"OFFICIAL amnesia" in which "official Ireland" forgets events which do not suit the image it wants to project has been criticised by Cardinal Cahal Daly.
He was preaching at a Mass in the Irish College in Rome to mark the 150th anniversary of the death of Daniel O'Connell.
O'Connell "seems to have been effectively wiped off the screen of the memory of `public and official Ireland'", he said. "He seems to be one of today's many victims of official amnesia, whereby whole periods and events of national history are deleted from the record because they do not fit the secular image which `public and official Ireland' seeks to give to itself and to project to the world at this time.
"O'Connell himself did not see his struggle for civil and political rights for Catholics in sectarian terms. He saw Irish Protestants as potential allies rather than as enemies. It was not for sectarian reasons or for any motive of Catholic triumphalism that he desired the abolition of the Union.
"Together with his non sectarianism, O'Connell's greatest message to the contemporary situation in Ireland seems to me to be his consistent rejection of violence as a way to justice."