what works for reconciliation?

What worksfor reconciliation?

Robin Wilson

2 DEMOCRATIC DIALOGUE NO 19

Democratic DialogueReport 19October 2006

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3DEMOCRATIC DIALOGUE NO 19

Preface 4

Executive summary 6

Introduction 7

Reconciliation 10

Ethos 15

Dialogue 33

Ripple effects 47

Social fabric 54

Conclusion 61

References 63

Appendix a: interviewees 65

Appendix b: topic guide 67

Contents


Preface

This is the 19th report from the thinktank Democratic Dialogue. DD grate-fully acknowledges the financial assis-

tance for this project from the CommunityRelations Council, which seeks to promote apeaceful, inclusive and fair society based on rec-onciliation and mutual trust. The viewsexpressed in the publication do not necessarilyreflect those of the CRC, on whose behalf PaulJordan and Francess McClelland have beenunfailingly co-operative.

The author wishes to acknowledge the sig-nificant contribution of Gráinne Kelly in draw-ing up the initial research proposal. OwenHargie, Erin Parish and Maria Power offeredhelpful advice on the interview schedule. AndAlison Keenan of the CRC kindly assisted inidentifying the eight organisations sampled.

Special thanks are due to all those organisa-tions for being willing to accommodate the dis-ruptive demands that any research entails. Anda particular debt is owed to the 37 individualswho not only agreed to be interviewed but also

gave so generously of their wisdom.Comments on the publication are very

welcome. Our catalogue of publications (avail-able in pdf format) is detailed on our web site.

Anyone wishing to be kept informed of DD

projects and events should contact us to beadded to our regular e-mailing list. All the nec-essary details are on p2.

This report is based on 37 interviewswith individuals associated in variouscapacities with eight diverse, long-

standing organisations working for reconcilia-tion in Northern Ireland. Through theseinterviews, and ancillary documentary research,it has sought to distil transferable ‘good prac-tice’ from which other new, or improving,organisations might benefit.

On the basis of prior work by DemocraticDialogue, a definition of reconciliation isrehearsed. And the key task of organisationsworking for reconciliation, in challengingstereotypes, is identified.

The first group of elements of good prac-tice distilled focuses on the ethos of suchorganisations. These include, in short:• clarity of purpose,• a holistic, teamwork approach,• an idealistic and creative culture,• a long-term commitment to social justice,• individual and organisational ‘reflexiveness’,and

• interculturalist and cosmopolitan values.Having identified dialogue as the essential

activity of organisations in this arena, the nextset of features concerns the conditions mostconducive to effective dialogue. These embrace:• a sense of security for participants,• responsiveness to targeted individuals andgroups,• recurrent contact in protracted projects,• a focus on the quality of exchanges, and• creative use of the arts and electronic media.

Thirdly, the interviews drew out what havebeen described as ‘ripple effects’—aspects ofgood practice which allow of a wider socialimpact. These involve:• stimulation of wider networks, diffusing inno-vations,• new ‘spin-off ’ ventures by practitioners, andtraining in the facilitation of dialogue.

Lastly, the canvas is widened to the broadersocial fabric. The report teases out two keyroles of organisations working for reconcilia-tion in this regard:


Executive summary

• building trust in a mistrustful society, and• establishing the warp and weft of cross-communal relationships.

And it suggests that funders, the CommunityRelations Council and government could all domore in brokerage roles—not substitutingthemselves for organisations with credibility onthe ground but acting to enhance their overalleffectiveness. In particular, government needsto offer much more targeted support to volun-tary organisations specifically and explicitlycommitted to tackling sectarian division.


This research project started from twosimple assumptions. These were thatpractitioners in non-governmental

organisations working for reconciliation inNorthern Ireland tend to have the modesty ofself-regard associated with a tolerant disposi-tion and that they have very little time due totheir commitment to the work. If true, in com-bination these would mean—particularly forthose with years or even decades of experi-ence—that they would carry around a largereservoir of tacit knowledge about good prac-tice from which many others could benefit.

A straightforward piece of research wouldthen be to interview individuals associated witha range of longstanding organisations in thisarena, picking their brains as to the lessons theyhad learned. What, in their experience, hadworked in the cause of reconciliation (and whathad not), and why?

The following organisations were selected,with the assistance of the core-funding officerof the Community Relations Council:

• Ballynafeigh Community DevelopmentAssociation, the umbrella body for commun-ity development in this mixed south Belfastneighbourhood;• Co-operation Ireland, the body promotingpeople-to-people relationships across the Irishborder;• the Corrymeela Community, the pioneer ofinter-religious dialogue in Northern Ireland,associated with a north-coast residential centre;• Future Ways, a small group of skilled indi-viduals assisting public agencies to come toterms with diversity among workers and users;• Holywell Trust, a Derry-based centre whichhas fostered dialogue on politically challengingissues;• the Nerve Centre, again based in Derry,using modern audio-visual technology to tacklecultural diversity with young people;• the Northern Ireland Council forIntegrated Education, advocate for, and sup-porter of, integrated schools across the region;and


Introduction

• WAVE, a support group for all victims of the‘troubles’, regardless of the nature of the vic-tim (or the perpetrator).

Thumbnail sketches of these organisationsare interspersed through the text. They are not,however, the focus of this report, because it isnot an evaluation of their individual perform-ance (a task many others more qualified thanthis writer have carried out) but an attempt todistil and disseminate more broadly what con-stitutes good practice.

They were chosen to cover diverse spheresof work, as well as a geographic spread. Theycould also be located at different points along aspectrum in their focus on reconciliation, asagainst other valuable goals: from front andcentre (like Corrymeela), to more tangential(like the Nerve Centre) to even (as with WAVE)having a problematic relationship with reconcil-iation itself. And not only was the director ofeach organisation interviewed but so were arange of others—whether other staff, commit-tee members or individuals otherwise associat-ed (or formerly associated) in some way with itswork. The aim was to ensure multiple perspec-tives were brought to bear, and in all 37 individ-uals agreed to semi-structured interviews (seeappendices).

What was, however, striking was that italmost appeared as if the interviewees had col-lectively colluded in advance. Despite the diver-sity of organisational and individual locations,common themes were independently rehearsedagain and again. This would therefore suggestthat the lessons drawn are highly generalisable.

What was also surprising was the many occa-sions in which concepts drawn from economics

illuminated the discussions. Those involved inthe work of reconciliation are engaged aboveall, as discussed below, in challenging stereo-types. But one widespread stereotype of suchindividuals themselves would be of the ‘well-meaning and woolly-minded’—as against, pre-sumably, the ‘hard-headed and businesslike’.Yet, again and again, analogies from discussionsof what makes for good economic perform-ance proved highly germane to understandingwhat works in advancing reconciliation.

What was, perhaps, most remarkable, how-ever, about the participants in this research—who gave of their valuable time extensively andwith great courtesy—was the extent to whichthey confirmed the initial hypothesis. Theimportance of story-telling for reconciliationwill also be underscored in this report. Yet theinterviewees were, themselves, telling personalstories. Again and again, these were hugelyimpressive testaments to deep emotional com-mitment, told with the least self-promotion.Indeed, one interviewee was at pains to stressthat the organisations involved should not berepresented as elevated ‘experts’.

To link these two points, economists thesedays talk a lot about the importance of ‘humancapital’: the success of firms depends not onlyon the physical capital invested in machineryand so on but, to an ever-increasing and per-haps greater extent, on the talents, skills andenergies of those who work for them. The evi-dence of this research is that the value ofhuman capital in NGOs working for reconcilia-tion in Northern Ireland—despite very modestinvestment of money in them—is high in-deed. In many ways it is a resource untapped by


government in tackling the ills of this dividedsociety.

The succeeding chapters of this report pro-vide substance as to what constitutes goodpractice in four senses. First, what are organisa-tions working for reconciliation about?Secondly, what exactly do they do?—here thefocus is on their key role in facilitating dialogue.Thirdly, how do they multiply the results, wheretheir work ripples out into the wider society?And, finally, how do they contribute to the larg-er task of mending Northern Ireland’s dam-aged social fabric—and what can governmentand funders do to help them?

It was a great privilege to listen to these sto-ries and Democratic Dialogue is indebted toeveryone who told them. Hopefully, this reportwill do them justice in making their conclusionsavailable to a wider audience. Even though theauthor has done little to add to them, exceptframing them in terms of common themes,responsibility for the conclusions rests, ofcourse, with him alone.


Architects of the future:Windmill Integrated Primary School

First, three key questions have to befaced. What is reconciliation, and doesNorthern Ireland really need it? And

what would ‘good practice’ in working for rec-onciliation be seeking to achieve?

In two previous Democratic Dialoguereports, Gráinne Kelly and Brandon Hamber(2005a, 2005b) have utilised international

experience to address a local problem—makingthe concept of ‘reconciliation’ meaningful onthe ground. Surveying the literature on the sub-ject and drawing on expertise from around theworld, they developed a definition.

