The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; Irish Women's Peace Movement

ROBERT MacNEIL: Good evening. Eight years ago today, October 5, 1968, a group of Catholics in Northern Ireland staged a march to protest denial of their civil rights by the Protestant majority. The demonstration was put down violently and thus was born a savage civil war. Eight years later, more than 1800 men, women and children have died. Northern Ireland is an armed-camp occupied by front-line British troops attempting to keep Protestant and Catholic gunmen apart. One attempted political solution after another has collapsed.

Then, an incident occurred in August which appeared to release a new kind of anger in the terrorized civilian population. British troops shot at a car apparently carrying terrorists. Out of control, the car skidded into three children and their mother out for a walk. The mother was severely injured; the children were all crushed to death. That night the children`s aunt appeared on television and said the people did not want violence. Another woman was so angry that she started a petition among her neighbors against violence. The two women joined forces and the so-called "Women`s Peace Movement," now called "The Peace Movement," came into being; and from their first demonstration began to grow.

UNIDENTIFIED UPITN NEWSMAN: ...thousands on foot, by bus, by car to show in the most positive way their support of this new peace movement, despite open threats from unidentified spokesmen for the provisional IRA and published statements accusing the Catholic element of being what the provisionals call "collaborators." As they marched through the city toward the meeting place they passed the scars which eight years of violence and killing have left on Northern Ireland.

It`s clear the early emotions aroused by the killing of three young children by a provisional IRA getaway car, far from fading, as had been feared, have, if anything, increased. Last week`s demonstration was in the Catholic Andersonstown area, the home of the children, -where: local. people could be expected to turn out in the thousands.` Today, the demonstration was in the mainly Protestant East Belfast area, and for the first time thousands of Catholics crossed the dividing lines of the city to emphasize that there`s nothing sectarian about this new demand for peace -- it covers the whole spectrum of Northern Irish life.

Symbolically, this was the most important of the peace marches to date. Craigavad Bridge links Protestant Londonderry with Catholic Londonderry, and from the Bogside and the Creggan the women came. And there are possibly no stronger pockets of republicanism in the whole province than the Creggan and the Bogside. In all, probably 50,000 people came, from areas almost synonymous with violence: Shank Hill Road, Andersonstown, Crumlin Road, the Falls.

MacNEIL: The two women who started the Peace Movement came to the United States yesterday, and are with us tonight in the studios of WYES New Orleans. Mairead Corrigan is the aunt of the children killed by the runaway car in August; Betty Williams is the cofounder of the Peace Movement. They flew to America yesterday under the auspices of Public Station WNED in Buffalo, New York to record an interview for the program "Woman," to be shown on PBS stations next week. Can I ask you first, Mrs. Williams, since your mission is in Northern. Ireland, what message exactly do you bring to the United States?

BETTY WILLIAMS: Our Peace Movement could become worldwide, because the United States of America has her own amount of violence to contend with; and if you read the Peace Declaration, we could help a lot of people in a lot of ways.

MacNEIL: Miss Corrigan, do you have a particular message for Americans?

MAIREAD CORRIGAN: Yes, we have indeed. Miracles have been happening in Northern Ireland and we have a new vision for Northern Ireland where people will put aside violence, where they will come together to build together one community out of our now divided community, where they will begin to see themselves not as Southern Irish people and not as British people, but as Northern Irish people with a complete new identity. We have come to ask the American people, who we know are very concerned and who love Ireland in their own way, to join with us, please, as much as possible and in every way possible to help us to realize our new vision.

MacNEIL: How do they do that in practical terms?

CORRIGAN: In practical terms, we know that coming into Northern Ireland is a lot of money, and we know that that money has been Going to use for the wrong purposes, and we say to people in America.

