minister for Education, Caitríona Ruane, who said that for her and her family, the Border did not really exist. "I am from Mayo . . . my husband is from Derry, we live in north Louth, and both my children attend school in Co Down," she said.

Dr Paul Burgess, of University College Cork but originally from the loyalist Shankill area of Belfast, found from speaking to Northern republicans and nationalists living in the South that there was a "sense of betrayal and disillusionment with the partitionist mindset  [in the South] that is altogether palpable".