PRESIDENT MARY McAleese has praised a cross-community “outreach” project on an interface between the Shankill and Falls Roads in west Belfast.
Referring to her first official visit to the Shankill area as “a wonderful experience”, Mrs McAleese said she was “delighted to be home” in her native city.
The Open Hands outreach initiative is to be housed in the former St Luke’s Church of Ireland church a few metres from what was the barricade between the Falls and lower Shankill areas.
Mrs McAleese said she “walked along this road many times” and she praised the initiative, hoping it would help “bring [the area] back to life”.
The project would enable people from both communities to “enjoy each other’s company”.
The outreach scheme is backed by the Rev Edith Quirey, the current local minister.
The President later delivered the annual lecture at the Children’s Law Centre at the offices of the Belfast Harbour Commissioners.
Speaking on the theme of Children’s Rights – A Foundation For Peace, Mrs McAleese told her audience of the progress being made at community level since the Belfast Agreement.
“Men and women of diametrically opposing political ambitions work collegially together in government and other organs of the Good Friday and St Andrews agreements,” she said.
“They debate, negotiate and compromise in order to overcome the natural differences between them.”
She added: “We know it is a process and dismantling the architecture of sectarian attitudes is an important element of the proper development of that process. These things require changes in behaviour and thinking. And the evidence is in that such changes are possible with effort.”
The speech delivered to the Children’s Law Centre, a charity founded on the principles of the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, was her final engagement in a day of appointments in the greater Belfast area.
She did not refer directly to the Roscommon abuse case, but she did say: “Every so often a dreadful case reveals to us a realm of failure and of progress still to be made and importantly a realm of suffering still being endured by children.”