A Troubled Tradition; can Irish women keep a place for peace?

May/June 2005 -(Clamor Bowling Green) In the spring of 1996, "The Troubles" of Northern Ireland had already claimed 3,000 lives, despite numerous negotiations and ceasefire attempts. The most recent manifestation of a centuries-old conflict between Protestants and Catholics, the time known as "The Troubles" began after the initially peaceful civil rights movements of the 1960s turned increasingly violent, and carried on well into the 1990s. By 1996, Northern Ireland's leaders were ready for some real change, organizing elections for a round of peace talks with representatives from all geographic areas and political and paramilitary affiliations. With this new, comprehensive approach to peacekeeping, how then could these leaders possibly overlook a grand 51 percent of their constituency?

By not including any women on the candidate lists.

Lucky for Northern Ireland, Monica McWilliams and nearly 100 other women were already organizing the fight for representation in what would prove to be some of most productive negotiations in the peacemaking process. McWilliams and her colleagues lobbied the major parties to include women in the talks, but after having their requests ignored, they decided to form their own party. With just seven weeks to get out the vote, the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition (NIWC) was created to contest the June elections. McWilliams, a nationalist, and Pearl Sager, a loyalist, won two seats at the table, with the NIWC coming in as the ninth most popular party in elections throughout all of Northern Ireland.

Writing in The Observer, Monica McWilliams says the defining characteristic of the NIWC is their emphasis on inclusion and consensus: "We have a niche as a cross-community party, appealing to Protestants, Catholics, Hindus, atheists, and more. We are acutely conscious that some 14% of people here do not come from Catholic or Protestant traditions and still more are politically homeless."

With a commitment to cross-party equality and mediation guiding their policy-making, the NIWC's approach at the talks was decidedly different from the often divisive and exclusionary political climate that has become tradition in Northern Ireland. During the nearly two years of deliberations, the women of the NIWC introduced fresh perspectives and pushed for common ground. However, gaining basic respect from fellow parties sometimes proved a daily challenge. In a 1997 article in Insight on the News, McWilliams responded to reports of Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) members verbally abusing NIWC reps during the talks, going so far as to "moo" when the women entered the chambers or during speeches. "The violence of their tongues," she says, "has led to others picking up guns."

This connection between political sectarianism and street violence shows just how difficult breaking tradition can be when years of binary conflict serve to strengthen existing divisions in a community like Northern Ireland, promoting a male, nationalist homogeny that pervades even the politics of peace. The NIWC's commitment to breaking up some of the old ways lasted throughout the 22 month talks, which ultimately resulted in the Belfast Agreement (or Good Friday Agreement) in 1998.

"The NIWC played a key role in promoting the Agreement," writes Kate Fearon in issue 13 of Accord: An International Review of Peace Initiatives. After the Agreement was created, it was voted into reality by a public referendum with citizens' overwhelming approval. The NIWC played a part in educating voters, demonstrating an ability "to speak simultaneously to a number of constituencies: nationalist and unionist, organized civil society and individual members of the public."

The NIWC's strength comes from this willingness to defy convention, simply by seeking out unheard perspectives on the issues. "I thirst to hear their voice and put myself in their shoes," McWilliams says in Insight. "To me that is knowledge that builds for change. I have to build a new country and that means getting together with people who don't share my point of view."

As a young, fourth-generation Irish-American woman visiting Belfast last summer, I learned firsthand about the community, finding warm welcome from the less conventional side of Belfast. Traveling with my friend Maura, we negotiated our way carefully at first, learning to stay away from the university area with its homogenous packs of women in skinny high heels and groups of loud men who shouted to us, inexplicably, in French. We puzzled over our newfound exoticism -- did we actually look that foreign? Or was the sight of two women laughing loudly and walking alone at night so much of a departure from the social norms of a city whose buildings still show murals of martyrs killed in urban war?

The more I learned about the underlying conflict during our stay, the more it seemed we were drawn to those on the sidelines; those who, like the women and other minorities given voice by the NIWC, weren't necessarily participating in the characteristic sectarianism of Belfast, but were affected by it nonetheless. One night we found a group of native Londoners, two Indian girls and a slight, feminine boy who led us to a hidden away hip-hop club after telling us more than a few doormen had turned them away. Another night we met a chatty Dublin girl whose family lived on both sides of the peace line, then a group of feisty old men playing Dixieland jazz in a traditional pub. We also made friends with an employee at our hostel, an Australian expat mother who had plenty to say about women's issues in Ireland -- "Their doctors tell them breastfeeding's not healthy! Can you believe it?!"

Tapping into the needs and strengths of these interesting, everyday people fueled the NIWC's early success in getting a wide variety of underrepresented people to seek more active engagement -- or at least understanding -- from the current political system in Northern Ireland. It seemed like an unstoppable plan. Yet despite hard work, plenty of anonymous donors, and seemingly limitless enthusiasm, the NIWC is barely viable today. Though the two majority parties, republican Sinn Fein and loyalist DUP, now have more female involvement, the NIWC lost much of its funding and its seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly (one of the organizations formed from the Belfast Agreement). Criticism of the NIWC also continued, from DUP members and even members of the media, although their harsh and unfounded critiques better serve the agenda of the NIWC by illustrating how great the ideological divide still spreads.

On one occasion, Newton Emerson wrote in the Irish News, "Men commit almost all the violence in Northern Ireland, but now that I'm in my 30s I've noticed something happening to my contemporaries. Men grow out of sectarianism. It's a folly of youth --while the girls go on pursuing their intense, unspoken vendettas for years and years." This is exactly the kind of blame game NIWC members have sought to move past. Without funding or representation, their challenges could be daunting.

Fearon, a founding member of the NIWC herself, writes that though the party was only meant to be temporary, it has had significant effects on the culture of Northern Irish politics at large: "The NIWC's involvement in the negotiations not only facilitated and promoted women's participation, it also demonstrated the possibility that civil society can participate in and influence formal political negotiations. It revealed that politics is not necessarily the exclusive preserve of customary politicians; groups other than those advocating exclusively a nationalist or exclusively a unionist perspective also have a place at the decision-making table."

The emphasis on civil participation reveals a flexibility that in itself is a kind of rebellion, drawing emphasis away from the political powers-that-be, and placing it back into the hands of community leaders, NGOs, and the everyday members of the private sphere who welcomed us outsiders so warmly to Belfast. Without the legitimacy and power of a formal party, though, might outsiders find the traditions of binary conflict still too strong to break?

Protestant Baroness May Blood and Catholic Bronagh Hinds don't seem to think so. These two founding NIWC members spoke on BBC's Women's Hour in December 2004, re-stating the importance of involving women in the peace process -- a role, says Blood, they've always taken on: "If the true story of Northern Ireland during the years of The Troubles ever comes to be truly written, women will have a large part of that story to tell. I can think of thousands of women throughout Northern Ireland who, through the darkest days, held their community together and worked across the peace line."

"We may have an agreement," adds Hinds, "but peace gets built bit by bit, and we have to address things still within our own communities and across the communities, even things that we are denying and not addressing now, and women will have a big role to play in that."

From: http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?did=858319461&Fmt=3&clientId=2641&RQT=309&VName=PQD