Paving the Path to Peace

PART I
Paving the Paths: General Introduction

Civil society’s influence on Northern Ireland is significant, though it is not an area without enormous contemporary challenges.¹ Observers have argued that the period of direct rule, after the Stormont parliament was prorogued in March 1972, led to a vibrant scene whereby civil society groups – the churches, trade unions, and community organisations, broadly constituted in a ‘third sector’ – learned to bypass local politicians and lobby both British and Irish governments directly.² Recent years and anniversaries of the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement have also highlighted the accord’s Civic Forum, which promised to bring together civil society elements and might have played a role had it been championed more in the political sphere.³ It is not surprising that the focus of commemoration of the recent twenty-fifth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement was concentrated on the elite level of inter-governmental and inter-party negotiation. This emphasis on the ‘high politics’, what Paul Dixon calls the ‘choreography’ of the peace process,⁴ is understandable, given that it was paramilitary groups, political parties, and governments which drove both the conflict itself and the post-ceasefire efforts to consolidate peace. However, this book is predicated on the belief that these elite actors were not exclusively responsible for the dynamics of conflict and peace in Northern Ireland. Indeed, there is another very significant dimension to this story which has largely been overlooked in the historical narrative of the process: the role played by civil society groups which sought to mobilise for peace and reconciliation in the late-1980s and early-1990s.

This volume grows out of a research project devoted to the civil society input into the movement for peace in Northern Ireland, especially as it dovetailed with the embryonic peace process.⁵ It provides a concentrated analysis of a largely-overlooked movement, the Peace Train Organisation, which ran seven trains between Dublin and Belfast from 1989 to 1995, and received support from a broad range of civil society: trade unions, churches, business communities, the media and arts organisations, as well as political figures from parties across both jurisdictions in Ireland, as well as in Britain. We seek to redress the balance in the historiography and popular perception of this critical period before 1998, arguing that, while it is often hard to quantify the impact of the pressure ‘from below’, civil society groups did operate as active advocates for peace, helping to shift the social and political climate surrounding the conflict.

The Peace Train Organisation (PTO) was particularly distinctive, perhaps even original, as a genuinely transnational and cross-communal venture. It operated not just in Dublin and Belfast, but also ‘East-West’ in Britain (in the form of a London Committee, and a one-off special train that ran from Holyhead to London in July 1991). The editors of this book conducted twenty-one in-depth semi-structured interviews with key protagonists, organisers, and supporters of the PTO between February 2021 and July 2023. Interviewees were drawn from all the main committees formed under the auspices of the PTO in Belfast, Dublin, and London. These individuals were engaged with a broad range of political parties in Ireland (north and south), as well as in trade unions, peace activism, and other civil society organisations. Many have subsequently played significant – and ongoing – roles in the political life of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, sometimes as elected politicians, but more often as community activists.

On 30 March 2023, the editors held a Witness Seminar at the Belfast headquarters of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, involving forty-five participants. This brought together for a day of reflection many of the key surviving figures who had been engaged in the PTO.⁶ This was followed by a broader conference, entitled Paving the Path to Peace: Civil Society and the Northern Ireland Peace Process, held at the MAC Theatre, Belfast on April 26 of the same year, attended by community figures across civil society, as well as – somewhat uniquely – members of the Irish Secretariat and the Northern Ireland Office. A wide range of panels featured trade unionists, peace activists from the churches, supporters of the women’s movement, local community development organisers, alongside university researchers and representatives of the political/governmental sector. In composing the event we followed just one proviso: mixing the panels. Rather than demarcating categories (e.g. trade unions), we combined the speakers and sectors. Such a combination, we maintain, reflects the combined power of civil society itself.⁷ Accordingly, following this introductory chapter, the second part of this book takes the form of an extended chapter by the editors on the Peace Train movement: its history, tensions, shortcomings, impact, and the questions it raises. Our focus on the PTO links to other civil society/peace initiatives discussed by different participants and authors in Part III of this book. The fifteen chapters constituting this third part are based on the conference contributions of civil society participants themselves. In addition, two contributors (Paul Burgess and Simon Lee) were engaged to write about their involvement in and reflections on the Opsahl Commission/Initiative 92.

