Rite and Reason:The names of all those who died in the conflict will be read out on Good Friday in a Dublin church, writes Andy Pollak.
Last week saw a miracle in the form of the leaders of two formerly warring and still antagonistic Northern tribes, the Rev Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams, sitting down together and pledging to work jointly for the peace and betterment of Northern Ireland.
This Friday a much smaller ceremony to mark the end of the conflict will take place when the congregation of the Dublin Unitarian Church in St Stephen's Green reads out the names of the more than 3,500 people who have died as a result of the war there.
To anyone's knowledge this annual act of commemoration on Good Friday, now in its seventh year, is the only religious service of its kind in Ireland. From midday until mid-afternoon, members of that church will solemnly read out the names of the dead. At noon they will start with Anthony Abbott, a soldier from Manchester shot dead by the IRA in Ardoyne, north Belfast in 1976, and at around three they will finish with William and Letitia Younger, an elderly Protestant man and his daughter, who were beaten, stabbed and shot by intruders in their home a mile further north in Ligoniel in 1980.
Chronologically, the sad litany will start with John Patrick Scullion, the first victim of the Troubles, a Catholic storeman shot by the UVF in June 1966 as he walked back to the house in the Falls Road area he shared with his blind father.
The most recent victims, more than 40 years later, were Edward Burns and Joey Jones, killed in Belfast last month in what was believed to be a feud between dissident republicans.
This reading of the names illustrates the terrible, random nature of death in war and civil conflict. All human life and death is on this mournful list: British soldiers; IRA volunteers; loyalist paramilitaries; Ulster policemen and women; gardaí; part-time UDR men; prison officers; civil rights marchers; judges; businessmen; farmers; taxi drivers; social workers; children; people killed walking home from the pub; people killed while watching football on TV; people killed in church; people killed on trains; people killed shopping in London, Dublin, Belfast, Monaghan and Omagh - one could go on.
The names of all these "lost lives" are read out simply and starkly, most of them taken from the splendid book of that name by Northern Ireland's most distinguished journalist David McKittrick and four colleagues, a book Kevin Myers described as "the greatest piece of scholarship in journalism or historical studies that has ever been conducted in this country". Tony Blair read it and said "the same feelings come back again and again - pity, anger, despair, but perhaps most of all the powerful conviction that there has to be a better future than this."
The idea for this ceremony came from Chris Hudson, a member of the Dublin congregation, who was a prominent trade unionist and Peace Train activist before he studied for the ministry. He is now the Minister of a Non-Subscribing Presbyterian Church - Dublin Unitarianism's sister church in the North - near Queen's University Belfast.
It is perhaps no coincidence that the Dublin Unitarians, as a small liberal congregation with roots in the dissenting and nonconformist traditions of 18th-century Presbyterianism, should have been the ones to hold this service. Unitarianism's core value of tolerance allows it to embrace all political viewpoints.
So if you are in the city with time to spare on Good Friday, drop into the Unitarian Church beside the Royal College of Surgeons between midday and 3pm. It's just people reading names, and others listening. But it's a way of reminding ourselves that war is the ultimate destroyer of harmony, happiness and human lives, and that we should never, ever let it curse this land again.
Andy Pollak, a member of the Dublin Unitarian Church, directs the Centre for Cross Border Studies in Armagh and Dublin.