The SSRC's GSC fellows, governing committee and program staff gathered in Belfast on September 2-7, 2001 for an annual conference. In order to benefit from unique local resources, the agenda included a session with local community activists who presented their work on the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process. The following is an edited transcript of this plenary session that was arranged on site by the participating GSC fellows.

Participants:

Barbara McCabe represented the Women's Coalition, one of the smaller political parties that took part in the peace talks and now has two representatives in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Ann Karr represented Community Dialogue, an organization that brings people from disparate groups together to discuss the ongoing peace process.

Martin McSnodden represented the Multi Agency Resource Center Ltd. that studies conflict-related trauma.

Session:

Barbara McCabe: The Women's Coalition is a small political party. It formed in 1996 around the time the British government was trying to establish some type of peace talks. The party came about because a number of women's organizations in Northern Ireland had for some time lobbied the existing political parties -- that were predominantly male -- to make sure women took part in the talks about the future of Northern Ireland. And there had been virtually no response. I think that there was an acknowledgment of receipt of the letter by one of the parties and that was it. So these women's organizations then went to the governments to say, well, what are you going to do to make sure women's voices are included in this process? The British government came back saying, well, we have this election system -- do you want to stand as a party? So these women's groups held a public meeting very quickly and posed a question to the women who showed up: Do you think this is what we should do? There was a very strong sense that those present should form a party in the absence of any other developments that included women.

So the Women's Coalition came about in April 1996 and it then stood in the elections of May 1996 that designated what political parties would take part in the peace process. The government had decided on an electoral system to pick ten parties to try to ensure that the key players were included in the peace process and to give legitimacy to that process. I don't think for a minute that the Women's Coalition was seen as one of the key players. We happened to benefit by the system and we got two people elected. That meant that we were able to take part in the talks. We went on to have our candidates elected to the Assembly.

There were two very broad aims of the Women's Coalition in its early days. The first was to address the issue of the lack of women visible in the other political parties and to try to challenge the other parties to do something about that. The second was to promote a certain kind of thinking, if you like, about what the peace process needed, what it had to involve.

That second aim of the Women's Coalition most interested me. I had been in many conversations with people talking about, oh, we'll have a talks' process but we'll not include those nasty people involved in violence. We'll just include the nice, respectable people who don't appear to be involved in violence. I wasn't a nasty person involved in violence but I thought that was a going-nowhere process. And it was very important for me that this group of women took the position that it had to be an inclusive process -- everybody involved in the conflict had to be involved in the peace process. And yes, that meant dealing with issues and dealing with people with whom you might feel uncomfortable. But that's what you had to do.

Barbara McCabe, Martin McSnodden, and Ann Karr

There is a difference between during the talks' process and after the talks' process. During the talks' process, the Women's Coalition and the other small parties were in a somewhat privileged position because we were able to exercise more influence than possible in some sort of normal democratic process. Now that we're out of the peace process, the smaller parties have all found it difficult to have their voices heard. To me, there has been a very stark distinction between what things were like during the peace process and what things became like after. And I suppose I also have a question about why on Good Friday, 1998, the peace process was finished, because to my mind that was how people saw it. We have an agreement, so that's the end of the peace process. Now we'll get on with democracy. The issue of implementing the agreement was never really a talking point during the talks and has never really become a talking point since then.
So one of the obstacles that the Women's Coalition faces nowadays is marginalization as a small party. I think one of the difficulties for all of the smaller parties is that we have created a permanent coalition government involving the four largest parties. And so effectively, it is a permanent government, which means that everybody outside of it is a permanent opposition. And over time, I don't think that it's good for any democracy to have some people permanently in government and other people permanently out of government. It can lead to stagnation. In the long term that's a problem. And it's obviously an obstacle for smaller parties like the Women's Coalition that don't face the imminent prospect of getting into government. It also says a lot about the majoritarian view of democracy that we've always had in Northern Ireland where there is a very stark notion of winners and losers. And that if you're seen on the losing side, which for now is the small parties, then anything you have to say isn't worth very much at all. And the larger parties, at the very best, will take up an idea proposed by a small party. If they go with it, then they go with it as their idea.

A very good example of that is our current campaign for a Children's Commissioner. The Women's Coalition recently presented draft legislation to establish a Children's Commissioner. The response of the Deputy First Minister was to start a consultation process about whether we should have a Children's Commissioner, thus needlessly taking the process several stages back. So these are the sort of obstacles that the Women's Coalition now faces.

Audience Question: Historically, why were so few women involved in politics? And what issues did the Women's Coalition bring to the table during the peace process and afterwards that otherwise might not have been addressed?

