Mary McAleese: Good Friday and the future of peace in Northern Ireland
(Vatican Radio) “The Good Friday agreement never was a promise that the fighting was
over; it was a promise that the two sides involved would come together and work together
to try to end the fighting," says Mary McAleese, President of the Republic of Ireland
from 1997 to 2011. McAleese was guest speaker Friday evening in the last in a series
of public lectures organised by the Pontifical Gregorian University, titled: "A spirituality
for dialogue and reconciliation".
The former President is a native of Belfast
and is the first person born in Northern Ireland to have been Head of State in the
Republic. As a Catholic, a law graduate, journalist, law professor and later President,
she has been closely involved in cross community peace building, which she describes
as an ongoing process of dialogue powered by “the greatest commandant: to love one
another”.
“It’s easy to love your friends; the challenge is to seek out those
people who won’t talk to you. That’s where you start. We are neighbours, living cheek-by-jowl;
no-one’s going anywhere”.
The political deal known as the Good Friday Agreement
which aimed to form the lasting settlement following the 1994 paramilitary ceasefires
in Northern Ireland, was signed on 10 April 1998, one year after McAleese assumed
office.
“The parties who signed the Good Friday agreement knew when signing
it that peace was not going to come the next day,” she says. “They had a vested interest
in it and it was an expression of their desire for peace. But they also knew that
you cannot turn your back on 900 years of received history and bitterness and division
and mountains of accumulated hurt. It takes time. That’s why it was always called
a process”.
In fact, if bringing Northern Ireland’s nationalist and unionist
factions to the negotiating table was a long and difficult journey, the implementation
of its details has, at times, been even more gruelling. The agreement established
a Northern Ireland assembly with a power-sharing executive, and new cross-border institutions
involving the Irish Republic and the UK. But other proposals, such as the decommissioning
of paramilitary weapons, the future of policing in Northern Ireland, and the early
release of paramilitary prisoners have met with greater resistance. And at times embedded
tensions have boiled over. This was seen in the recent rioting in Belfast against
the council's decision to restrict the flying of the Union flag over Belfast City
Hall.
“Flags and emblems are very neuralgic; the agreement gave a way of being
able to honour the commitment to accepting that the flag of Northern Ireland for the
time being – until the people of Northern Ireland decide otherwise – is the Union
Jack [The Union Flag of UK – ed] . But also to give people the right to create a
society where everybody feels comfortable. So I can understand when they change the
pattern of usage from 365 days a year to 17 it can give people pause of thought.
Tragically I think, those who are rioting are very much the people who were never
brought on board on the Good Friday agreement; they were probably always anti-the
Good Friday agreement. Others who opposed the flags decision expressed their opposition
in a democratic way”.
Many of those involved in the recent riots were young
people, she notes, a “new generation who really do not know the cost of violence”.
So is the passing on of a historic memory of the ‘Troubles’ to younger generations
important in the peace building process?
“There is a real dilemma here, because
in the past, both sides handed on that baton of historic memory in order to hand on
the hatred; it was the conduit for the toxin of sectarianism, of political hatreds
as both sides gave their children and their children’s children, their own edited
version of history. So we have to be careful about how we hand history on and why
we hand it on. There’s a big difference in handing on the historic memory of, for
example, the Shoah in order that Europe never ever descends again into that madness,
that extraordinary evil. And similarly in Northern Ireland, I think it’s importance
that we hand on the memory of suffering: what price was paid for the Good Friday Agreement,
why the need for compromise, why was it so important. When I think back to all my
years involved in peace building, I never ever was without the memory of my friends
who died. There is a generation now who don’t know what it was like to live with bombs
and bullets and the army presence on the roads, the abnormality of all that…So I think
we all have to put our heads together to see what we can do to try to calm the waters
and see that these young people – there are manifest elements of string sectarianism
here – but we obviously have work to do here now. I’m thinking here of the Protestant
paramilitaries who are under enormous pressure at the moment. And I think they are
key to any solution because they know who these young people are and have a link to
them that other people don’t have so we are relying on them to do the talking and
persuading to get the young people off the streets and into some more meaningful way
of living”.
Listen to Emer McCarthy’s extended interview with Mary McAleese
in which the former President shares her personal experiences of peace building and
her hopes for the future of her native land: Listen