The report by the Irish Peace and Reconciliation Platform, which will not be published until next month, was leaked to the Observer newspaper and seen by The Irish Times. The platform is made up of 16 Southern-based peace and reconciliation groups including Co-operation Ireland, the Glencree Centre for Reconciliation in Wicklow and the Peace Train Organisation. Among those who helped with the paper were Mr Chris Hudson, the Irish Government envoy who opened talks with loyalists in the early 1990s, and the former education minister, Ms Niamh Breathnach.

The report lists obstacles in the Republic to a lasting peace. Since 1922, it says, there has been "little attempt to address the fears and apprehensions of unionists in the context of possible new political dispensations". It adds that anti-British attitudes have helped "restrict the creation of trust-building with the unionist community" in Northern Ireland. It says there has been "a fostering of selective cultural and historical amnesia", which led to the "airbrushing" out of history those "Irish people who fought on the British side in the World Wars, and a mistaken belief that only Catholics suffered in the 19th-century famines."

"Rigidly nationalist and majority-religion mindsets have prevailed since the State's inception", the report claims. "Non-Catholic interests and culture have been excluded" by the State's support for the majority religion's role in education and medicine. Even in the wake of the Belfast Agreement, the report says, there has been a failure among State institutions "to tackle the obstacles to peace-building and reconciliation in any serious way. In wider society, it says, "there has been a pervasive readiness to scapegoat Northern Ireland and its people and to hold them responsible for their own misfortune. "The media have, in general, underemphasised the integrity of the unionist position and have portrayed the people of that tradition in selective and oversimplified terms," it adds.

© Reform Movement 2003