Letter: Let the clergy help break Irish deadlock

YOUR leading article (29 November) was positive, constructive and refreshing. Continuing that approach, now might be the time for the Catholic clergy to play a positive role in getting decommissioning under way. In the years of the truce and subsequent civil war and after, clergy were sometimes involved in negotiations about a hand-over of the IRA arms.

If this were to happen now, the clergy might help with a hand-over of IRA arms to the government of the Irish Republic. This would avoid the sensitive issue of Republicans handing arms to the British. And it would not be a case of the Catholic Church interfering in politics: but rather of it helping an ailing process and furthering "peace on earth to men of goodwill". (Luke 2:14.)

FR JOHN BUCKLE

Southampton, Hants