Interviews with practitioners in threeNorthern Ireland localities detected an uneasi-ness with the notion of reconciliation, partly


RECONCILIATION

Our working hypothesis is that reconciliation is a necessary process followingconflict.However,we believe it is a voluntary act and cannot be imposed. It involvesfive interwoven and related strands:

• Developing a shared vision of an interdependent and fair society

• Acknowledging and dealing with the past

• Building positive relationships

• Significant cultural and attitudinal change

• Substantial social, economic and political change

Reconciliation

stemming from a concern (for the secular) thatit had an inherently theological connotation andpartly, more generally, from a sense that it had anebulous character. Interestingly, however,interviewees felt by and large quite comfortablewith the definition developed by Kelly andHamber (see box), subsequently taken up bythe Special European Union Programmes Bodyto tighten funding criteria for the Peace II pro-gramme extension.

The research for this report would bear outthe robustness of this definition. The themesaddressed in the next two chapters can be ref-erenced back to the five strands. Each of themhas a clear resonance in what follows and insome cases, such as in the discussion of ‘rela-tionships’, there is a one-to-one correlation.Notably, the one element whose relevancesome of those interviewed by Kelly andHamber were less sure about—‘substantialsocial, economic and political change’—emerged unexpectedly and frequently in thisresearch, and is discussed under the heading of‘social orientation’.

Ironically, some of those reluctant to use thelanguage of reconciliation feel that it does notprivilege sufficiently social and political change—that it implies that division in society is merelya product of individual prejudice and that thisignores wider social determinants. These arevery important connections to make.

Richard Wilkinson (2005) has highlightedhow in human and indeed other primate soci-eties characterised by ‘dominance hierarchies’,violence tends to occur between those locateddown the pecking order and their near neigh-bours, over which has precedence, while those

at the top—deemed out of reach by their sub-ordinates—tend to escape scot-free. As anexplanation of why Northern Ireland’s majordivision by social class engenders nothing likethe reaction caused by the minor differencesbetween working-class Protestants and work-ing-class Catholics, this is hard to better.

In such societies, according to MichaelChance (cited in Wilkinson, 2005: 252), ‘We areprimarily concerned with self security … [and]rank, hierarchy, convention and maintaininggood order.’ In contrast to this ‘insecure andfearful’ environment, in more egalitarian soci-eties—again, including some in the animalworld—the atmosphere is ‘carefree and cre-ative’ and ‘group members form a network ofsocial relationships and are able to communi-cate fearlessly and openly with each other’.

These words and phrases—creativity, net-works, safe spaces for dialogue—will also recurin the discussion below. And this leads to a keyconclusion: not only is fundamental socialchange an intrinsic feature of reconciliation,but reconciliation has to be at the heart of anyprogressive politics for Northern Ireland.

The publication of A Shared Future(OFMDFM, 2005) by government in 2005,regardless of the limits of the departmentalcommitments it contained, represented a signalstatement. For the first time since partition, thegovernment of Northern Ireland—any govern-ment: unionist, direct-rule or power-sharing—affirmed that Northern Ireland was a deeplydivided society and that this was politicallyintolerable. The unionist regime had essentiallygiven Catholics the options only of assimila-tion, emigration or a ghettoised existence.


Direct rule had replaced this (bourgeois)Protestant-monopoly power by technocracy.And the first power-sharing administration hadabolished the Community Relations Commis-sion—on a naïve, job-done, assumption—whilethe second had failed even to discuss the reviewof community relations it had itself commis-sioned—never mind act upon it—before it wassuspended.

A Shared Future argues the case for reconcil-iation mainly on grounds of the socio-econom-ic costs of division. These are real andsubstantial. But there is an overriding and com-pelling moral-cum-political case. As the chiefexecutive of the CRC, Duncan Morrow (inter-viewed for this research in connection with thework of Future Ways), has put it, London andDublin have been seeking to establish function-ing power-sharing arrangements for NorthernIreland in the expectation that ‘a shared future’would follow, whereas the truth may be thecontrary: only when there is wide-scale com-mitment to a shared future, including amongpolitical parties, will stable power-sharing bepossible.

A Shared Future has therefore to be a keycommitment for government in NorthernIreland—again, any government—for theforeseeable future. But it can only move fromthe level of the slogan to the street if non-governmental organisations and individualpractitioners are given the opportunity to lift itoff the page—particularly given the lack ofcommitment of those regional politicianslocked into mutual antagonism, whose sectari-an clienteles it threatens to undermine. Andinnovative work by NGOs and practitioners may

provide important pointers as to what statutoryagencies, many of which are struggling withthis complex challenge, may contribute to the‘triennial action plans’ (OFMDFM, 2006) throughwhich the policy will be effected.

And what is the problem to which goodpractice in reconciliation might be thesolution? It may help to take a step

back and ask how communal divisions aresustained.

We have, as Amartya Sen (2006: xiii) argues,‘inescapably plural identities’: male or female,working-class or middle-class, old or young,sporty or otherwise, and so on and so on. It fol-lows that at any one time, in any one situation,we have to reflect on which of our affiliationsis important. And so: ‘Central to leading ahuman life, therefore, are the responsibilities ofchoice and reasoning. In contrast, violence ispromoted by the cultivation of a sense ofinevitability about some allegedly unique—often belligerent—identity that we are sup-posed to have and which apparently makesextensive demands on us (sometimes of a mostdisagreeable kind). The imposition of anallegedly unique identity is often a crucial com-ponent of the “martial art” of fomenting sec-tarian confrontation.’

It is the process of stereotyping whichdenies the inherent complexity of every indi-vidual’s identity, reducing him or her to a merecipher for the group, to whom a negativeenemy-image can then all too easily be attached.A stereotype is ‘a highly simplified representa-tion of social realities’ and stereotypes create ‘ablack and white design’ that leaves no room for


diversity (Bauman, 2002: 115).And it is in and through ‘degenerate spirals

of communication’ (Giddens, 1994: 245)between opposing communal protagonists thattensions are maintained and reproduced.Projecting on to a demonised ‘other’ aspects ofourselves that we cannot face reproduces con-flict and violence (Volkan, 1997). On the onehand, one’s ‘own side’ can thus be recruited tothe role of passive and blameless victim. Onthe other, to the ‘other side’ can be attributed allresponsibility for each twist in the spiral (Beck,1997: 83-84). In Northern Ireland this hascome to be called the ‘blame game’.

We unavoidably operate with conceptions ofthe world that are inherently partial and limited.And we fill in the ‘gaps’ with assumptions, esti-mates and guesses which may or may not relateto any evidence and may or may not coherewith anything else we profess to believe.

But a modesty of self-regard can help pre-vent us engaging in destructive stereotyping(Ignatieff, 1999: 62): ‘We are likely to be moretolerant toward other identities only if we learnto like our own a little less.’ By the same token,the more we can not only know of othersbut also the more empathy we can feel withthem, the less likely are we to be dependent onstereotyped representations in interculturalencounters.

This point challenges, by the by, much ofwhat has become known in NorthernIreland—to use an awkward neologism—as‘single-identity work’. This is, ironically,premised on a stereotype itself: that Protestants,as a group, have an identity ‘deficit’ whileCatholics, as a group, are ‘confident’ about

theirs. It’s an odd ‘confidence’ that seesworking-class Catholic neighbourhoods stillpredominating at the bottom of the social hier-archy decades after the civil-rights movement.

The politics of ‘multiculturalism’ (Barry,2001) has emerged in recent decades as anunderstandable response to the subordinationof members of ethnic (including religious)minorities in multi-ethnic states, such as histor-ically Catholics in Northern Ireland (howevermuch sectarian domination was cross-cut byclass division). But it has had the unintendedeffect of hardening communal divisions,including in Britain, where anxiety has mountedsince the 2001 riots in northern English milltowns and the 2005 London bombs aboutthe ghettoisation of Muslim communities.Bizarrely, however, the commission establishedby the government to explore interculturalismand social cohesion has been told discussion of‘faith schools’ is off-limits—despite the obvi-ous critical lesson from Northern Ireland, oftheir role in reproducing stereotypes, that Sen(2006) and others have drawn.

As Jeff Spinner-Halev (1999: 65) has argued,‘A multiculturalism that tries to create a societywith several distinctive cultures deeply threat-ens citizenship. In this kind of multiculturalsociety, people are not interested in citizenship;they are not interested in making the state a bet-ter place for all; they care little about how pub-lic policies affect most people or about theirfellow citizens. Even the term ‘‘fellow citizen’’might strike them as strange. What they haveare fellow Jews, or fellow blacks, or fellowMuslims, or fellow Sikhs. Citizens, however, arenot their fellows.’


If multiculturalism has been associated witha competitive ‘politics of recognition’, focusingon communal assertion vis-à-vis the state—as inNorthern Ireland’s endless contest for ‘parity ofesteem’—an intercultural perspective focusesrather on the relationships between diverse cit-izens, and so places a premium on dialogue,with a view to reducing communal tensions.