Please, before you put your hand in your pocket to send any money to Northern Ireland, ask where it`s going to. My sister lost her three little children when an IRA gunman -- the car went out of control, and they died. The horrors that are going(on in Northern Ireland -these things are carried out by men who are carrying on wars;-and it`s just not IRA, it`s UDA, it`s all forms of violence which we condemn. But it takes money to run a war; before money comes into Northern Ireland, please, please ask, "Where is it going to and what is it for?" As Betty says, our peace message also is for the world. Peace begins in the heart and the home and the country and the world. America has its problems; please --violence in seven years in Northern Ireland has got us nowhere, it`s only lost life. Learn from the awful mistakes we have made, and please try to work in your own way towards peace.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Could I ask you, Mrs. Williams, you`re suspected, I read, by all sides -- your movement -- of being a front for this or that group. The sectarian violence has gone on for so long, and all the factionalization that`s followed from that has

Cone on so long, it`s hard for people to believe that you are not pushing the cause of this or that group -- how do you prove your neutrality?

WILLIAMS: I don`t really think I have to prove my neutrality because I`ve never cast a vote in my life in Northern Ireland -- it was rather like spitting into the wind. We have the true factions in Northern Ireland, the two bigot factions saying -one says I`m British-government backed and the other says I`m totally Republican backed. For the first time in seven long years in Northern Ireland we have these factions agreeing about something. They can`t understand what the hell`s going on.

MacNEIL: What is your religion, Mrs. Williams?

WILLIAMS: I`m a Roman Catholic.

MacNEIL: And Miss Corrigan?

CORRIGAN: I`m a Roman Catholic, too, but the wonderful thing about our movement is that for the first time in seven years we have people forming themselves into little street groups in the Catholic and the Protestant districts; and within this last couple of weeks

I have attended meetings in Protestant districts, and Catholics have been at those meetings and in those areas for the first time in seven years. This is how we will draw together the divided community so that these people can begin to discuss what the want and how they want to live their life, from a grass-root level, instead of tie politicians at the top always telling us in Northern Ireland how we should live and what we think. The ordinary people of Northern Ireland -- the Catholics and the Protestants -- are going to come together to discuss what they want for the future, and how they want to live.

MacNEIL: Yes. Some of your. colleagues, Mrs. Williams, in the Peace Movement have either been threatened with violence or actually visited with violence in recent weeks; do you two fear for your own lives?

WILLIAMS: No; we discussed this very thoroughly at the start of this campaign. One has to forget about oneself. Peace is going to be much harder to achieve than war was to start in Northern Ireland, so we mast forget about ourselves, we must totally put our selves out of it.. I think before this finishes. we`ll see the most atrocious acts of violence in Northern Ireland, and against women -- I fully expect that; but as regards fearing for myself, no, I don`t.

MacNEIL: Miss Corrigan?

CORRIGAN: No, I`ve no fear for myself, but I do fear for a lot of ordinary people 3.n Northern Ireland. You see, for a long time in Ireland -- indeed, in the world -- we have glorified the man who`s carried the bomb.Do you know, we sing songs about men who take life -- we make them heroes? We are now going to say the hero in our society is the guy who stands up against the man with the gun and says, You`re not speaking for me.` I do not want your violence;" the guy who gets involved with the other guar. And you know, these are going to be the heroes in Northern Irish society. But that`s going to be a very high price for a lot of ordinary people to pay within the next couple of months; but I`m afeared where at the crossroads where people have got to be prepared to pay that` price for their peace.

MacNEIL: Thank you, both, ladies. The third leader of the Peace Movement in Northern Ireland remained anonymous until about two weeks ago. He is Ciaran McKeown, a former journalist who wrote the Peace Declaration the two ladies just referred to that is read at every rally, and a 34-page document entitled, "The Price of Peace," which the London Financial Times, for one newspaper, called "in almost lyrical vision imbued with the ideals of pacificism." Mr. McKeown is a Catholic and once a leading member of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland. Mr. McKeown, you appear now to be the "intellectual support for the Peace Movement which the two ladies founded and symbolized, and its manifesto is your pamphlet, "The Price of Peace. Your approach has been criticized as naive and utopian; how do you meet that criticism?

