Church of Ireland Synod: Nationalists in the North had to recognise that they had "moved out of second-class citizenship for good", while unionists should recognise that their constitutional position was "secure for as long as they wished it to be so" and they should "stop leaning on that issue to the denial of social justice or community fairness for others", the Church of Ireland Primate, Archbishop Robin Eames, has said.
Nationalists had to "avoid remaining a community which carries resentment because of inequality or oppression" and unionists had to rid themselves of the "evils of inherited sectarianism" towards their Catholic neighbours. "Those who propagate such attitudes must become 'yesterday's Protestants'," he said.
Archbishop Eames, who retires at the end of December, was delivering his last presidential address to the Armagh Diocesan Synod at the Synod Hall in Armagh yesterday.
"Northern Ireland must move on. The prize we have endured so much to achieve deserves nothing less," he told delegates.
Nationalists had to be reassured of their future as equal citizens with equal opportunities to prosper in the land of their birth. "They must be a part of the 'shared future' for us all," he said.
Unionists deserved the assurance that the "balance of equality once so weighted against the Catholic community will not be redressed by swinging so much the other way that we replace one community of resentment with yet another", he said. He believed, despite the obstacles, that there was now an unstoppable wave of genuine progress towards a stable and just society. "We all must be a part of that wave," he asserted.
However, sectarianism remained "alive and well in Northern Ireland". There was "still much evidence that a person stands condemned in the view of others simply because he or she is a Protestant or a Roman Catholic . . .
"A person is judged and condemned because of the accident of birth. As long as this remains a corrosive ingredient of life here, we will remain prisoners of our past as the world moves on," he said.
A new dimension to this problem was that racially-motivated attacks on other ethnic groups or individuals seemed to be an almost daily occurrence in the North, he said.
It was his belief that "deep down in the consciousness of this society there is an antagonism towards anyone who is 'different'."
He made a plea for society to "confront sectarianism at every level, confront sectarian attitudes whenever or however we meet them, refuse to maintain sectarian attitudes or actions and let us together not only make them things of the past, but make sectarianism socially unacceptable for good".