And if the proliferation of identity politicshas coincided with the widening of socialinequalities (Barry, 2001: 325), underlying anintercultural perspective must be an egalitarianconception of citizenship. Otherwise, self-regard will always take priority over regardfor the other and dialogue will never succeed,as one side (the more powerful) will not belistening.

Good practice, then, is likely to be aboutchallenging stereotypes through interculturaldialogue. David Stevens of Corrymeela encap-sulated this when he said that ‘good practiceis ultimately about giving people some capac-ity for self-reflection and a capacity to tryto enter somebody else’s world’. The inter-views excerpted below put rich flesh on thebones of this argument.


The first set of themes to emerge fromthe interviews concerned the ethos oforganisations working for reconcilia-

tion. And the first issue to emerge in that con-text was clarity of purpose.

As Alan McBride of WAVE put it, ‘you needto have an understanding of what it is you’retrying to do … Then after that it’s just a matterreally of finding what you need in order to sup-port that work that you’re doing.’ And NicholaLynagh of the Northern Ireland Council forIntegrated Education said: ‘There’s somethingaround just what is it that we’re trying to do.What do we want to transform this societyfrom and to?’

Tony Kennedy of Co-operation Irelandagreed, reflecting that ‘maybe the most impor-tant thing is to be clear about what you want toachieve because I think that’s where we as asociety blew the Peace money. If anybody evercomes to write an honest record of what hap-pened with the European Peace money, youwould have to conclude that we as a society

blew most of it on non-peace programmes.’ Ifanyone came to him for advice on starting up anew group, he would say: ‘They would need tothink about what they wanted to achieve by it.What is their aim?’

Often this comes down to a paragraph ortwo which clearly identifies the aim of theorganisation. Terry Doherty of HolywellTrust said that ‘everything we do has an ele-ment of “Where does this fit into that missionstatement?”.’

Katie Hanlon has been director ofBallynafeigh Community Development Assoc-iation for over two decades. As she recalled,‘when I took over Ballynafeigh in 1985 first—Istill have no job description or anything else, Inever wrote one for myself—I inherited thejob, which was the constitution with the open-ing paragraph underlined and the objects. So,actually, I was employed to uphold the constitu-tion. I’ve taken that job very seriously and that’swhat I see as my role.’

Clarity of purpose easily lends itself to


Ethos

clarity of message. Deborah Girvan of NICIE

said of her communications effort on behalf ofthe organisation: ‘Same consistent message youkeep repeating and repeating and repeating.And then you hear it being fed back to you, youknow you’ve made it!’

These, are, of course, lessons applicable toany organisation. What makes voluntary organ-isations different, by and large, from (say) busi-nesses—though much comes later on thesurprising similarities—is that they are drivenby values rather than economic imperatives.

Such values can suffuse an organisation, sothat the aim or mission does not become a setof warm words forgotten as soon as drafted.Ms Lynagh applied it to the integrated school asa practical example: ‘I think it’s more importantthat the school holds at its heart an ethos, avision, of community relations where they’rereally trying to pull every value that’s ethicallyright—like equity and understanding and rela-tionships—to the top.’ The key then was to‘make them living, more than just in your cor-porate plan or in the school development plan’.

Dr Morrow agreed: ‘I hate it because it isclichéd and it’s extremely limited in its value,but the “Equity Diversity Interdependence”language which emerged … [was because] wehad to tell people this wasn’t nationalism andunionism. This was an ethical, value-led projectand we were insisting that the national projectsbe subject to the ethical framework, rather thanthe other way round.’

The great strength of the slogan is that itdoes hold together the elements that are oftenunhelpfully counterpoised—equity and interde-pendence—in any discussion of diversity in

Northern Ireland. But it is a mouthful andNorthern Ireland already appeared to havemore acronyms per square kilometre than any-where else before ‘EDI’ was added to them.

So, if it has become ‘clichéd’, is there some-thing beyond EDI which can encapsulate thevalues of organisations working for reconcilia-tion? Interculturalism may provide an answer,as discussed below.

A virtue of clearly defining an organisation’saim is it implies identifying a state of affairs, agoal, which it will work to realise. It is easy fororganisations to keep ticking over, doing eachday roughly what they did the last. It is eveneasy to think that one is achieving, by measur-ing the outputs of the work, such as the num-ber of attendees at a training session.

But what really matters is the outcome(s)that one is trying to achieve. As Mr Kennedyencapsulated it, ‘that’s really the focus of ourstrategic plan, because somebody described thisto me as “oh, is this the survival of Co-opera-tion Ireland?” and we were saying, “absolutelynot”’.

Outcomes in terms of reconciliation areclearly much harder to assess than ‘bums onseats’. But Einstein warned against the tenden-cy that what gets counted, counts. As SandraPeake of WAVE argued, with an eye to funders,‘we are being driven by targets and whatever,but actually the qualitative value of our work,which is often not measured, is overlooked andprobably the least rated, and yet actually it’smost important’.

It is tempting to reduce the evidence fun-ders, and government, seek for monitoring andevaluation to indicators which can be readily


measured. As Sanderson (2000: 216) complains,‘concern with understanding, explanation andlearning is subordinated in discussions of eval-uation in official circles to issues of measure-ment and accountability’. Indicators may wellexclude important aspects which can only bedetected by qualitative methods (Sanderson,2000: 226, 223).

One of the things that makes reconcil-iation such a challenging task forgovernments is that, like many con-

temporary political issues, it is an outcome thatno one department is able to ‘deliver’ on itsown. It’s the same story with other key con-cerns like social inclusion or sustaining theecosystem. They are not just challenges of hugescale but they also represent complex combina-tions of problems. As already indicated, a broadunderstanding of reconciliation embracessocial, economic and political aspects, as well asthe more psychological and emotional.

It is easy to be daunted by this, but anotherway of looking at it is to say that individuals donot experience such issues broken into conven-ient departmental boxes either—that’s why theyoften feel driven ‘from pillar to post’ when theyengage public services. Yet voluntary organisa-tions can address these challenges in a morepersonalised way. And they can sometimesbring together a range of competences whichcan, under one roof, meet the different aspectsof that person’s needs. A person attending avictims’ group like WAVE, for example, maywant advice about problems with handlingchronic physical pain but may also be interest-ed in having the support of a befriending

relationship.So taking a whole-organisation, holistic

approach may be key to good practice. Indeed,WAVE sees itself, according to Ms Peake, as ‘pro-viding very much a holistic service’.

Conventional organisational hierarchies,where it is assumed knowledge is concentratedat the top and is filtered down as orders to thebottom, may get in the way of this approach.Modern firms have, however, sought to flatten


Ballynafeigh Community Development Association

Founded: 1974Base: BelfastPurpose: to sustain, support and celebrate mixedcommunities and neighbourhoods within Ballynafeigh andelsewhereDirector: Katie HanlonWeb site: www.bcda.net E-mail: [email protected] Signal achievement: establishment of a rich social fabric tosustain Ballynafeigh as a shared neighbourhood, in the faceof economic, sectarian and demographic challenges

hierarchies, realising the importance of theintelligence gleaned about their product—howit is made, how it sells—from those dealingdirectly with the customer.

Eamonn Deane of Holywell Trust pointedout how funders often operated with tradition-al expectations of line-management which mil-itated against the ethos of working forreconciliation: ‘The only line management thatwould ever happen here is … two colleaguessitting chatting together to see how they cansupport one another. But it’s not line manage-ment in the sense that I have seen in otherorganisations, in that hierarchical sense. If youcreate a new society, if you are building a peace-ful society, then we can’t adopt those old waysof being together.’

NICIE, for example—and this is one of thosesubtle ways in which the socially progressiveand the conciliatory intersect—is determinedthat tackling controversial issues should bedone on a whole-school basis. As Ms Lynaghexplained it, ‘it’s an absolute must we haveclassroom assistants in, and it’s an absolutemust that we have the admin staff, people whogreet you. So we say it has to be a whole-schoolapproach: we have to have all represented.’ Intheir latest report as chaplains of LaganCollege, Helen Killick and Sr Anne Kilroy insistthat integration ‘is an issue that needs to perme-ate every aspect of school life’.

Derick Wilson of Future Ways described itswork with local authorities in similar vein,pointing out that ‘where you get a leisure centreattendant and a cleansing official and a chiefexecutive having a new dialogue about theneeds of the town, those are things that don’t

happen just out of equality legislation. Theyhappen out of the good-relations approach.’

Ann Anderson-Porter of Co-operationIreland echoed this too. Arguing that the organ-isation’s staff should face the same challengesas those it was funding, she said that ‘we wantevery single person who works in this organisa-tion—no matter what their job is, from thecleaner to the EU staff—to have gone throughthe same processes’.

This subtle understanding of the fabric of asuccessful organisation is not easily captured byfunders, however. Anxious to avoid committingthemselves to giving core support to organisa-tions to meet their overheads, they tend to sup-port projects instead.

