MICHEÁL Martin and the Alliance Party have parted company – and all because of reconciliation.

It has been a bad few weeks for the reconcilers.

Drumcree and other events have seen our politicians at each other’s throats and the commentators and the scribes have taken once again to describing the fragility of our peace settlement.

Not that I have ever had a grá for the reconciliation word. I never thought it did what it said on the tin.

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It was a Presbyterian minister who once said to me that reconciliation was a Catholic word. And theologically, he is right.

It grows out of the process of sacramental confessions, penance and forgiveness. And Protestants were never particularly attracted to that process for the shriving of sin.

My main difficulty is that the word and the process often gets substituted for politics, as if they are the same, when they are not.

Possibly the interconnection arose from the South African........

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