Northern Ireland's social development minister, David Hanson, has recently unveiled what he describes as 'The Maze Masterplan' for the 360 acre site which once housed the infamous prison where many of the north's paramilitaries were housed and where ten republicans died on hunger-strike.

Mr Hanson's plan involves an international centre for conflict resolution, a hotel, business park and integrated housing, as well as the most architecturally ambitious feature - a 42,000 seat stadium to stage soccer, rugby and Gaelic games. The British government will put £85 million aside for the project if another £300 million can be found from private sources.

The concept of a conflict transformation centre will make for the greatest difficulty insomuch as the 'centre parties' in Northern Ireland will be reluctant to endorse commemoration of paramilitarism - and in particular of Bobby Sands and his fellow hunger-strikers. However there is real value in creating a physical space that people can visit and which contains exhibits and archives of the 'Troubles years'. In this regard, Northern Ireland has much to learn from the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, in which those charged with the task ensured that the end-product would not just be a quasi-legal document, containing the proceedings of the hearings, but also a public collection of photos, testimonies and artefacts which might stand as a moving and evocative testimony to the terrible years of the state's war with the Maoist guerrillas known as 'The Shining Path'.

However, there is something bizarre about creating a sports venue on what was once Northern Ireland's political epicentre. The erection of a stadium as a 'testimony' to the end of the 'Troubles' is surely inappropriate. The ritualised combat and partisan euphoria of mass-entertainment is scarcely a sober or thoughtful commemorative response to a geographical space that was home to so much desperation, loss and strife. At best, we would be in danger of creating an edifice that unwittingly reworks an old maxim - that sport is a continuation of politics by other means.

David Hanson would do well to read the autobiographical writings of the architect Daniel Lebeskind, the designer of such masterpieces as the Berlin Jewish Museum and the man appointed to rebuild in the space once occupied by New York's Twin Towers. For Lebeskind, the architecture that commemorates cultural trauma and reflects terrible absences must be carefully thought out. It must reflect - in the very building itself - the severances and disjunctions which are its theme. Thus, the Jewish Museum in Berlin has a huge, dark, ugly and empty fissure which passes through every storey of the building representing the bleak, violent and 'purposeless' fact of the holocaust within 20th century German culture.

Christians should note how, in a not incomparable way, for two millennia, the church has cherished the emblem of the cross. It sought to make visible in the cruciform iconography of the layout of its cathedrals, the grief, pain and humiliation of Christ himself which is at the heart of God's redemptive identification with a sinful and conflict-ridden world. Surely then, as Christ's followers in Ireland today, we should be particularly sensitive to the need to generate commemorative spaces and structures that offer a sensory enactment of the human pain which is their inspiration - rather than cathedrals to sport, which is, at its best, mere entertainment and diversion?

Philip Orr

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Date for your diary:
4th November, 2006 - Centre for Contemporary Christianity Annual Conference
From here to eternity - Christian Spirituality for a changing world
Guest Speaker: Dr Marva Dawn
Armagh City Hotel