CIARAN McKEOWN: I meet it very simply in this sense, that I`m a person who is very familiar with all the very intellectual attempts at constitutional and political engineering over the last seven years; I`ve seen some of the most intelligent and some of the most courageous politicians whom one could meet try to solve the problem by means of very intelligent, very careful kinds of constitutional engineering. All their possible approaches have failed over seven years, every possible attempt at military and paramilitary solution has failed; all attempts to solve the problem from the top down have failed, in other words, every attempt to look at Northern Ireland and say, "How do you get to govern two divided tribes? failed. What we are very simply trying to do is to create one community in Northern Ireland, to develop one stable democracy from the bottom up; so the problem is not, how do you govern two divided tribes, but hour do you develop a stable democracy from one community.

MacNEIL: I`d like to come to the details of that in a moment, but I`m just wondering -- to ask you the same question that I asked the ladies -- how do you, as a Catholic yourself, because this must become an issue if it isn`t already, establish your neutrality?

McKEOWN: Well, neutrality is almost a violent word in Northern Ireland. Ian Paisley has said that we are a neutral between terrorists and the security forces. But the. people on the ground do not regard. us as neutral because the people on the ground, both Catholic and Protestant, know that for unarmed people to say to the IRA to stop, to say to the UDA to stop, to say to the UBF to stop is to put our necks, as unarmed citizens, on the block. Also, the people whom we meet in areas which are described as strong Republican areas or strong Loyalist areas know that it takes courage from us to walk into those ghetto areas and proclaim our message of peace, of a new way of resolving conflict by the techniques of peace rather than the techniques of war. And in fact, the curious thing is this: that while the leadership of this movement appears to be Catholic in terms of Betty and Mairead and myself, the backbone of it in many ways is Protestant. Our best organized groups are in the Loyalist Shank Hill area, Glencairn, East Belfast, and when we go there to these areas the reception which we get there is far greater, far warmer than we get in Catholic areas.

MacNEIL: Can I ask you this; you say that the other institutions and attempts at political solutions have not worked and contain the seeds of violence, all of them. You want to establish a viable democracy from the ground up. What practical political steps do you envision, and what is the timetable for that --what happens next?

McKEOWN: We can`t set an exact timetable, obviously, but what happens next is a development directly from establishing one community in terms of trust across the peace lines, and that we have been doing with remarkable success. We were told it was-not possible for Catholics to go from the Falls area to the Shank Kill area; we did it, even though we were told from good friends in the Shank Hill area, "If you do that you`ll be shot." We did it. Thousands turned out; we haven`t been shot yet. We`ve gone to East Belfast, this criss-crossing of Northern Ireland between Catholic and Protestant has happened time and time again; we`re building up.

MacNEIL: So the next step is socializing and fraternizing.

McCEOWN: We`ve got this trust and this friendship developing. Once we establish that single community based on friendship and trust, then we look at the problems of Northern Ireland, which are very grave -- not only the war, but you know, something like 12 percent average unemployment, which means 40 percent unemployment in some areas; a housing crisis; we`ve got various social problems which this one united community can look at together, and look at through the eyes of a new kind of Irish philosophy, a new kind of pacificism. When I say "new" I mean new for this generation. It`s not new for Ireland because Ireland traditionally was a peaceful nation until other interventions. What we`re doing, in fact, is renewing an old vision of Ireland -- an old clan system, an old pacifist, an old island of saints and scholars -- we`re re-evoking, if you like, that kind of vision. And we`re asking Americans now in this visit, those Irish Americans who like to identify with Ireland, not to identify with the recent anti- British, or colonial affairs of Ireland`s history, but the old vision of Ireland -- the old Celtic race, and so on -- that is the kind of new vision which then forms this movement. It`s a pacificist vision, it`s a very creative vision; that`s the one we are here about..

