wfn.org | Bomb scare delays slows down travels of a pastor from Northern

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Note #6703 from PCUSA NEWS to PRESBYNEWS:

Ireland to Louisville
15-June-2001
GA01144

Bomb scare delays slows down travels of a pastor from Northern Ireland to
Louisville

by Alexa Smith

LOUISVILLE, June 15 - The Rev. Robert Herron's trip to Louisville was held
up for six hours by a bomb scare.

	Police were searching for a bomb on the train tracks between Portadown, a
volatile loyalist stronghold, and Newry, a town that sits on the border
between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

	Herron was on his way to Dublin by train, as one of the ecumenical
representatives to the 213th General Assembly from the Presbyterian Church
in Ireland.

	Of course, the radical fringe called in the threat.  Most likely, it was
republican dissidents, breakaway members of the Irish Republican Army, that
sent a message, just days before national elections, that they're still
there, capable of blowing up a train of civilians, or, picking off a British
soldier sent to dismantle a bomb.

	In the subsequent days, the elections demonstrated that clearly, that the
fringe on both sides of what the Irish euphemistically call "the troubles,"
gained ground.

 Sinn Fein, the political arm of the IRA, or the republican paramilitary, is
now the largest nationalist party, albeit marginally.  And the Democratic
Unionist Party, led by the Rev. Ian Paisley, is just marginally behind the
moderate party that has been the prime negotiator in an up-and-down peace
process.

	The reason?  Frustration, Herron says.  "A bumpy, rocky road this has
been," he said, sitting in the Starbucks coffeeshop in the Kentucky
International Convention Center.

	Nationalists say unionists aren't compromising enough; unionists say their
leadership has gone too far, at least until the IRA agrees to decommission
guns.  And, in the meantime, churches in Northern Ireland have created one
the most sophisticated ecumenical structures in the world so that Christians
on all sides of the political divide can keeping talking to one another, at
least on the national-level.

	"But it is different at the local level," said Herron, who has served a
congregation in Omagh, where, nearly four years ago, a bomb blast killed 29
adults and wounded or maimed hundreds more.  "After 30 years of violence, we
have a society which is segregated … and there is a lack of trust between
those communities.

	"That's because either side can be perceived as harboring those who've been
involved in despicable deeds," said Herron, who has been deeply involved in
inter-church dialogue.  "In each community, there are very real victims of
'the troubles.'"

	Such hesitation doesn't mean nothing is happening.  In Omagh, for instance,
there is an inter-church youth football league, where kids on either side of
a painful political divide get to know one another. Plenty of Presbyterian
parishes are part of what are called cross-community groups, where
church-goers do just that, go into parts of towns where they are politically
unwelcome and meet with other Christians.

	Herron observed that ecumenism in Northern Ireland is just the opposite of
here, where local work seems to be ahead of national conversations.

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