ABSTRACT
Given that there are, as in every community, different identities, and particularly since at least some of these distinctions have, in Northern Ireland, been pushed to the point of division, it is necessary to create common institutions and instruments of government in which all can participate and with which all can identify. We take the view that an elected assembly, with legislative as well as executive functions in an extensive range of areas (giving significant socio-economic autonomy), including relationships with the Republic of Ireland is the minimum necessary to provide this unifying factor. It would be Profoundly [sic] counter-productive if in the construction of such structures the very divisions which they were established to heal were institutionalised by the forms of protection they used. For this reason setting out two separate sets of mirroring rights, with parity of esteem between only two traditions, and insisting on always dividing people into Protestant and Catholic, and unionist and nationalist (and assuming also that these divisions are contiguous), would not be a healing of the divisions but an institutionalising of them. Instead we should recognise one set of rights that applies to everyone, one community with a number of rich, overlapping strands of culture and tradition, and recognition of an inclusive pluralism of religious and political thought and adherence which does not marginalise the partners and children of mixed marriages, the values of integrated education, and interdenominational religious activities, and political liberals who do not espouse nationalism of one kind or another. Everyone must be able to be confident of equality of treatment.
