Risking and Reaching:
Moving Beyond the Troubles in Northern Ireland

Mary Frost Steen
St. Olaf College

(London)Derry, Northern Ireland

In the quiet dusk of a fine June evening, we strolled through Derry's Catholic Cityside, and along the River Foyle to the Craigavon Bridge that crosses to Waterside, a predominantly Protestant area.

At the end of the bridge in the center of a roundabout, a hopeful bronze statue rises above the traffic. Titled "Hands across the Divide," it depicts two young men standing on separate raised stone platforms twisting to look at each other and reaching out so that their fingertips just touch across the gap. As we contemplated this sculpture, a military helicopter hovered over the river and a motorcycle circled the roundabout, carrying two police officers in full riot gear. Not two minutes later, two gray armored vehicles sped by.

Thirteen of us had spent a week in Derry at a faculty seminar to provide background for the Peace Prize Forum which would honor John Hume and David Trimble, Nobel Laureates from Northern Ireland. For six evenings we had walked the city after dark, feeling no menace and very little police presence. That evening, though, tension was palpable. We could feel it not only in these police activities, but in the row of four cars filled with watchful young men in the central square, and in the disembodied voice we heard crackling over a walkie talkie as we passed a dark alley.

Parade Rights

The city was on high alert because the next morning the Protestant "Long March" was due to set out from Derry for Portadown. It was billed as a civil rights march. Thirty years ago Catholics began civil rights marches to counter discrimination in housing and jobs. Now Protestants were asserting their civil right to parade, and to parade through Catholic areas.

To everyone's relief, the next morning the Long March left Derry without incident. Six weeks later, however, petrol bomb-throwing mobs spilled fire and destruction in the center of Derry. This time the provocation was the Protestant "Apprentice Boys" parade, commemorating the day in 1689 that a group of young Protestant apprentice boys closed the city gates against the Catholic King James II. Catholics find these parades galling, particularly when Protestants march triumphally through their neighborhoods. They are repeated all over Northern Ireland--2500 of them--during the "marching season," which runs from July through December.

"Peace Wall"

Derry is divided clearly into neighborhoods that are predominantly Catholic or Protestant. (Even the name "Derry" is divisive: the official name is "Londonderry," but Catholics generally prefer to leave London out of it.) We had stood on the 17th century city wall and looked into a small Protestant neighborhood lying between the city walls and the river. A modern "peace wall"--a 12-foot steel fence surmounted by razor wire--separates it from the adjacent Catholic neighborhood. This evening we decided to walk through Protestant territory.

On the ground it was easy to know when we were among Protestants: the curbs throughout the neighborhood were painted red, white, and blue--the colors of the Union Jack--in alternating two-foot segments. Moreover, the wall murals that pervade Derry did not read "Free Derry" or "No Consent, No Parade" as they do in Catholic Bogside, but depicted parading flute bands or William of Orange on his horse, symbolic declarations of Protestant supremacy.

For several blocks, as we walked in the deepening dusk along narrow streets lined with row houses, we encountered only one living thing--a dog. Then, as we climbed a hill looking for a gate through the city wall that would take us back into the city center, a tiny man with a cane in one hand and the leash for his sheep dog in the other stopped us.

"Be careful. There's hooligans out on both sides tonight."

Concerned that we ignorant tourists would blunder into danger, he was also anxious that we understand the politics and history behind the current tension. To this end, he gave us a thumbnail sketch of Northern Irish history, concluding, "It's all the fault of the French."

"All the fault of the French?" we wondered as we followed his directions to the gate. Were the current Troubles the result of the Normans invading Ireland in the 12th century? Of the 1610 Derry town plan's being modeled after the French King's town of Vitry? Of Catholic James II being aided by French strategists in the "Siege of Derry" after the apprentice boys barred the gates?

After only a week in Northern Ireland, we were not surprised to think that a man on the street might hark back to the 12th century. The Irish keep their history firmly in mind.

