Interview - Activist’s peace movement born from violence

Activist’s peace movement born from violence

On Aug. 10, 1976, Mairead Corrigan McGuire’s sister Anne took her four children for a walk in West Belfast, Northern Ireland. At the same time, British soldiers and members of the Irish Republican Army got into a shootout while driving in the neighborhood; 19-year-old Danny Lennon, an IRA member, was shot through the head and killed. The car he drove went out of control, killing two of McGuire’s nephews and her niece. Her sister sunk into despair and later took her own life.

Three days later, the three children were buried, and the Peace People were born of the cooperation of Maguire and two other women who did not know each other until the tragedy. Maguire and co-founder Betty Williams were honored for their efforts with the Nobel Peace Prize the following year, and since then, Maguire has become an advocate for peace around the world.

Maguire, 60, visited Chicago from her home in Kilcief, Northern Ireland, in Early October to show support for the “Boeing 7,” Chicago-area peace activists convicted of trespassing during a protest in the lobby of Boeing’s Chicago headquarters. She talked with staff writer Michelle Martin.

The Catholic New World: When your sister’s children were killed, why did you start a peace movement instead of fighting violence with violence?

Mairead Corrigan Maguire: Well, we had a great experience of violence—both state violence and paramilitary violence—and we had seen that wasn’t working. It was cyclical, and somehow it had got to be broken. When Anne’s children were killed, that was an opportunity for us to say, “Stop the violence, stop the killing. There’s got to be another way for us to solve this problem.”

I went to the television studio and asked to go on television and that was essentially the message. Betty Williams—who I didn’t know—went collecting signatures from her local area, calling for a rally for peace. On the 13th of August, when the three children were buried, myself, Betty and Ciaran McKeown, who was the third co-founder of the peace movement, met for the first time. The rally was the next day. It just took off from there really. I think we’re just instruments in a way, because people wanted to march for peace to do something, and we just called them together.

TCNW: How did Peace People promote peace?

MCM: We had peace marches for the first six months, every Saturday. We particularly marched into areas where people had been afraid to go—you know, “You can’t march into that area because that’s a Protestant area,” or “You can’t go to that area because it’s a Catholic area,” and the paramilitaries were active there. We helped people to overcome their fear and to have confidence and to say, “This is our city, this is our place and we want peace,” and show that we didn’t want to use violence as a way to solve our problems. In the first six months of those rallies, we had a 70 percent decrease in the rate of violence.

After the rally period, we encouraged people to work for peace wherever they were and however they could, particularly to begin to look at the root causes of violence and the issues of human rights abuses. People then were really beginning to work in their own communities and across communities, to develop friendships. Our whole approach was a people-to-people movement and we also campaigned on issues like the appeal of the Emergency Provisions Act, we felt very much that that the state’s injustice was part of the cycle of violence, so we did a lot of lobbying on things like emergency laws.

TCNW: Did you always have Catholics and Protestants together?

MCM: We always had people of all faiths and none, and part of our approach was that we had to work together as people and look at the human rights issues. We resisted any attempts to kind of put us into a Catholic-Protestant balance. We always tried to say that wasn’t important and it wasn’t what we were about. We were encouraging people to move above these divisions in our society.

TCNW: How did your faith play into your decision to do this?

MCM: I was born Catholic on Falls Road in 1944, and I grew up in a very Catholic family, and my faith was always very important to me. I think one of the most important things I did learn through Vatican II was that faith without acts is a dead faith, so I was always socially involved in my community. Never, pre-Peace People, politically involved, but working with the youth in the community and working in the parish.

When the Peace People started, my faith had prepared me to be socially and politically involved.

One of the other things that helped me very much, at the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, there was a great deal of (discussion) about the whole question of war and armed violence. I myself living in a Catholic community under state injustice had to ask myself, “Can a Christian ever use violence?” I read just-war theory and went on a spiritual journey if you like. I finally went to the cross, and for me, the message of the cross is absolute non-violence. They’re killing him up there, and God loves every person. So at that stage I totally rejected just-war theory. I think it’s a phony piece of morality.