MacNEIL: Thank you. We`ll`-come back. Dr. Garret Fitzgerald is the Minister for Foreign Affairs for the Republic of Ireland and is in New York with us. Prior to assuming that position three and a half years ago Dr. Fitzgerald was an Irish correspondent for the Financial Times and The Economist, both published in London. Dar. Fitzgerald has devoted much of his life to the European community movement, and we`ve asked him here tonight to discuss the Peace Movement in Northern Ireland. In a speech last night, Dr. Fitzgerald, you say the Peace Movement we`ve been talking about has weakened the position of the men of violence on both sides. How, and how do you measure that in practical terms?

GARRET FITZGERALD: It`s weakened them because they live on keeping alive ancient, kind of tribal hatreds between the two sections of the community in Northern Ireland. And when a movement like this bridges that gap and brings the two together in the way that Ciaran has described and Mairead and Betty Williams have described, then the source of whatever strength they have disappears, is eroded. Ciaran has said there have been many political attempts to find -the solution in Northern Ireland; there have, and by politicians of good will and intelligence and courage. But they haven`t succeeded because they`ve been contending against this deep division in the community. I think there-is a lot in what he says, that until you heal that division, until you-get people seeing that they have a common interest as people and that this mythical division between nationalists and unionists based on myths of history has no reality toward human beings, the politicians -- nobody else can really-solve the problem till that`s been done. The-Peace Movement is, therefore, of great importance, I think.

MacNEIL: You also said last. night that the Peace Movement has created potentially improved conditions for political progress; whose move is it neat, or should politicians wait and watch the Movement a bit longer?

FITZGERALD: Well, one of the difficulties in Northern Ireland is that all the political attempts that have been made so far have failed, and some of them have failed quite recently. And politicians in Northern Ireland who have been trying to find a way through, to get off their hooks and to get agreement on some way of governing Northern Ireland are at this stage pretty discouraged and somewhat demoralized. And it`s not an easy moment at which to get them restarting this process. I think the Peace Movement needs to gain momentum so that politicians feel themselves under such pressure from their grass roots that they get the courage to restart the process and the courage to overcome some of their inhibitions and to make compromises they haven`t hitherto been willing to make.

MacNEIL: So it`s a hopeful sign but it needs watching, and the moment isn`t right to move towards more practical political steps.

FITZGERALD: I think it will take time; it will take, certainly, some months. And what is so remarkable about this movement is that unlike previous attempts to achieve something of this kind, it has sustained itself over a long period and has shown a vitality and a dynamism which no previous movement has shown; and despite the skepticism and the cynicism at the beginning, of many people including some politicians,. it`s going strong and going in the right direction.

MacNEIL: Would your government be prepared to do anything to demonstrate its support of the movement?

FITZGERALD: We certainly support it, to the hilt. But its merit lies in the fact that it`s welling up from the ordinary people; it isn`t politically manipulated, it isn`t politically organized, we`ve had no contact with them, I`ve never met or had any contact, indeed, with either Betty or Mairead -- I`m delighted to meet them, in a sense, on television here for the first time tonight -- and that`s its strength. And I don`t think governments or political parties getting involved is going to, at this stage, help: But on the other hand, we have our job to do -- to try to use this upswelling of common feeling between these two sections of the community, as this creates the conditions for political action, to take the opportunity to push ahead to political progress. And we have a job, the British government has a job and the politicians in . Northern Ireland have a job to do, and their job is being made possible by this Peace Movement.

MacNEIL: Let`s hear from. an English voice in this. Simon Winchester covered the troubles in Northern Ireland from 1969-72 for the Guardian. He currently is that British newspaper`s Washington correspondent. Mr. Winchester won a "Journalist of the Year" award in 1971 for his reportage in Ulster, and his experiences there are recounted in a book- entitled Northern Ireland in Crisis. Mr. Winchester, what prospect do you see of this movement actually succeeding where so many other efforts have failed?

SIMON WINCHESTER: Well, I hate to be the one to cast a rather negative note into this discussion, but I`m afraid I see this movement in much the same light as the two or three movements that have gone before it. Of the two or three that have gone before only one, which was a movement started by five women in Londonderry, had any success at all.

