Often the strangers on the edge are the only people who can see the future as well as the past

The once dilettante scion of a Scottish business family tells Paul Williams of the revolution that God brought to his life.

Irish nun and social worker Sister Stanislaus Kennedy believes that spiritual discipline and practical caring can enhance each other, writes Kenneth Noble.

Mary McAleese, President of Ireland, has long been dedicated to justice, dignity and equality for all in a divided society, writes Peter Hannon.

Faustina Starrett is Coordinator of Media Programmes at the North West Institute of Further and Higher Education in Derry, Northern Ireland.

Troubled by the Irish question, English doctor John Lester feels the need for a clinical examination of his own attitudes:

In the 1960s and 70s Bill Taylor, otherwise known as 'Burglar Bill', was one of the principal trade union convenors of the huge Austin car plant in Birmingham, where 28,000 people worked. In 1974 the IRA bombed two pubs in the city centre.

Gordon Wilson and his daughter Marie, a 20-year-old nurse, were buried under six feet of rubble when the IRA bombed a Remembrance Day gathering in the Northern Irish town of Enniskillen in 1987. Marie was one of 11 who died in the blast.

For many years, although some of my closest friends in Ireland were Catholics, in my inmost feelings I felt superior to them - intellectually, socially and in terms of religion.

Derry's city walls loomed over the Bogside. Some wanted to destroy those symbols of 350 years of oppression, but Paddy felt they could be seen, not as a noose, but as a necklace, enclosing `a learning cell for something new'.