Ms Hanlon decided a robust response wasrequired to the fragmenting effects this wasunwittingly having on BCDA:

Projectitis forced people to work for the projectand forget the organisation was an organisa-tion—it was a holistic thing. So you had to workin straight lines and people got absolutely focusedon these straight lines to deliver their targets, theirgoals and all the rest of it, and their budget. Soeven the funder itself only saw the project; it did-n’t see the organisation. So I was trying to run anorganisation which was more like seven or eightdifferent organisations and the holistic elementwas going, and so were some of the visions andideals and all the rest of it. I had to kind of smashthat in order to push people to realise that therewas a higher body that they were working for.

Effective organisations, however, do notjust combine the skills of those whowork for them. They achieve a result

greater than the sum of their parts through


teamwork. As Ms Girvan described it, ‘it’s onlyby really working together as a team in here thatyou can really pull out the key bits which reallymatter’.

Organisations working for reconciliation areessentially engaged in problem-solving. Theproblem has no predictable solution, easilyarrived at, and there are legitimate differencesof perspective as to what the solution is. This isnot like making widgets.

Thus, Mr Wilson argued that ‘if the organi-sational culture is fair, if it is open to the diver-sity of talents within the membership of itsstaff, and if it is committed—now we use thelanguage of a shared future—then the “good”,the thoughtful or the learning organisation willuse the insights of its traffic wardens, of itscleansing officials, of its leisure centre atten-dants, of its front-of-house administrative staff,as well as those working in policy and manage-ment. The eyes and ears of those organisationsare going to be greater if diverse interests andtalents of the members of staff of that organ-isation can be made into some sort of commonpurpose or common future.’

Eamon McCallion of Community Relationsin Schools concurred: ‘You need to reflect in allyou do with your team, with other individuals,and to learn from those experiences and todraw on other people’s learning. And I thinkone of the other models of good practice is todo that wider than your own organisation.’ Thisallusion to wider networks will be developed ina later chapter.

Discussing how staff at one integratedschool had addressed issues to do with integra-tion, Ms Lynagh said that ‘part of it was team-

building. There was a hidden-curriculum agen-da which was the team-building—just that theyknow each other better, be able to work on eachother’s strengths.’

BCDA (2005: 21) insists that ‘collaborativeaction and teamwork are an everyday feature’ ofits practice. Philip Whyte described how he andhis colleague brought together experiencesfrom their contacts on either side of the sectar-ian divide in Ballynafeigh and discussed themwith the director, Ms Hanlon, ensuring theorganisation could take an overview of whatwas happening in the community: ‘I think it’s ateam thing as well—we have a great team in thisorganisation. That includes where me andGerry [Tubritt] will always make sure that wemeet after key meetings to debrief along withKatie. We’re constantly in this office after ameeting to say “well this happened, this hap-pened, this happened”. So everybody’s on theball with what’s happening and then whereKatie can take us, the next step, [is to] look atthe bigger picture and say “well maybe we needto do this but maybe we just need to wait”.’

Ms Hanlon linked teamwork to a sense ofcommon purpose within the organisation,arguing that ‘when we’re all working togetherwe all know that there’s a sort of a commongoal that we’re working to’.

There is another, particular, reason whyteamwork is so important in organisationsworking for reconciliation. As Ms Girvan put itcrisply, ‘It’s not easy work, community rela-tions.’ The work of Future Ways has neverbeen easy but Dr Morrow reflected that ‘we hada trust in the team and a trust in our mutualability’.


Des Fegan now works for Co-operationIreland but his background is in busi-ness. He has found that ‘the one thing

working in this sector, the quality of humanresources you have is exceptional and I thinkwe’re very fortunate for that. They are verycommitted people …’ And this activist ideal-ism emerges as another feature of good prac-tice. Indeed, in the wider context of thevoluntary sector in Northern Ireland, 72 percent of organisations surveyed by the NorthernIreland Council for Voluntary Action said theybelieved volunteers were crucial to the runningof their organisation (NICVA, 2006).

As Ms Girvan of NICIE put it, ‘this is like avocation to many of us. We feel that we’re real-ly doing something, that we’re trying to make adifference, that we’re succeeding in it.’ AndJennifer Gormley, formerly a schoolteacher,now working with young people in the very dif-ferent atmosphere of the Nerve Centre, said: ‘Istill like my luxuries, but there’s nothing betterthan getting up in the morning and looking for-ward to where you’re going to be … and that

would apply to the artists and animators whocould well be in Dreamworks doing fantastic-ally financially rewarding things, but theychoose to be here.’

Organisations like this, where people getpaid for their work rather than working to getpaid—and this is not for a moment to suggestthat they should be paid less or that their good-will should be exploited—also attract the ener-gy of volunteers, who may bring additionalskills to the organisation. At WAVE, for instance,access to more than 100 volunteers brings ahuge 17,000+ contacts with the public in a year(WAVE, 2005). And particularly committed vol-unteers—some of whom have suffered terribleloss themselves—have joined the board oradvisory groups. Co-operation Ireland similarlydraws on volunteer effort, including from peo-ple with business connections for fundraising.

Voluntary activism has been the spearheadof the movement for integrated schools, andexplains why it has succeeded in establishingmore than 60 schools in the teeth of adversityin the past quarter century. The ‘joined-up’manual co-produced by Corrymeela and NICIE

(Potter and Lynagh, 2005: 35) cites MargaretMead: ‘Never doubt that a small group ofthoughtful committed people can change theworld. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.’

Michael Wardlow of NICIE explained thedynamic driving the founders of a new school,a dynamic challenging the fatalism and power-lessness which, arguably, sustains sectarian divi-sion in Northern Ireland more than popularcommitment to it. He said: ‘So there’s certaincharacteristics that determine those type ofpeople and generally they’re bloody-minded.


Co-operation Ireland

Founded: 1979Base: Belfast and DublinPurpose: to promote practical co-operation between thepeople of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, tofacilitate the development of a shared and stable islandDirector:Tony KennedyWeb site: www.cooperationireland.org E-mail: [email protected] Signal achievement: stimulation of people-to-peoplenetworks across the island which have been key to the'normalisation' of north-south relationships

Generally they are people who really have con-sidered this and really, having heard from uswhat this means, still are determined to take iton. And generally there around four to six peo-ple. So you have a small core of bloody-mind-ed people, in the main people who have a childwho they want to go into this system … Andthere is this feeling that “if we don’t do it noone else will”, that “if I walk away from thistoday this will never happen”.’ From such asmall origin, he said, ‘it becomes almost thisunstoppable force’.

Volunteers have played a crucial role atCorrymeela, where they may stay for a year at atime. Dr Stevens pointed out the benefits thismay offer the volunteers themselves, as well asthe organisation, noting that ‘these people arehaving the opportunity to work with a hugediversity of groups and as the year goes onsome of them would be doing programmeswith groups. So people start to see that theyhave skills that they never thought they had.Particularly working-class kids from Rathcooleor west Belfast whose formal education capaci-ties have been negative—they suddenly discov-er skills which they can use.’

There will be more to say later on just howcritical a role ex-volunteers from Corrymeelahave played over the decades. Dr Stevensexpressed real concern in this context about aperverse effect, more recently, of the Peaceprogramme in skewing organisations towardsbidding for paid staff at the expense of volun-tary activism. He warned of ‘a real dangerthat—to use a good biblical term—the laststate will be worse than the first, when themoney has worked its way through’.

Channelling that activism and idealisminto concrete practices introducesanother theme which recurred in the

interviews: creativity. One of the difficultiesconventional hierarchical organisations engen-der is a tendency towards routine. Indeed, insome areas of the civil service—for example, innorth-south co-operation in Ireland—thenotion of ‘no surprises’ has been elevated to apositive principle.

One interviewee who had previously workedin a public body in Northern Ireland said: ‘Ifyou did anything wrong you were lambasted. Itwas a very bureaucratic, very formal, very civil-service sort of thing, and it stymies an awful lotof creativity. That’s another thing: you have tobe very creative …’

BCDA (2005: 25) is committed to ‘developing,testing, and sharing models of creative prac-tice’. Funders might also not find the uncertain-ty attractive but Ms Hanlon said she would be‘very loathe to drop the creative approachesbecause that’s the most challenging part of thework’. And it does bring results: discussions inthe NICIE team generated the small-footprintimage which won the organisation a public-relations award and which captures very visual-ly the child-centred, future-oriented ethos ofthe organisation.

The traditional classroom in NorthernIreland would have been associated with didac-tic rather than interactive teaching methods.Citizenship education, however, is beingthought of with the acquisition of more criticalskills in mind. Integrated schools have tendedto be at the forefront of such developments.And Mr Wardlow argued that ‘there’s all sorts


of creative ways you can do that in a classroom,by role-playing and group work, where you canactually demonstrate when this works well andwhen it doesn’t’.