MacNEIL: When was that?

WINCHESTER: 1972, I believe. That resulted in the laying down of arms of the official IRA, but the official IRA was an organization whose main weapon was the ballpoint pen, rather than the Thompson machine gun; it didn`t take a lot of persuasion to make them. I think the provisional IRA - - it`s beginning to be forgotten -- is not a creature that has to swim in the warm sea of popular acceptance, the old Maoist dictum; I don`t think it runs true any longer in Northern Ireland. The provisional IRA is a small but highly efficient terrorist organization which I think can blithely ignore the well-intentioned, enormously courageous people of peace in the Catholic community; and similarly in the last 18 months, I think, the UDA and the other paramilitary Protestant organizations have become so powerful that they can thumb their noses at the peaceful people in the Protestant community.

MacNEIL: Would you -say that the fact that a number of people prominent in the Peace Movement have been attacked or people associated-with them attacked -- a woman was shot in the face by a shotgun blast recently; a 17- year-old boy was attacked and had the initials IRA carved in a couple of places in his body -- a sign that at least some terrorist organizations regard this as a movement to be reckoned with?

WINCHESTER: Some fringes of the main terrorist organization regard the Peace Movement as an organization to be reckoned with. These kind of attacks against the peace people have happened before, and much more brutal than the ones we`ve seen against Liam Doherty and other people recently. No. I don`t think this represents the main stream view of the organizers in the South for the IRA and in the Protestant communities for the Protestant organizations. I think the leadership believes they can sit back and that this thing will die outs and it`ll die out for this reason: that -- let`s take the IRA, for one specific example -- an incident will take place within the next couple of weeks which will cause the British Army to go into Ballymurphy or Andersonstown or some area of the Falls to search for something or a person, and in the process of searching for that gun or that person, inevitably there will be disturbances of one sort or another. A riot will happen, maybe only a small one, but someone will get hurt, some Catholic child will get hit in the face with a rubber bullet. Inevitably the wroth of the people, and not just the IRA, will then be directed against the British Army. And so the same old antagonism which has existed and which has caused the IRA to flourish will be cleverly, skillfully manipulated by the IRA to make sure that it happens again. I should say one other thing: .the IRA can be snuffed out if its money is taken away; that is very true in deed. And for that reason I think there`s a great deal of sense in Ciaran and these ladies coming to America to try and plead with people to stop giving them money. Except one wonders whether, in fact, their visit here isn`t going to be counterproductive; because the money has been dropping off -- it was $800,000 a year a few years ago, now American interest in the whole Irish situation has dropped to the level where they`re only getting a quarter of that. Ought it not be allowed to tail off on its own, isn`t this -- I`ve seen demonstrators here in New York tonight -- isn`t this going to exacerbate the situation?

MacNEIL: Let`s deal with the money question first. Mr. Fitzgerald, you yourself have come here and made the same plea in the past; how important a factor is it, is it-tailing off, and would it make a real difference if what`s left were significantly reduced?

FITZGERALD: I think it has been tapering off, as far as one can judge, as those Irish Americans who have hitherto contributed begin to understand more of the reality of the situation and what the IRA are about and that they don`t represent what Irish Americans have thought they represent. I wouldn`t think that this program tonight and the appearance of Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan here is going to revive the contributions; on the contrary, I think their appeal is probably going to have a lot more impact than anything that I could say for the Irish government. I think that it is useful; it must be said that not all the money comes from America -- money is raised in Ireland, by bank robberies and post office raids, and by intimidation of people in the North, and if this Peace Movement makes people stand up to intimidation in Northern Ireland and not to contribute and-to take the risk of what follows from that then that will help to-cut off the local supply of money, much of which comes by protection rackets of various kinds.

MacNEIL: Let`s leave the money, and Mr. McKeown, why, as I presume you do, do you believe Mr. Winchester is wrong?

