COMMENT Comfort and good news have been plentiful from Northern Ireland this past week – good, that is, once the shock of the murderous incidents had sunk in. The first and deputy first ministers – Peter Robinson of the Democratic Unionists and Martin McGuinness of Sinn Féin – have worked together to express outrage at the shooting of two British soldiers and a policeman by two dissident republican groups, if in differing registers. No threat of revenge has come from loyalist paramilitaries. Most momentous: Ian Paisley, Presbyterian fundamentalist, scourge of papists, commended a sermon by a Catholic priest.
This is not little. Rather, it is the sign of people not yet at peace with themselves but firmly, even desperately, attached to peace.
