Exiles home

as one of our Prayers of Thanksgiving puts it.  And, as clergy have done from time immemorial, we survive Holy Week, roll the stone away, declare the Resurrection – and go for a week’s holiday.  So it’s Belfast tomorrow and Donegal on Tuesday.  Nothing much changes in Ireland.  Ian Paisley continues to maintain opposition to political progress.  I can allow him his point of view – but not the intemperate, door-slamming language in which he expresses it.  And in Dublin, they have been marking the 90th Anniversary of the 1916 Rising – with a strange mixture of pride and embarrassment.