Unionists suggest President postpone Belfast visit

The President, Mrs McAleese, was last night urged to postpone a planned visit to the loyalist Shankill area of Belfast because of continuing ill-feeling over her recent comments on sectarianism.

She is due to meet staff and pupils at a primary school on February 24th, according to Ulster Unionist politicians. But they said she should stay away from the area following her remarks comparing Nazi hatred to sectarianism in Northern Ireland.

Mrs McAleese apologised for her comments, saying they had been worded "clumsily".

Yet Mr Fred Cobain, a member of the suspended Northern Ireland Assembly said there continued to be a "sense of hurt and outrage" in the Protestant community.

"If Mrs McAleese is genuinely keen on building bridges then I strongly advise her to postpone this visit. If this visit is allowed to proceed it will represent another serious misjudgment and will compound the original offence.

"She will not receive a sympathetic hearing and in reality will only succeed in rubbing salt into the wound."

Cllr Chris McGimpsey, also an Ulster Unionist, said the President had insulted and wrongfully maligned an entire community and may not fully understand the profound sense of hurt she had caused. "By expressing regret for her clumsy comments, Mrs McAleese made a step in the right direction. But by seeking to impose herself on the Protestant community so quickly after so grievously offending it, she goes too far, too soon. The sensible thing for her to do is stay away for the time being."

A spokesman for Mrs McAleese said the President's programme for the end of February had yet to be finalised.

Declining to comment on whether or not her plans would be changed, he added: "The programme will be finalised about a week in advance. That is the situation."

Last month on the 60th anniversary of the Auschwitz liberation, the President said the Nazis had given "to their children an irrational hatred of Jews in the same way that people in Northern Ireland transmitted to their children an irrational hatred, for example, of Catholics, in the same way that people give to their children an outrageous and irrational hatred of those who are of different colour and all of those things".

In her subsequent apology, she said: "It was never my intention going into it simply to blame one side of the community in Northern Ireland."