As Dr Stevens had said of volunteering, cre-ative approaches can also be a social leveller. MsGormley affirmed that ‘it’s the only thing Ithink actually gives the level playing-field toeveryone, and there’s not much in life that actu-ally can do that, but that’s where creativity isunique’. There will be a lot more to say, specif-ically on the creative arts, in the next chapter.

Inevitably, creativity involves risk-taking, butrisk-averse organisations will never challengethe fatalist acceptance of sectarian division.Maureen Hetherington of the Junction,describing her work with Holywell Trust indeveloping its Towards Understanding andHealing project, had a clear invocation to oth-ers. She urged them to ‘take the big risks, thehuge leaps of faith and the knowledge that youcould actually make this happen and that itwould be okay, because there’s so many timeswhenever you hear people say “oh I’d love todo that but I know this will happen, I know”,and it blocks people from being creative.’ Or, asMs Lynagh of NICIE put it, ‘if you’re interestedin change it’s a bumpy ride’.

Creativity is at the heart of innovation. Andinnovation, as will be evident later, is one of thekeys to achieving wider progress.

Clarity of focus, teamwork, voluntarismand creativity will all help to sustainany organisation, in the face of the

huge challenge posed by the task of reconcilia-tion. As Northern Ireland’s decades of violent

‘troubles’ recede, what heaves into view is theLabour of Sisyphus which must follow them.This puts long-termism at a premium: instantvictories can not be expected, but many set-backs can. It takes considerable resilience towithstand them.

Dr Stevens of Corrymeela, which hasentered its fifth decade, said: ‘The task of rec-onciliation in this society is a 30- or 40-year taskand that raises questions about what a recon-ciled society would look like, but it’s certainlynot what we have at the moment!’ His formercolleague Mary Montague, now at Tides, agreedthat ‘we have to take very, very seriously the factthat we’re not even close to reconciliation andrecognise that the journey that we have to makeis going to take an awfully long time—andmaybe not even [realised] within our genera-tion, because people are carrying so much hurt’.

Ms Peake of WAVE concurred: ‘I suppose it’sabout acknowledging there’s no quick fix to it.’Mr Wardlow’s advice to anyone wanting to setup a new group working for reconciliation was:‘Think ahead ten to 15 years if you’re looking atan organisation.’

But effective organisations do not justengender individuals sufficiently resilient tomeet this challenge. They also incrementallyaccumulate capacities which can be the plat-form for further progress. Ms Hanlon of BCDA

reflected: ‘I believe the success of this organisa-tion is longevity, is a lot to do with a body ofwork built over time. And change: very smallincremental steps, layer on layer on layer—working on with individuals, building up a rela-tionship over a long period of time, often fromchildhood right through to adulthood, right


through to later on.’Similarly, Lisa Kelly of Tides recalled her

experience at Corrymeela: ‘Corrymeela hassuch a huge benefit because people do buildsuch strong relationships within their experi-ence of Corrymeela, and that’s what’s quiteconsistent with the organisation, that it hasbeen there for so long, that you have genera-tions of families. That was one of the things Inoticed as family worker: you had grandparentsand parents and children, and granny had beenthere during the height of the “troubles” andthen the mum had been there and then kidscome back.’

But this again raises huge questions aboutthe funding of reconciliation work. This, ineconomic terms, is a classic ‘public good’.Unlike private goods and services, public goodsare non-exclusive and non-rival, so they cannotbe bought and sold in competitive markets—the air we breathe, for example. But becausethey are public goods, in a capitalist society theymay be under-supplied because of ‘market fail-ure’: for a firm that pollutes the air, the pollu-tion is a mere ‘externality’ that falls on someoneelse and so need not concern them. And indi-viduals feel powerless to tackle the problem,which they may with resignation accept. Sopublic intervention, as with clean-air legislation,is needed.

Reconciliation falls into this public-goodcategory. We all would benefit from it but it isnot a commodity which can be supplied to themarket and individuals face a co-ordinationdilemma in securing it. Non-governmentalorganisations working to resolve that dilemmathus need and deserve—depending, of course,

on how good their practice is—external finan-cial support from government or charitablefoundations.

Yet funders are reluctant to operate withanything like the decades-long horizon of rec-onciliation in Northern Ireland in mind. DrStevens said: ‘So this is long-term activity andtherefore it needs long-term responses, and oneof the difficulties is that the funding structurehere is so short-term and the money is startingto diminish.’ This can have perverse effects onthe operation of organisations in turn. ShonaBorthwick of Tides, again formerly of Corry-meela, said the short-termism of funders meantthat ‘you’re always trying to come up with a newinitiative instead of just consolidating anddeveloping what you have’.

As suggested in the previous chapter,and hinted at repeatedly above, work-ing for reconciliation cannot be

detached from a broader social orientation.Once more contradicting the stereotype of the‘woolly-minded well-meaning’, this research hasfound again and again steely individuals with athought-through commitment to the pursuit ofa better society—however one defines that.

In the real world, of course, individuals donot bracket off Northern Ireland’s sectarianchallenges from other problems they may facein their everyday lives. Organisations that wantto engage in reconciliation and stay relevant,therefore, have to make these connections—without spreading their net so widely as to losetheir clarity of purpose.

Karin Eyben of Future Ways gave a con-crete instance of what this can mean, discussing


the organisation’s work with local authorities.She said that ‘in Coleraine as an example, wedid some workshops with the bin men and theydidn’t have any toilet facilities. In fact the placewhere they were located had terrible toilet facil-ities and no kitchen—basic issues. And it wasclear that they were never going to engage inthis discussion until their basic humanity hadbeen recognised.’

Her colleague, Mr Wilson, bemoaning theway in which ‘the political leadership pretendsthat different traditions in their different waysown the poverty agenda’, said: ‘Of course thereare spatially concentrated groups where thepoverty is also an issue, but can we try to moveit away from being the possession of the tradi-tion to being issues of individual citizen pover-ty that we as a society need to be concernedabout?’ For him, ‘community relations work isnow core to the lifeblood of whether we have anew society’.

In Ballynafeigh, the main threat to the mixednature of the community does not come fromsectarian politics or paramilitarism: it comesfrom the ‘invisible hand’ of the housing market.The restrictions on how much housing associa-tions can bid for properties and the grants avail-able to private developers have led to manyproperties being bought by developers andturned into houses in multiple occupation,where the greatest profit lies. That tends toreplace a stable population with a transient one,and in the process the balance of the area isbecoming more skewed towards the Catholicside.

Recently, Ms Hanlon (2006) has written: ‘IfBallynafeigh is left to the mercy of market

forces there is a real and present danger that thesocial diversity which local residents andBallynafeigh Community Development Assoc-iation (BCDA) have fought so hard to protectover the past 31 troubled years will be irrevoca-bly damaged.’

Unavoidably, therefore, BCDA is drawn intopolicy debates about the regulation of thehousing market to promote the public good ofa shared community. As Gerry Tubritt of theassociation said, ‘in any given day I’m looking atyouth provision, housing, the rights of peopleon low incomes, the relationship betweenCatholic residents and Protestant residents,between old and young, and they’re all intercon-nected in my head’.

A convenient stereotype of integratedschools—rehearsed with gusto to this author bythe former and current leaders of a major polit-ical party in Northern Ireland in conversationsome years ago—is that they cater for the mid-dle class and are of no relevance to those livingin divided working-class neighbourhoods. YetNICIE (2006) affirms in its ‘statement of princi-ples’ that children should be encouraged toidentify with ‘the oppressed and victims ofinjustice’.

Sister Kilroy of Lagan College, the first inte-grated school in Northern Ireland, described its‘justice group’, which engages senior pupils. Inthe group, she said, ‘we focus on developmentissues and also Northern Ireland issues; someof them are coming from a church background,some are atheist; and it’s the one area that kidscan come together, it’s an issue that draws themtogether—the issue of making the world a bet-ter place’.


Errol Lemon, outgoing head of BrownlowCollege, another school supported by NICIE,said that ‘there’s all sorts of community-basedprojects that go on from time to time. We’ve aninter-generation project, for instance, with thesenior pupils. They go out into the local daycentres for the elderly and they make the teaand buns, they bring them in once a year for abig bash—basically, tea and sandwiches—and[they] put on a concert for them.’

Under the heading of ‘equality’, the state-ment of principles from NICIE (2006) commitsschools to ‘be democratic in all relationshipsbetween staff, parents and governors and,where possible, make decisions affecting schoollife on a consensual basis’. Indeed, NICIE claimsto have achieved a first in terms of democraticengagement, beyond the establishment ofschools councils. Mr Wardlow explained that‘one of our schools has young people actuallyon the board of governors as of right. It is theonly school in Northern Ireland that we knowit happens in, integrated or otherwise, inDungannon. And those young people do notbelieve they’re a token.’

