Hugh Thomas is a member of The National Secular Society.

Hugh,

over the last few days the British people have been watching on their television screens brainwashed victims of priestcraft spitting at terrified little five year old girls going to school for the first time in Northern Ireland. This is having more impact than a religious fanatic leaving a bomb in a crowded pub or street. It is suddenly beginning to dawn on people, in a country where the Church and state are still established, that a "sectarian" killing is in fact media code for a religious killing.

When the Anglo-Catholic scientist, Prof. Stephen Hawking, went to the Vatican, the Pope said to him:

"I don't care what you do in science just as long as you never encroach on my subject - life after death."

At the moment the Secular Society is allied to the Roman and Anglo Catholic Churches in fighting to keep the secular scientific case for survival after death from even being presented to the public for them to accept or reject as the case may be. You have chosen strange bedfellows.

Michael Roll

Back to school, but shadow of terror remains behind the smiles - an article by Rosie Cowan, published in The Guardian (Wednesday September 4, 2002)

Extract:

Thankfully, this week's return to classes at Holy Cross Catholic primary school in north Belfast's Ardoyne was a lot quieter than the scenes shown around the world last autumn. There is no sign of any resumption of the loyalist protest, over republican attacks on the Glenbryn enclave, but the tension is still there and the memories vivid. For Niamh, her nine-year-old sister, Leona, and many of the other 200 girls at Holy Cross, the bogeymen have not gone away.

Father Aidan Troy, chairman of the board of governors, who walked with the girls and their parents to school through a protective gauntlet of police and soldiers during the protest, welcomed the return to relative normality, as did the Holy Cross principal, Anne Tanney.