Barbara McCabe: Very few women have been involved in political life in Northern Ireland. Not just because of the conflict -- it dates from before that. The conflict is one reason why a great many social issues stopped being addressed. We are still a very traditional society. Until this year, from the establishment of Northern Ireland in 1920, there had been three women ever elected to Parliament in Westminster. A few more were elected to the local Parliament in Stormont. Three women representatives have been elected in our most recent general election, which is quite extraordinary, really.

The Women's Coalition focused on bread and butter issues. I can give you a sort of illustration, which I think is quite a good story. When George Mitchell was chairing the talks, he used to assign homework to the political parties. They used to have to go away and come back, say, a week later with their positions on such-and-such a subject. The first homework assignment that he gave was to draw up an agenda: what should these talks be about? So the Women's Coalition organized a group of something like 35 people drawn from different sectors, for example from NGOs, trade unions, or other professions, and said, this is the opportunity to reshape Northern Ireland. What do we need to talk about? What do we need to get in there? We then drew up the Women's Coalition's agenda for the two years of talks, a document that was three-and-a-half pages long and ranged over a number of issues that from our point of view were all important to address. Most of the other parties produced half a page with maybe three points on it. Our three-and-a-half page agenda got put on the shelf until the time when the first draft of the agreement was published, just slightly less than a week before the second draft was agreed to on Good Friday, 1998. Our agenda then became a bit of a checklist. What were all the things that hadn't been talked about yet? What were all of the things that had been neglected in this process? However, it was very difficult getting women mentioned at all in the Good Friday Agreement.

Ann Karr: Let me talk a bit about my organization, Community Dialogue. There is a negotiation process constantly going on here between politicians. But ordinary people also need to have ownership of a peace process that is about their future. When the talks were ongoing we wanted to see if we could get ordinary people together to look at the issues that affect us all, that is, the contentious issues in Northern Ireland. In front of me here are documents we have produced over the past three years that came from these very discussions.

Community Dialogue is managed by an executive committee. The Executive Committee is drawn from a wide range of peoples and backgrounds and community organizations. On our Executive Committee, we have representatives of community organizations working with both the Protestant Loyalist Unionist community and with the Nationalist Republican community. We have a representative of the Orange Order, as well as representatives from the churches: We have a Jesuit priest, a nun, and someone who is very involved in the Presbyterian Church. We also have people on the ground in communities in Northern Ireland who are working with the residents there who have come through a tragic conflict and who are trying to pick up the pieces and move on. When the Executive Committee comes together, there's a very wide range of opinion on any issue that we discuss. The thing about Community Dialogue is that we very rarely get agreement on anything.
We recently had two dialogues here in the Wellington Hotel - at 4:00 in the afternoon after being there from 9:00 in the morning, we agreed it was time for a cup of tea. (Laughter) And that was it. We had a dialogue about the implementation of our peace process. Why are we now in a situation where we can look at our agreement and see it in crisis? When you look back to see what sort of process was put in place following the referendum, it is very difficult to see any process at all. So we brought people together to discuss these very real issues for them.

Community Dialogue is about putting on the table the issue about which you feel most strongly and at the same time listening to someone else's position on it. We're not talking about agreement, we're not talking about negotiation, and we're not talking about problem solving. We're simply talking about people speaking the truth on an issue about which they feel very deeply: what concerns they have, what hopes they have, and so on. We have had dialogues and have produced documents on issues like decommissioning, policing, and marching. When there was a review and suspension of the Good Friday Agreement, we brought people together to discuss that.

There's a big problem in normal discussion in Northern Ireland. When you sit down around a table with friends you don't talk about politics or religion - you really say nothing about these issues. So we try to bring people together and to create an atmosphere in which people are comfortable enough to discuss these issues, to tell others how they feel about them. We see it as a release valve. Sometimes I feel there aren't enough release valves in our society for people to say how they feel about these contentious issues. So Community Dialogue tries to provide that opportunity. We organize meetings we call "residentials" where we bring people together for several days on a particular issue where they have time not only in sessions like this to dialogue but also time to meet socially, and that's usually where a lot of the real work goes on. It's really about getting to know one another, about coming to grips with who you are and trying to understand someone else. Otherwise, in this society, to this day, you might never have such an opportunity. If you're a Protestant living in a totally Protestant area, you may never have had the opportunity to sit down and discuss with a Catholic or a Nationalist Republican his view on a particular issue. And sometimes perceptions are totally wrong. You may imagine people feel this way or think this way about you, but it's not until you have the opportunity to sit down and dialogue with them that you realize that you probably have a lot in common.

Our work is simply providing a forum for people to come together and talk. We've come through so many years of trauma, so many people have suffered and now is the time for dialogue to start. It can't be only the politicians who dialogue, it has to be us, the ordinary people.