Ms Gormley of the Nerve Centre gave anexample of the social dimension to this work.Describing the use of an animation resourcewith primary schoolchildren in the organisa-tion’s cinema, she said: ‘For me that is all aboutsocial and personal, P4s. One boy at the back ofthe cinema when I asked “does anyone knowwhat ‘empathy’ means?” … says ‘it’s knowingwhat other people feel’. And I am thinkingthat’s absolutely wonderful. Do you knowwhat I learned afterwards? The teacher came tome and she said “that wee boy, Stephen, he’s

statemented and he never speaks”.’These could all be seen by some as concerns

only for those on the liberal-left side of thepolitical spectrum. Yet Mr Wilson also high-lighted the impact of sectarian affiliations onbusiness: ‘If we build a society of narrow asso-ciations … what are we creating? It’s certainlynot a high-qualification, high-value based econ-omy where people are at ease with difference.’

Similarly, Mr Deane of Holywell Trustdescribed its imaginative proposal for a shared-city neighbourhood within Derry’s walls. He


Corrymeela Community

Founded: 1965Base: Belfast and BallycastlePurpose: to promote intercommunal dialogue, supportvictims of violence and injustice, and address issues of faithand ethicsDirector: David StevensWeb site: www.corrymeela.org E-mail: [email protected] Signal achievement: generation of a corps of hundreds ofcommitted and skilled individuals who have animatedreconciliation activity during the 'troubles' and since

pointed out that ‘we’ve been saying to the statu-tory agencies and to the decision makers, solong as this city is perceived by itself and byothers as being exclusively Nationalist or divid-ed by the river then this city has no future—ithas no commercial future’.

One of the ways in which socialthinkers have described the world welive in today, where we can no longer

take for granted social roles, has been in termsof ‘reflexivity’. As Anthony Giddens (1994: 86)puts it, ‘Decisions have to be taken on the basisof a more or less continuous reflection on theconditions of one’s action.’ Two aspects of‘reflexivity’—organisational and individual—are germane to this discussion.

Organisationally, it emerges that self-criticism is another key to good practice. AsMs Anderson-Porter put it succinctly, ‘we’llprobably learn more from the things that don’twork’. Mr McCallion of CRIS agreed that ‘a lotof the success that takes place is through fail-ure, paradoxically’.

He recognised that ‘it’s a difficult thing to do,to say “you know, I’ve made a mess of this” andput your hands in the air, but I think it’s onlythrough that reflective learning that we grow’.Ms Montague of Tides similarly urged thoseworking in this arena ‘not to be afraid to say,“look group, I’ve made a mistake here” and totake the flak or whatever: “I thought that wouldhave worked; it hasn’t worked”—and actuallybe prepared just to put your hands up and say“I’ve made a mistake”. I think that’s very, veryimportant.’

Martin Melarkey of the Nerve Centre was

self-critical in a manner typical of the intervie-wees. He said that ‘we certainly wouldn’t standhere and say the practice has fulfilled our aspi-rations or what we think the potential is’. Butthat restless urge to do better fuels continuousimprovement.

Ms Kelly of Tides said that time needed tobe created for this self-assessment. She warnedthat ‘often you’re going from one thing to thenext’ and so it was impossible ‘just to sit downand have some time to breathe and reflect onit’, to address why ‘this didn’t work—how canwe do this better?—so you have that idea ofgood practice’.

Individually, what is at issue here is a dispo-sition towards tolerance. This was oftencaptured by interviewees in terms of a

capacity metaphorically to stand outside oneselfand monitor one’s own behaviour. SusanMcEwan of Corrymeela described it as ‘explor-ation of the lens through which you look at lifeand, in a community or a society like ours thathas been so divided, looking at that lens by itsvery nature helps you explore the lens that you[use to] look at the other’.

Ms Eyben of Future Ways spoke of‘developing a level of self-awareness that issufficient to realise the normality of how youdo things. What is normal actually needs to beabnormal in terms of reconciliation, and viceversa.’

But this is not easy, as individual reflexivityinevitably entails a capacity for self-criticism.Ms Lynagh of NICIE said of her group workthat ‘it’s normal for me to come back from asession having 20 questions about myself,


going into deep reflection which sometimestortures—that sense of being open to questionand rethink and relook at things’. MsHetherington of the Junction agreed that ‘thecost is that you have to either re-examine orthink through what your values and belief sys-tems are’.

Yet it is possible. NICIE (2006) is committed,through schooling, to ‘the development ofautonomous individuals with the capacity tothink, question and research’. And one of theways reflexivity can be stimulated is throughrole-playing. Mr Lemon told of how BrownlowCollege had used role-playing to address con-troversial issues:

How do you teach the hunger strike, for instance,in a mixed class in year 11? And we have neverhad a problem with dealing with controversialissues like that, say Bloody Sunday or the hungerstrike, in a mixed class, but it does give you theopportunity to take the children out of their com-fort zone and challenge them. You could have asituation where you would be doing a role play onthe hunger strike and you could have a boy fromMourneview, a very loyalist area, being BobbySands, and having obviously done a bit of back-ground reading and so on, but putting the casefor the hunger strike. You could have somebodyfrom the Garvaghy Road, from a very nationalistbackground, being Margaret Thatcher or theBritish government spokesperson. And that hap-pens and they are quite capable within the safety,if you like, of the classroom, approaching that asan academic exercise and it hasn’t ever been anissue and people are quite happy to do that. Thepupils are; the worry is from the staff more thanthe pupils.

Like others, Dean Lee of NICIE described thisprocess as ‘empathising and putting themselvesin another person’s shoes’. That task is madeeasier by this no-man-is-an-island insight fromMr Wilson of Future Ways: ‘The other is alwaysin us. But we have a society that has promotedthis notion that others are completely other—theyare completely outside us.’

Eamon Baker of Holywell suggested that weall ‘have this capacity to disown the bits of our-selves that we don’t like. So the way I could dis-own the bit of myself that I don’t like is Idisown the perpetrator. Right? So I tell you I’ma victim …’ Describing how the war memorialin the Diamond in Derry had previously beensocially invisible to him, he said: ‘I needed to doa substantial bit of work on myself in terms ofthe bits of me that I repudiate, the shadowy bitsof me, before I could see something that was inour city. And so my speculation is we all need todo that as one way of moving forward.’

It is from others, by the same token, that amore reflexive sense of self is acquired. MrMcCallion described the best thing about beinginvolved with Corrymeela: ‘It gave me theopportunity to look at myself through others’eyes, if that makes sense.’ And Mr Deane ofHolywell said: ‘I think the best practice that Ihave ever experienced from others and fromwhat is in here have been practices or situationswhich made me stop and think about an oldproblem with fresh eyes.’

And if the inherent uncertainty of a reflex-ive disposition has its costs, it also appears tohave larger benefits. At first sight, one of thebaffling aspects of the interviews for thisproject was that age was an irrelevant factor,


even though the participants varied widely fromthose in their 20s to those in their 60s. Olderinterviewees were just as sharp, just as enthusi-astic and just as idealistic as younger partici-pants. Of course, they were more likely to havegrey hair, But Mr Deane’s comment mayexplain why their age had not wearied them—that experience of being continually ‘re-freshed’ through an openness to new ways ofthinking about old problems.

Areflexive perspective naturally leads toa questioning of what was earlierdescribed as ‘multiculturalism’. For it

challenges the idea that individuals can simplybe aggregated into ‘communities’ which are inturn equated with whole ‘cultures’. Research byBloomer and Weinreich (2003) has shown theinvalidity of this simplifying perspective in cap-turing the complexity of individual affiliationsin Northern Ireland.

Mr Wilson of Future Ways insisted: ‘I have abigger identity than just that identity that’s beengiven to me. My identity is much more perme-able. And that’s going to be a major challenge inthis society—people having more permeableidentities here running through things. Orwhen you’re in a group and a woman from aProtestant background talks about having aCatholic father and so on, and vice versa, whichhappens all the time. You begin to see peoplesay “this identity stuff doesn’t quite fit”.’

Dr Morrow of the CRC further questionedthe practicality of multiculturalism. He arguedthat while ‘the multiculturalist says “let’s liveand let live”’, as an alternative to people beingrequired to assimilate to a dominant culture, ‘it

doesn’t work either because actually we are hav-ing to share the space’.

This leads in turn to a similar-sounding butactually quite different approach to handlingcultural diversity: interculturalism. Mr Lee ofNICIE insisted that ‘there’s a deliberate use ofthe term now, interculturalism rather than mul-ticulturalism’.

Mr Wilson put it like this: ‘If multicultural-ism only builds up cultures to propose, or cul-tures to sit side by side with other cultures, itdoesn’t actually help us here. We have to meetas people, we have to meet as equal and differ-ent citizens eventually. And we have to create ashared society, which isn’t just about those ofus who have been here for years: it is also aboutbeing open to those who are more recentlyarrived.’

