Questioner: What are your feelings about the situation in Northern Ireland?
Huzoor (rh):The situation in Northern Ireland. Well, that situation is reminiscent of all the past differences on a religious basis, which have never been resolved because of political involvements intermingling with religious issues. Whenever the political and the religious issues intermingle, then the religious position always continues to harden, and it is never given a chance to be settled on the merit of the case itself. Religion is never discussed as such as far as the merits of respective positions in religion is concerned. The result is that the Catholics are Catholics, the Protestants are Protestants, and so on and so forth, and they feel they have a right to dictate politics on the basis of their religious belongings. Such issues are always insolvable, because religion has no territories like geographical territories. Religious territories out-spill geography and races and this and that, while political geography is very well defined and known. It’s just a futile exercise to mix these things. Somebody should stand up to them and say, look here, for God’s sake, settle the issue on either political ground or religious ground. Otherwise, nothing will happen, nothing. A solution which is forced after the warring parties are exhausted can be imposed, of course. I mean, that can bring a sort of peace. But things will keep boiling down or boiling up later on, and such issues remain always full of dangers. In the future, they sometimes work like buried bombshells. Right? Yes, thank you.