I started off as a volunteer for Community Dialogues. I'm now working on a research project that looks at the question: what is dialogue? Dialogue here means so many different things to different people. Some people feel that dialogue is about negotiating or is about moving them somewhere they don't want to go. Some people feel that if they're asked to dialogue they have to sit down with someone that they're simply not prepared to sit down with for whatever reason. Some people feel that dialogue is about trying to solve problems that they are just not ready to get involved in solving. As far as we're concerned, dialogue is simply a means to generate empathy amongst people. It's about giving people an opportunity to tell the truth as they see it and to listen to somebody else's truth. My research looks at how to create conditions in which dialogue can happen.

We ask three questions on any particular issue. What do you want? What do you need? What can you live with? We don't expect people to respect one another because they will tell us they don't and can't and that's fine. We have a few ground rules that are simply about being prepared to listen to someone else's point of view and to accept that that is their point of view.

Martin McSnodden: I was a victim of the conflict in Northern Ireland in many ways and I was regarded as a perpetrator. Having served 15 year as a political prisoner, I returned to a community that hadn't moved on, in fact had moved back a lot in 1990. I became involved in a reintegration program for loyalist political ex-prisoners in 1995. I developed the program around the province for five years. The program looks at the trauma experienced by political ex-prisoners and former combatants. I've been asked to explain a little about our group. But first, I would like to talk about victimization in the conflict. There's a whole intergenerational victimization which, left unaddressed, can fertilize future conflict. That has been the case in Northern Ireland for hundreds of year. Our past very often catches up with us in the present as a result of a person or a group of individuals who have felt they have been victimized in the course of history, either recent history or hundreds of years ago.

We're still in the midst of conflict. We may have a political settlement, but we're still far from having a social settlement. I have been one of the protagonists in the conflict. I would say that in the course of my victimizing other people, I also victimized myself as a human being. Many other people that took up arms, whether as members of the security forces or as members of the paramilitary organizations, have also been victimized in this conflict. We are often the people who have been scapegoated as being the cause of the conflict. But in reality, we are only a symptom of it.

Very rarely do former protagonists have the legitimacy to have suffered in such a conflict. Political ex-prisoners from both sides of the conflict founded our group to look at victimization and at the trauma experienced by political prisoners, their families, their neighbors, their friends, their community, and of course the other community. We decided that we would give everyone's trauma legitimacy, regardless of the events that caused it. We find that we are one of the very few groups to do that.

In our society, we have a hierarchy of victims. I see some people smiling. I'm pretty sure it's not just here. The government never attempted to address the needs of victims. There was no additional funding over 25 years of violent conflict. That's a sad indictment of our society. Our group came together to try to change things, to try to alleviate the trauma that has been experienced here as a result of the conflict.

The group itself is representative of, as opposed to representing, various factions in our society. We have former IRA prisoners, former UVF prisoners, former soldiers, and former police -- We have a number of people who in years gone by would have shot each other dead on the streets and perhaps not even batted an eyelid.

We are a new organization -- We only crystallized in January of this year. We're being very hasty, though cautious, in the development of the organization. Our goals are simple: to alleviate traumatic experience. The strategy that we are going to employ and are presently employing is very simple, though it's not simple. It's like our conflict, it appears to be simple and yet it's so complex. Our intent is to do research, local research with regards to victimization, with regards to people's attempts to address the trauma of that victimization. You can live in one street in this province and not know what's actually going on in the neighboring street. We know that there is some good practice out there. But we also know that it's not widespread. And other groups from other communities could benefit from it. We want to act in a way that we can spread that network, share those resources, and help alleviate trauma.

But as we all know, we're not the only country that's been in conflict. So we're also looking at other conflict zones, past conflict zones and present conflict zones, to learn from their experience. We've made contact with a number of groups such as the Center for Reconciliation in Johannesburg or the Vietnam Veterans Centers in the United States. We're hoping to share our experience with groups from other conflict zones and to benefit from their experience.

We're also trying to work toward advocacy with regards to government here. The government is a "Johnny Come Lately" with regards to addressing victimization. We're looking at other training programs that have been delivered around the world. Our strategy is really to get out there, to listen to people, to give them the opportunity to tell us what they think are their needs. And then to work along with them to address those needs.

Audience Question: Could you say more about your work on perpetrator trauma?