There is engagement in all parts of this book with other civil society efforts to break the logjam of sectarian politics in the late-1980s and early-1990s. Such civil society peace work precedes the official accords and declarations of political parties and governments in 1985, 1993, and 1998. The overarching argument of this volume is that the peace process should be interpreted and researched as a ‘bottom-up’ grassroots phenomenon, at least as much as a ‘top down’ process controlled and shaped exclusively by political elites. Though there are many nuanced dimensions to the broad range of voices captured in Part III of this book, there is a degree of consensus that historians of the Northern Ireland peace process need to move beyond the truncated perspective that peace was achieved rather suddenly and mainly through the private machinations of political and paramilitary elites. For this reason, our approach should be seen as expanding the existing historiographical focus, rather than undercutting it. Civil society complements the ‘high politics’ picture of Prime Ministers, Taoisigh, and US Presidents who swept in to get the political agreements over the line. We do not deny the clear importance of the negotiations which delivered the Republican and Loyalist paramilitary ceasefires in 1994 (renewed by the Provisional IRA in July 1997, after the ending of its ceasefire in February 1996). Similarly, it would be unconvincing to argue that inter-party negotiations which led to the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement in April 1998 were not fundamental in this history. There is, finally, considerable crossover between the worlds of politics and civil society, with individuals who were – or became – politically prominent. In their chapters for this book, Avila Kilmurray (1952–) and Bronagh Hinds (1951–) discuss their involvement in the women’s movement, trade unionism, and party politics, the latter through the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (NIWC).

Above all this book maintains that peace is made – and made to stick – by adherents and organisations of civil society working on the ground, on the interfaces (literally), in the workplaces, the congregations, the streets. Much of the preparatory ‘ground-clearing’ work and the creation of an intellectual climate favourable towards the peace process was put in place over many years, emerging slowly from the tireless (often unpaid and usually thankless) efforts of a host of social movements, some of which are discussed here alongside the PTO. This is then, in part at least, a work of historical recuperation, helping to rebalance the prevailing narratives and explanations of Northern Ireland’s peace. The methodological difficulties of assessing the effectiveness (or otherwise) of peace activism were clearly recognised in a useful scholarly study of the voluntary and community sector in Northern Ireland. Feargal Cochrane and Seamus Dunn argue that any attempt to measure ‘peace by the yard’ will be an inadequate method for gauging the impact of this kind of activism. They further point out that ‘Much of the most useful and potent activity in this field … is conducted invisibly’, away from the microphones and cameras.⁸ Its value is only likely to become apparent when considered over a long timespan. It is, subsequently, hard to quantify the impact of a group like the PTO. Our in-depth engagement with the work of this microcosm of peace activism can only furnish an ‘impressionistic’ answer to the conundrum: how should we judge the role of these civil society initiatives in paving the path to peace? In some ways, the quantification is impossible in the sense that peace movements are measured in the lives saved, not taken. The lives the PTO and other civil society organisations preserved cannot be counted like the dead of the Troubles, recorded in the magisterial tome Lost Lives.⁹ We do, however, know that lives were saved by such peacemaking groups.

In a more general sense, while there may have been little traceable outcome, and there may not have been structural or fundamental changes in the political and social environment due to such activism, it has convincingly been argued that such groups kept the flickering candles of peace burning during depressing levels of violence. In this sense such groups had ‘an incremental effect in popularizing the idea of peace and disseminating its language’,¹⁰ galvanising others. We would supplement this with the firm conviction that there are significant contemporary lessons which can – and should – be drawn from the experiences of these civil society initiatives. These will, we anticipate, be useful for a clear-eyed understanding of the nature of the violent conflict which blighted life in Northern Ireland. Equally, there are deep divisions which continue to destabilise society and polity today. Insofar as many of the peace and conflict resolution organisations analysed here were also motivated and organised on a non-sectarian (or, in truth, an anti-sectarian) political basis, their historical experiences remain of direct contemporary relevance. Northern Ireland remains a society where thoroughgoing anti-sectarian attitudes and political engagements still need to be articulated and fought for.