McKEOWN: I would hate to caricature my old friend Simon as making a typical English misunderstanding of the Irish situation, but I think it`s not because of his Englishness but because of the fact that he left in 1972. 1972 represented what the IRA might have claimed to have been the high point of their career; they brought down the Stormont government. That was, in a sense, the exercise of Catholic community in Northern Ireland`s veto over any kind of government. In 1974, two years later, we had the Loyalist veto when the Loyalist minority under Paisley brought down the power shaking executive. This is 1976, which is four years on from 72 sand two years on from 74. Both communities, as looked on as split communities, have recognized each other`s Veto; in this year they recognize how much they have in common.--. And what we are about is not the kind of politics of reaction that Simon talks about, when the British Army goes in and hits somebody -- there is a reaction. If the IRA go in and hit the Loyalists, there is a reaction. What we`re talking about now is a very positive, patriotic vision, a distinct Northern Irish identity which has evolved because of seven years of a shared experience by the Catholics and Protestants. We now realize that the people of Northern Ireland have a distinct experience, which, in a sense, makes them distinct from even the Southern Irish people as represented by Dr. Fitzgerald. Not separatist from Southern Ireland, not separatist from Scotland, England Wales and Britain, but- quite distinct -- a distinct European region which has known a particular kind of terrorist experience: a Republican terrorism, Loyalistic terrorism: I can fully understand Irish Americans. If I were an Irish American of several generations descent, and I have third generation relatives here, I would probably be inclined to think in terms of the old British enemy, and so on, and so forth. I am a contemporary Irishman, a contemporary patriot, and what we have learned is a bitter lesson about the techniques of violence; they do-not work, number one; they certainly are not intrinsically Irish or native to the Irish, they are something which are an inheritance from the years of colonialism. The British, in a sense, are paying for the previous generations of colonialism, not the current one. What we are saying now-is that this generation of Irishmen in Northern Ireland -- the Northern Irish patriot -- is using a new technique of peace, the old philosophy of pacificism, if you like; and we appeal to those who would want to identify with us in Ireland to look very carefully at what we`re doing. Because what w`e`re doing, in effect, by resolving an ancient conflict by the techniques of peace will be an example to the world that many people will wish to identify with. Even Americans in their bicentennial year might want to look again at what William Penn tried to do in Pennsylvania, might try to look again at the way in which it would have been possible for the early pioneers to integrate with the Indian culture in Pennsylvania; and I rather feel ashamed that Irishmen were involved in the wrecking of that experiment.

MacNEIL: In effect:,. Mr. McKeown seems to be saying that by creating a new psychology and a new Northern Ireland identity they will have changed the situation. Do you believe that that is politically practicable, Dr. Fitzgerald?

FITZGERALD: I think it is possible; we can`t know whether this will work or not. It is possible that all the enthusiasm and energy and vigor and dedication that`s mobilized here may not eventually produce a solution. But it certainly is a more hopeful group than any other one we`ve had, and it would be wrong for anybody to dismiss it. I noticed that Simon, in what he said, was really talking about the possible impact on the IRA, whereas what I was doing was talking about the possible impact on politicians; and in the long run the problem will be resolved politically, by some political organization of Northern Ireland in which the two communities work together, making the IRA and the UDA irrelevant. The UDA and the IRA and these other bodies are irrelevant to the ultimate solution.

WINCHESTER: May I bring up a point here?

MacNEIL: You can, very briefly; about 15 seconds.

WINCHESTER: Basically, why is the Irish government, then, pressing this claim in the European Commission in the court, suggesting that the British have been guilty of brutality? That seems the kind of action which is going to be terribly counterproductive.

FITZGERALD: Well, that-launches into a long issue there;- the fact is,-this arose from the torture and-brutality of five years ago.

MacNEIL: And we would need another program to discuss that; I`m awfully sorry. Thank you all, we have to end it there. Jim Lehrer and I will be back tomorrow night from San Francisco, where the second Presidential debate will take place. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.