The Ne Temere ruling came into force on Easter Sunday, 1908. It meant that the Catholic Church would not recognise a marriage between a Protestant and a Catholic unless the marriage took place in a Catholic church. Also, the children must be brought up as Catholics.

A few weeks after the Ne Temere ruling, a Belfast couple - Alexander McCann and Agnes Barclay - married in a Protestant church. Alexander was Catholic and Agnes Protestant.

A couple of years later, in 1910, a priest visited their home and informed Agnes that, under the Ne Temere ruling, the couple had never been properly married and she was living in open sin.

Alexander McCann is said to have insisted his wife be married over again. Agnes is said to have resolutely refused to conform to this idea and - according to the Minister at Agnes' local church, the Reverend William Corkey of Townsend Street Presbyterian – Alexander started to ‘ill treat’ her.

It is reported that one time, when Agnes was out of the house for a short while, her husband carried off her two children, the youngest of which was only two months old. Agnes lived on in the house with her husband for three days and was almost distracted at the loss of her little ones.

One day she went out to search for them, and when she came back to her home all the furniture had been removed and the house was bare.

Reverend William Corkey wrote: "The poor mother is now walking the streets of Belfast in destitution seeking for her poor babies. The priest thinks she is not able to take charge of her children and looks on her as a loose character because she only had a Presbyterian marriage."

The case was seen by many Protestants as proof positive that Home Rule would be Rome Rule. They deeply resented the interference of the Catholic Church in this marriage and started to hold huge protest meetings. At one special meeting of the Belfast Presbytery a Reverend Dr Irwin declared: "Ought we not to ask ourselves if the spirit and methods of Rome are much different in Belfast and Ireland today to what they were 200 years ago? The claim of that Church always has been to control the individual, the home, the school, the nation."

In this programme, Barbara Collins reports on a service of reconciliation at Townsend Street Presbyterian Church in Belfast, attended by Protestant and Catholic clergy, and by members of the Northern Ireland Mixed Marriage Association. She investigates how the break up of a marriage 100 years ago caused such division between the churches and in the country and she speaks to the historian Eamon Phoenix, to members of the clergy and to couples from the Northern Ireland Mixed Marriage Association.

Barbara asks what happened to the unfortunate McCanns and their small children, all caught in the eye of this political storm but forgotten soon afterwards.

Barbara says: "Before I started to make this documentary, I had never even heard of Ne Temere. I was transfixed by the tragedy of the young Agnes McCann, a mother whose two babies were brutally taken from her as a direct result of the decree. She ended up being a cause celeb for the anti-Home Rule movement but she herself was never a political figure. The tragedy for her that she was never to see her children again."