As editors of this book, we found intriguing echoes of some of the problems faced by civil society during the Troubles and beyond.¹¹ The traditional media seemed reluctant to cover the work of civil society in their print media and televisual coverage, both contemporaneously – in the early-1990s – and during the recent twenty-fifth anniversary commemorative events on the Good Friday Agreement. Aside from following a general ‘If it bleeds, it leads’ line, journalists in Northern Ireland see civil society as frivolous, immaterial, and one-sided (in terms of its focus on anti-paramilitary violence).¹² Journalists resolutely stayed away, almost ideologically, from the events we organised as part of this project in 2023. We overcame this by creating our own media coverage, either in the form of articles, or by engaging local journalists to record our events.¹³ It is also worth pointing out that some of the most telling criticisms of civil society from scholarly quarters correlated with times when the political process in Northern Ireland seemed promising and at least partially functioning. Civil society was apparently minor at this moment (1998–2000, 2007–17)¹⁴ because the politicians were ‘getting on with business’. Academic supporters of the consociational power-sharing system accordingly rejected the import of civil society, seeing it as historically unreflective of Northern Ireland’s bifurcated society and overtaken by the severity of political divisions (to cap this reading, the Orange Order is ludicrously described as the largest civil society group).¹⁵ The Northern Ireland Assembly’s periods of impasse and total collapse (2002–7, 2017–20, 2022–4), always emblematic of a dysfunctional political design, should lead to a revisiting of these assumptions.

One of the main criticisms of civil society from an Irish Republican perspective is that it appears firmly entwined with British officialdom.¹⁶ Adrian Guelke makes the intriguing comparative point that the African National Congress (ANC) in South Africa considered civil society to be an important arm in the anti-Apartheid struggle, encouraging pressure from the trade unions and churches against Apartheid. In Northern Ireland, by contrast, the Republican movement viewed civil society as the untrustworthy preserve of the British state.¹⁷ This has also been seconded by academic readings of the conflict, with the suggestion that the British state funds – and then aggrandises in importance – civil society, so as to circumnavigate the political realities of voters in Northern Ireland increasingly supporting ‘extremist’ parties: namely Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party.¹⁸ There is evidence, based on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement anniversary, that the Irish state has, in fact, become more involved in promoting civil society efforts (our own project was one small element in this). By contrast, British political actors appear to have gradually withdrawn from Northern Ireland, especially since 1998. There is no question that ground has shifted, and our understanding of civil society should also move accordingly. Recent research has emphasised the role of civil society in both Catholic and Protestant communities accommodating people in distress during the forced population movements of the early-Troubles, the late-1960s and early-1970s. Far from civil society being an artificial British construct, its communal ethos, action-instinct, and promotion of self-reliance represents a grass-roots counterweight to the centralised power of the state.¹⁹

Of course, civil society’s everyday work perseveres on the ground and in communities. Fr Martin Magill, in his contribution to this book, outlines his ongoing work with the campaign group Stop Attacks, attempting to prevent paramilitary organisations from inflicting severe injuries on young people, often children, who are accused of anti-social or other behaviour which has incurred the wrath of local paramilitary groups. Magill is emblematic of certain priests and church figures who have played roles in prominent peace movements, either on individual terms or as part of organisations. Bishop Edward Daly noted that his first ‘hands on’ work defusing flashpoints occurred in the late-1960s in Derry city and the Bogside when the Catholic Church and its premises was approached to ‘restore order’.²⁰ Magill follows in a similar vein. Aside from his association with Stop Attacks, he is often to be found on the streets at times of trouble, talking to young people and trying to prevent aggravation. His contribution to this book highlights Stop Attacks, but also represents a more general call to action for the churches. Especially on the Protestant side, such institutions are often viewed as having left working-class communities behind, following a prolonged retreat to the garden centres and golf courses. The inconsistency of church voices is compounded by stereotypes of standoffishness.²¹ The participants and authors who contribute to the third part of this book cover the peace centres of Corrymeela and Glencree (Emily Stanton and Pat Hynes), as well as their own religious journeys (Lesley Carroll and Mary Montague). All complicate this narrative and suggest that the churches historically and presently are involved in hard conversations and a fair degree of reconciliatory heavy-lifting.