Ms Peake spoke of the potential of overlap-ping identities to engender intercommunalbonds. WAVE’s approach was ‘just acceptingpeople as people from wherever, and the thingthat binds it together isn’t their religion, theirpolitics. I was going to say [it’s] their victim-hood, but that’s not true: it’s their humanity andthe victimhood that’s been the circumstance oftheir coming together.’

The focus then moves to dialogue acrossdivided populations, rather than competitionbetween them. And this links to reflexivity, asdialogue can only be entered into in good faithif there is a willingness to embrace the possibil-ity of change upon reflection. As Dr Morrowcontended, ‘to turn multiculturalism into inter-culturalism, if we really are going to do that, wehave to suspend our presumption that weknow’. That requires a social safety-net, as will


later be emphasised in discussion of safe spacesfor dialogue.

What does this mean in practice? Mr Craigof Tides gave a hypothetical example:

We know multiculturalism doesn’t work becauseyou get ghettoisation inside that. So how do wego for interculturalism? The big conversation is,‘So I’m delighted that you as a Muslim wish tojoin the police force. No you can’t, under the cir-cumstances of the work, pray five times a day, butwhere the shift pattern allows you we will put aroom aside. Welcome, this is our cultural realityand we welcome you to it, but this is where youmove to. But what we can accommodate andacknowledge is through a prayer room where theshift pattern allows you to take a short break forprayer.’ Happy days. That’s interculturalism.

In the new Northern Ireland there is vastlymore cultural diversity among the ethnic-minority and migrant populations than

among its overwhelming white, Christian (andto an outsider pretty monocultural) majority.Mr Lee of NICIE again pointed to the need foran individualist rather than a group-stereotypedperspective to appreciate this fine grain. Hesaid: ‘Even within traditional minority ethniccommunities which are perceived as singleminority ethnic communities there’s still a lot ofdiversity. My own personal example [is] of theChinese community, obviously: three main lan-guages, dozens of other dialects spoken withinthat one community and completely differentbackgrounds, reasons for coming to NorthernIreland, cultural practices, countries of origin.So the diversity really is huge from thatperspective.’

An interculturalist approach seems essentialto confront this developing reality. John Petodescribed one of the Nerve Centre’s goals thus:‘To try and broaden this notion of diversity andtry and get the idea that diversity in NorthernIreland should be the same as diversity any-where else. It’s not just about Prods andCatholics basically.’

How, for example, can the still essentiallyProtestant/Catholic denominational organisa-tion of the schooling system cope, withoutincreasingly forcing square pegs into roundholes? Mr Lee asserted: ‘I think the goal postsshould be widened in terms of integration,integrated schools being seen as the ideal placefor ethnic minorities, because it fits into theethos of acceptance of diversity, no matterwhat kind of diversity is there. It’s not justacceptance of it but it’s a willingness to addresswhat makes us different, which can be appliednot just with Protestants and Catholics but alsowith other cultural and religious differences aswell.’

Even before the wave of immigration asso-ciated with EU enlargement to the east, the CRC

had effectively buried the language so current atthe time of its establishment in 1990—the talkof ‘two traditions’. There are many more cul-tural manifestations in Northern Ireland thantwo—indeed, there is an infinite number—andhermetically sealed ‘traditions’ keep pointingthe region back to its divided past, rather thanto a shared future.

The Department of Education, however, isfinding it difficult to come to terms with this.Mr Wardlow of NICIE explained:


We’ve been arguing in the integrated sector withthe department recently that integrated schoolsare defined at law as schools likely to be attendedby equal numbers of Protestants and Catholics,so we are not allowed to count ‘others’ in thebalance; now, some integrated schools have ‘oth-ers’, if you like, of over 20 per cent. We’ve beenmeeting the department and trying to get them toaddress this … They are still saying ‘well, you areProtestants/Catholics together, that’s what youare there for’ and we’re going ‘hold on, that’s notthe new Northern Ireland and if we are answer-ing questions about ten years ago and we are notaddressing the future we are actually buildingschools that are not fit for purpose’. Now thereseems to me singularly a lack of understanding ofthat, and certainly our discussion with, say, folkfrom the Islamic tradition or coming from aChinese background in terms of race is that theyreally don’t want their own schools—certainly theMuslim community don’t: they are happy to be inan integrated environment. And where that worksit works well but that is not recognised by thedepartment at the minute.

This intercultural approach, finally inthis chapter—and pointing towardsthe substantive issues discussed in the

next—is associated with a cosmopolitaninsight.

The Celtic Tiger economic phenomenon hasbeen largely a product of the managed integra-tion of the republic into the global economysince the 1960s. A low-performing economyhas moved to being a high-performer, and thisis not only through attracting high-perform-ance enterprises in sectors like computing.There has also been a diffusion effect onindigenous firms, whose game has been raisedas a result (O’Malley, 2005). Had the republicinstead persisted with the idea, pursued relent-lessly between the 30s and the 50s, of develop-ing domestic enterprises behind tariff barriers,a certain level of mediocrity would otherwisehave been continually sought and achieved, andthe possibility of developing globally competi-tive firms would have been a pipedream. In thesense of becoming able to benchmark per-formance against higher global standards, thisstory is one of ‘reflexivity’ too.

Similarly, what emerged from these inter-views was not just that some of the NGOs werewinning international contracts for work in theBalkans or the middle east, important as that isas an indicator of the quality of their work.What was striking was the insight that onlythrough a broader, internationalist perspectivecould the ‘local’ be adequately addressed andunderstood.

Mr Wardlow of NICIE put it this way: ‘I thinkthe big thing is integrated schools know thatthey need the international links because there’s


Future Ways

Founded: 1994Base: University of Ulster, Coleraine and CookstownPurpose: to find practical and human ways people can live,learn and work together equitably with their differences in asociety emerging from conflictDirector: Derick WilsonWeb site: NAE-mail: [email protected] achievement: challenging the notion that communityrelations is the sole responsibility of those with least power,through long-term work with social institutions like thePSNI, probation, councils and churches

lots of other good practice in the world,whether that’s in America, for example—wherethere would be a lot of issues around desegre-gation—and our schools would have links insay Israel/Palestine, South Africa, the placeswhere you would think of where conflicthappens.’

Corrymeela’s volunteer system, referred toabove, brings such international connections.Dr Stevens said in a matter-of-fact way: ‘Werecruit about 14 long-term volunteers everyyear, some from Northern Ireland and othersfrom abroad. We would have people from for-mer Yugoslavia at present, El Salvador, theStates.’ Mr McCallion, formerly a Corrymeelavolunteer himself, said of his experience: ‘Andin some ways that challenged me as well,because it made me more open to realise, well,actually we do need a wider context and a moreinternational context to help us focus and tolook at this.’

Tides’ international work, including in theBalkans, allows lessons to be brought home. AsMs Montague explained, ‘if you look at thework that we’ve done here and the work thatwe’ve done internationally, I think it’s taking thelearning from both, so giving people a sensethat “okay, this is only one little tiny part of avery big world that we’re in”, and helping peo-ple. Because when you’re focusing and you’restorytelling and you’re doing all that, you’re get-ting people to look at themselves an awful lot,but you have to put that into perspective, intothe context of today’s world, so that they get asense that there’s more in life and not just theirlittle local problems, without being arrogant.That was the other mistake, that we can get so

tied up with looking at our own situation thatwe miss the fact that it’s not just all about us:there’s a big world out there.’

Asked, for example, what students atBrownlow College would be doing duringIntegrated Education Week, Mr Lemonresponded: ‘You’re looking at all sorts, maybeconflict around the world. Increasingly we’retrying to get away from too much navel-gazingon the Northern Ireland situation and the factwe have 30 pupils at the moment who are non-English speaking, that’s something that’s hap-pened in the last two years. That gives anopportunity to look at different cultures. We’retalking about Brazilian, Polish, Lithuanian,Portuguese, Chinese at the moment. And it’s tolook at their cultures, look at a little bit of thehistory and the conflicts there.’

Mr Wardlow said: ‘Certainly Lagan wouldhave a huge number of international links. Iguess they can do that because of theeconomies of scale, but I am always amazedthat Lagan continue to push this and push thefact that they are an international school.’ Theschool, famously, pioneered use of theInternational Baccalaureate in Northern Irelandas an alternative to the much more narrowBritish ‘A-level’ system—an idea whose timemay now be coming with the development,post-devolution, of a ‘Welsh Bac’ and a broad-er Northern Ireland secondary curriculum.

And the international connections of theintegrated sector mean it is still ahead of theeducational game. Mr Wardlow again: ‘The factthat now under citizenship we can look at theglobal dimension and again under the RE syl-labus where other faiths and other traditions


can be taught, particularly at post-primary level,that’s allowing teachers who have that creativityto bring the other faiths and other traditions inand bring people in from the outside to say“well this is what it means for me as a Hindu inDiwali, for example”; “here’s what Ramadanmeans for me as a Muslim”. So they’re actuallybringing real faces that are non-white into the[classrooms], and when schools are doing thisthe children go away challenged by it, andteachers too.’