Living History

All remember that their island was important to England and its defense from the 16th century to World War II. But the history they hold fast varies. Protestants, for example, commemorate Derry's role in the victory of William of Orange over James II. Catholics, on the other hand, are mindful that England "planted" British colonists in the north of Ireland to hold it for the crown, so that by the end of the 16th century only 10% of the land was owned by Catholics, down from 90% at the beginning of that century. More recent history is closely held as well. Catholics remember the 13 who died in 1972 on Bloody Sunday when British soldiers opened fire on riotous civil rights marchers. Protestants raise memorials to those who have been killed by IRA bombs.

Using the terms "Catholic" and "Protestant" makes it sound as though the disputes are between two religious factions in Northern Ireland. But the Troubles are not based on doctrinal differences. Rather, they stem from a history of dominance of one group over another, of inequality and injustice, of terrorist tactics. While the bombs of the IRA have been heard 'round the world, the injustices may not be so well known. From the early 1920s to the '60s not only were Catholics discriminated against in jobs and housing; districts were gerrymandered so that by 1968, although Catholics constituted over 60% of the population of Derry, the town council had 12 Protestant to 8 Catholic representatives.

Good Friday Agreement

During our time in Derry we heard remarks given by John Hume, highly respected leader of the moderate Socialist Democratic and Labour Party. Hume, a rumpled, tired-looking man whose appearance suggests that he would be more at home schmoozing in a smoke-filled room than lecturing from behind a podium, rehearsed the main principles underlying the 1998 Belfast, or Good Friday, Agreement: 1) Respect for difference and different identities. 2) Creation of institutions that respect those identities. 3) Breaking down barriers through common economic interest: "spilling our sweat and not our blood."

The Agreement brings to fruition 30 years of persistent, non-violent work on Hume's part; it took months of tough negotiation by all parties--the English, the Irish, the Northern Irish (Protestant and Catholic). It has the support of most citizens of Northern Ireland: 81% turned out to vote in a referendum on the Good Friday Agreement; 71% voted "yes." Some Protestant parties, however, refuse to travel this road. Gary Cunningham, Ian Paisley's deputy in the Democratic Unionist Party, one of the more intransigent Protestant groups, explained to us why his party opposes the Belfast Agreement: "Those who terrorized the community would be rewarded. The capacity to inflict violence is still there. ... John Hume shouldn't have got the Nobel Peace Prize."

Even those Protestants who do support the Agreement, led by Ulster Unionist Party head David Trimble, have been insisting that duly elected Sinn Féin representatives cannot be seated in the new executive committee unless they first renounce all use of violence and turn in their weapons. Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA, is affronted by this pre-condition on its elective representatives' right to be seated.

Why Not?

Why not seat representatives who have been duly elected? Why not turn in weapons? Why, for that matter, insist on parading through hostile neighborhoods? Why resort to bombs and snipers?

"It was an apartheid state here," explained Sinn Féin leader Gerry Adams when we met with him, "including things like internment (jail without trial). We've been colonized, it's essential to understand, and we're only now working out of it."

Oppression, discrimination, terrorism...parades, razor wire, bombs... .

This is the history that the negotiating parties are trying to put behind them, aided by former U.S. Senator George Mitchell. Although the peace is not yet won, John Hume and David Trimble received the 1998 Nobel Peace Prize from the Norwegian government for taking the risks necessary to negotiate the Good Friday Agreement.

In honoring these Laureates, the Peace Prize Forum will acknowledge the barriers to peaceful resolution of long-standing conflicts within borders. And it will celebrate those with the stamina to continue reaching over the barriers to find common ground, those with the courage to risk trusting ancient enemies.

Mary Steen was one of 13 faculty members from the Peace Prize Forum colleges who attended a ten-day seminar in Northern Ireland to gain background on issues and individuals relating to this year's Forum. She is a member of the English department at St. Olaf College, Northfield MN.

Copyright © 2000 Mary Steen
Last Revised: November 14, 1999