Martin McSnodden: I would like first of all to say I don't particularly like the label "perpetrator". I would much prefer to use terms such as "human beings that practiced violent behavior". Because using labels is one way in our society of putting people down and dehumanizing them. And it has been used in the past to get people to take up arms. The transition from being a nonviolent person to being a violent person, to taking up a gun and blowing someone away, shouldn't be experienced by any human being. It can be traumatic. Many people in our conflict have been victims before they've taken up the gun. One of my Republican friends had lost his brother in the conflict before he in turn took up the gun. Is he a victim or is he a perpetrator? There's a whole question around that in our conflict because it's been such an intimate conflict with regards to communities and families and intercommunity conflict and intracommunity conflict. People who took up the gun, or who joined certain organizations knew, or should have known, that there was one of two roads they were going to go down: One was to prison the other was to the cemetery. Many people went to both. I believe those who lost their lives to be victims and I believe their families to have suffered trauma as a result of losing a loved one.

Those who went to prison were traumatized by the institutional violence that took place within the prison. They built up safety mechanisms while in prison, suppressing emotions for example. This could lead after years to an inability to relate to their loved ones. They found themselves using either drugs or alcohol as release mechanisms for their innermost thoughts. Like Vietnam veterans, they often position themselves in rooms where they can see people coming in the door. They're startled by bangs and other loud noises. So the prison experience can traumatize individuals as well as families. Release from prison can also traumatize people. People after 10 or 15 years of imprisonment develop a familiarity with that environment. Whenever they return to the streets, they don't have that familiarity, they don't have that cohesion of the group that existed within the prison or on the battlefield. They're left on their own feeling isolated. They can't relate to anyone about their own personal experiences. They can't talk to their family members. Either they don't want to talk to them about their involvement in violence or those safety mechanisms that they built up over the years won't allow them to talk to them. So there's a lot of trauma that exists within those people who have taken up guns and have been involved in violence. We have group therapy sessions, and it may not even be called a group therapy session, it could be taking place around a table in a pub in some far-flung corner of Belfast, people just chatting about how they feel, and seeing that other people feel as badly as they do. And that makes them feel better -- they know that they're not isolated. Now what we're working on is to give people an opportunity to rise up from within themselves, to raise their self-esteem, and to accept their personal experience as being normal in some sense.

Audience Question: I wanted to ask about the particular challenges of working with young people. Most of the people we've encountered who have been talking to us about this conflict have been older people. I think this is a gross generalization, but there's a way in which younger people tend to be more impulsive and more extreme in their views. From what I understand most of the violence on the street is really violence among young people. What are the particular challenges that you face working with young people when, as Martin said, they've grown up in the culture of division, of violence, of conflict?

Barbara McCabe: This is a particular hobbyhorse of mine. Northern Ireland has had a segregated education system for its whole existence. Is that a cause or a symptom of the conflict? In my mind, it's much more a symptom of the conflict than a cause. There's a geographical segregation of people and schools. There are a small number of integrated schools, and I'm a supporter of integrated schools.

I think there's a far more damaging segregation in Northern Ireland education. We have children taking exams at the age of 10 or 11 that determine their future educational choices - that is, whether they go on to grammar school or secondary school. Children who go to secondary school have been labeled by the exams as failures. This creates huge self-esteem problems. And the exam results are very closely associated with class. If you're middle class you're almost certain to go to a grammar school. If you're working class, it would be very difficult for you to go to a grammar school. Even if you got a place, it may seem extremely difficult for you to step out of your community, out of what's happening with the other kids around you.
I think the issue of self-esteem has been totally neglected in Northern Ireland. There has been a great deal of research done on the impact of segregating young people by religion but nothing done on the impact of segregating young people by class. I would love to see a much more critical debate about what our education system is doing to working class children.

Ann Karr: I wanted to mention integrated education as well. I am a founder parent of an integrated primary school - we parents started it 17 years ago. And only this year, we got funding for a new school building, having spent 16 years in mobile classrooms. I wanted my children to have the option of attending an integrated school. And it is something to do with the fact that I am a Protestant. My husband is Catholic and I've brought my four children up as Catholics.

Martin McSnodden: Young people are the common fodder of conflict. I had a gun in my hands when I was 16 years old. I started a life sentence when I was 19 years old. I would say 90 percent plus of the prisoners, while I was there, were teenagers when they took up a gun.

Young people today in working class areas of Belfast don't have any self-esteem. It is a hopeless situation they find themselves in. They resent authority from the police, the army, the paramilitaries, or anybody else, because everybody tells them what to do, but nobody listens to them about what they want to do. To hear their desires is something else. You actually have to encourage them to express their desires. Our young people in Northern Ireland are no different from young people anywhere else. They would like to get a job somewhere, they would like to get a better education possibly, to do better at school.

Look at your television screens tonight and you'll see that it's the young people that are throwing the bricks and the bottles and the blast bombs. If I hear shots ring out, I am convinced that it's a person under 25 that's pulling the trigger.