You cannot read the Gospels and not know Jesus is totally nonviolent. I began then to live out of a non-violent ethos. As a church, I think we need to throw out the just-war theory and develop a theology that is more in the spirit of the Gospel, that is non-violent. I think we need to bring the Gospel of non-violence and peace to the heart of the Christian message.

I came to that kind of spiritual journey in the early 70s, so when the Peace People started it was natural to me that the movement would be totally committed to non-violence.

TCNW: How did winning the Nobel Peace Prize affect the work of the Peace People?

MCM: It helped internationalize the image of the PP. It also helped open a lot of doors to the Peace People. It was a tremendous help there, and it’s a great honor, so it did help in many ways within the movement and internationally. In some ways it didn’t help. Some of the communities didn’t like us getting this prize.

TCNW: What do you say when someone says, you’ve done great work in Northern Ireland, but why should we listen to you about Iraq?

MCM: I think the most exciting thing for me in the world today is that we are the human family, and we are interconnected in a way that previous generations were never interconnected. That means that for me, something that’s happening in Iraq or Chechnya—those are members of the human family. If we can do something to help each other, in an interdependent world, we have a right and a responsibility to do that. So whenever I was invited to go to Iraq by the American peace movement, I was delighted to go in to see what the situation was on the ground.

I also believe Northern Ireland has a tremendous message for the world, that militarism and paramilitarism don’t solve these deep ethnic, political struggles that we’re faced with, and we can only deal with them in a non-violent, all-inclusive manner. That message for me is very important.

TCNW: When you visited Iraq during the sanctions period, what was your assessment of conditions there?

MCM: The tremendous suffering of the Iraqi people—there are no words to describe it. I was shocked and in grief for weeks after I returned, because I could not believe that such suffering would be allowed to go on and the whole world would not be saying it’s got to be stopped. What happened in Iraq could have been prevented. We visited in a shelter in 1999 where two American smart bombs had been dropped, and 500 mostly women and children had been incinerated. We visited the Al-Mansour Pediatric Hospital, and there were the children, dying of preventable diseases—cholera, malaria and so on. The doctors said, “We don’t have medicine to save their lives.” Seven a day were dying. … We were also told that UNSCOM had done its job so well that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Iraq was not a threat to any country outside itself. That’s why it was so important for us to come out of Iraq, to lift the sanctions and help the people get on their feet. They knew that Saddam Hussein was a cruel dictator, and they could change the regime themselves. There was a way to do it.

That was why it was just so awful that the war and the invasion of Iraq took place on the 19th of March, 2003. This country was already suffering so much. We came here on St. Patrick’s Day (in 2003) and went to the White House and were arrested. One has to draw attention through drastic measures to say these people are human beings. These foreign policies that America’s putting out, they’re creating an anger and bitterness, and violence and injustice breeds violence and terrorism. The situation in Iraq today is so much worse, but that was preventable.

TCNW: How?

MCM: We can solve these problems through dialogue and negotiation. We don’t need war. War is like slavery and racism. They’ve had their day. There are definite ways to solve our problems. Every single person should be working for no more wars. If we continue with this myth that war works, that it’s inevitable, that it’s glorious, that we’ve always had war—this is a myth, and we’ve got to break it. Wars don’t work. Wars are dangerous today because 80 percent of the people who die are the civilian population—women and children. It’s only a matter of time before we drop a nuclear bomb on someone. We have pressingingly to work for no more war and conflict resolution.

This is what Northern Ireland has to say to the world: We in 1976 could have gone down the road of war and conflict, but we chose the path of peace. Now, thank God, we are reaping the benefits and the fruits of doing it in a peaceful manner.

TCNW: What advice do you have for peace activists?

MCM: They must try every channel to make their voice heard, to continue what they’re doing. I have always been deeply inspired by American peace activists, groups like Voices in the Wilderness—I nominated Voices in the Wilderness for the Nobel Peace Prize. So keep at it. Keep holding your peace rallies. Keep protesting. Keep writing to the political leaders.

I am totally anti-violence, so I would say keep your protests non-violent like Martin Luther King, like Gandhi. But protest, protest, protest. We are in a very dangerouls situation in the world today with regard to American and American foreign policy, and we have got to turn this thing around, and it can only be done non-violently.

For more information on Peace People, visit www.peacepeople.com.

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