Sr Kilroy of Lagan said: ‘I love that aspect ofthings, bringing in people from all over theworld.’ And she added: ‘We need to see peopleof different colour, different creed, differentlevel.’ She gave an example of how it couldcontribute to that modesty of self-regard soessential to a reflexive disposition, describingthe impact of a visit by a group of youngstersfrom Kenya on Lagan pupils:

I tell you they were absolutely bowled over whenthe Kenyan girl was telling them about what herschool day was like. Four am to get up to go forthe water. She’d only to walk one kilometre butshe could have had to walk up to five. Five am toseven am prep, study. Eight am to five pm class.Break at half ten but nothing to eat. Lunch atone. Sport from five to six and then those whowere boarders studied until 10 pm, the others gohome, do the cooking, the cleaning and thenstudy. And they pay for it. I mean that one thingwas enough: they [the Lagan pupils] were literallygoggling. And they [the Kenyans] were saying,“but we’re the lucky ones: most of the peoplecan’t afford to pay for education”. So that wasworth seeing—our kids’ faces.

Equally, Northern Ireland can go to the world

to gain this opportunity, as Ms Peake of WAVE

put it, to ‘listen to others’. She described takinga group to the US in 1998, where they met vic-tims from Rwanda and Bosnia: ‘They foundthat not only had they lost but in some casesthey didn’t have water, they didn’t have a home.Their whole structures had totally gone … andwhat people were saying was that it actuallymade them realise that in some ways they hadhad a very horrific experience and a bereave-ment, but all their things had not been takenfrom them. And sometimes that’s about takingstock and recognising that in Northern Irelandyou can become very insular.’

BCDA (2005: 28) emphasises ‘achieving ouroutward-looking vision by fostering nationaland international links’. And some of thatworld is attracted to Ballynafeigh. Ms Hanlongave an example of how the meaning of thearea as a mixed community, and BCDA’s role inknitting it together, was changing: ‘There is aZimbabwean church use here on a Sunday as aplace of worship … They have volunteered tooin the after-school club and sent their childrento the crèche. It’s from those small things, andthen all of a sudden you can build a project ora joint piece of work because you can involvepeople more directly. We obviously service a lotof the ethnic minorities in the advice centreand the rest, but for me the test will be when wecan have a Polish Residents and a ZimbabweanCultural Society, but it has to be from them.’

The intellectual curiosity towards the‘other’ associated with a reflexive disposition isa natural stimulant of new conversations.And it is to what makes for successivedialogue that we now turn.


The previous chapter was about theapproaches successful reconciliationgroups bring to their work. This one is

about the single largest aspect of it—the facili-tation of dialogue. As indicated above, this ispotentially the most powerful solvent of stereo-types, but not necessarily so. Stereotypes can beconfirmed in some encounters, as NorthernIreland’s hitherto endless rounds of fruitlesspolitical ‘negotiations’ have demonstrated—with the participants emerging to give theirphalanxed press conferences, all explaining whyit’s been the fault of somebody else.

By contrast, the conversations in whichFuture Ways was involved (as was MediationNorthern Ireland) with the police were veryproductive. These began prior to, but providedimpetus for, the process of radical reform con-sequent upon the Patten review arising fromthe Belfast agreement. Mr Morrow noted ofthe senior police participants that ‘all said thatthe opportunity to begin to have these conver-sations was really significant’.

So what is it about dialogue that gives it thispotential, and what are the conditions to realiseit?

One intriguing answer to the first questioncame from Ms Montague of Tides. Sheanalysed why out of ten cross-communitygroups with which she had been involved at thetime only one had survived unscathed the ten-sions which exploded in the mid-1990s over theannual Somme commemoration parade by theOrange Order at Drumcree in Co Armagh. Shereflected:

I had a number of groups working together andthey were working on common issues, and thatwas fine. And then we had the first Drumcree andjust as that happened it blew those partnershipsapart. So, although you had people that weremeeting and discussing things, issues aroundhousing, issues around health—common issues,social issues—as soon as Drumcree happenedthose relationships disappeared and out of theten groups that I had working together, only onegroup remained in inter-community dialogue, and


Dialogue

that was a group called the Over the Wall Gang.And it was a group from Cupar Street [in Belfast]on the Catholic side and from Ashmore on theProtestant side, on the Shankill side. And I lookedat that and I thought, “well, why did they staytogether and the others didn’t stay together?”.And on reflection what I found was that with theOver the Wall Gang there was a piece of workthat I had done which I hadn’t done with any ofthe other groups, and that was that I had gotthem to story-tell, shared storytelling. So theyactually got saying openly to one another, ‘Here’show we’ve been affected by the conflict; here’swhy we’re afraid and what we’re afraid of.’ Andthat was very interesting because that group thencould come together, they had a more open rela-tionship. They could each honestly say howDrumcree made them feel and how they viewedit.

This theme that productive dialogue can takethe form of storytelling in small but diversegroups recurred repeatedly in the interviews.It’s a natural human proclivity, an obvious con-versation-starter. Just to ask someone ‘what doyou do?’ or ‘where are you from?’ is an invita-tion to begin a story about their unique life his-tory. As Sarah Lawrence of Studio One, theNerve Centre’s Belfast offshoot, explained, ‘ifwe bring any youth groups together or anygroup of young people, a lot of the stuff wewould do is to do with identity anyway becauseit’s about what they’re interested in, what they’reabout, who they are—stories. If they’re makinga film or an animation the stories are going tocome from them, so that’s to do with theiridentities.’

Mr Deane of Holywell Trust described invery uncomplicated terms its Towards

Understanding and Healing project:

This is a dead simple process. Basically it is tellingyour story, but telling it in a way where you’re justtelling your story without trying to score pointspolitically or otherwise—just saying this is whathappened to me and my family. And the otherpeople in the room, the small group, their con-tract is basically to listen to the story … You don’thave to pass any commentary but when it comesyour turn you tell your story, that’s all. No mysteryand no psychotherapy and no psychobabble, juststraightforward. It might arise that people beginto put themselves in the other person’s shoes; itmight not if they’re not making that choice. Justlet’s see. But what we will do is ensure safety, inso-far as is possible. We will not try to impose anytime limit on the person telling their story. We willnot try to impose any structure which says ‘youcan’t say this’ or ‘you can’t say that.’ You tell yourstory, your voice, you find it, tell me.

His colleague Mr Doherty agreed: ‘I think it’srespectful to the people that you’re workingwith and you don’t have to be smart, you don’thave to be able to write a book, you don’t haveto do any of those things. You can come alongand participate and just do what you normallydo—speak to people, listen to people. So youtalk about listening, hearing, speaking and thosetypes of things.’

Mr Baker, also of Holywell, developed themetaphor that, if walls can have ears, ears canalso have walls: ‘Storytelling is central to it andthat storytelling is about me being able to seewith wider eyes or hear with ears that haven’tgot walls in them.’ In that context, he said, ‘inan apartheid society or a parallel-lives society,


storytelling becomes a bridge’. Ms Hethering-ton, also involved in this project, spoke of how‘you just see the transformation when peoplefelt that they have been heard—the way thattheir bodies were changing, how receptive andresponsive they would be to understand, thatrespect for listening, and then that becomes thepositive and counter-dialogue’.

Mr McCallion of CRIS teased out this criticalelement of reciprocity: ‘I think one of the otherkey ingredients about providing a forum wherepeople can tell their story, where people can feelvalued and heard, is when they genuinelybelieve that the people here are interested intheir story and that it’s not to make snowballsto fire back at them. It’s about genuine listening.It’s about a desire to understand. It’s about adesire to move on. It’s about a desire for thelistener to have their opportunity to be heardas well. So it’s about that mutuality within therelationship.’

Absorbing an individual’s unique story, hav-ing recognised human dignity on equal terms,makes it hard to see in him or her only a maskof collective identity. As Ms Montague put it,‘it’s very easy to have an enemy when you can’tsee the enemy’s face. So, once there’s some kindof direct interaction and people meet oneanother on a face-to-face basis, the dynamicschange. And it’s not as easy to hate, because thefaceless monster on the other side of that wallhas got my blue eyes or brown eyes, has a name,has a family—they are a person. They’re not acardboard cut-out that you can hurt or hate.’

In the work by Wilkinson (2005) referred toin the introduction, the alternative to societiesbased on ‘dominance hierarchies’ is represented

by those—and he points to concrete examplesin the human and animal world—based on co-operative relationships. Here, instead of com-petition, sometimes violent, over places in thesocial hierarchy, the symbol of co-operation isthe gift. Chimpanzees can spend apparently


Holywell Trust

Founded: 1988Base: DerryPurpose: to work at individual and community level forhealing, dialogue, co-operation and civic transformation, inDerry and the north-westDirector: Eamonn DeaneWeb site: www.holywelltrust.com E-mail: [email protected] Signal achievement: creation of a network of figures atcommunity level in Derry instrumental in reducing tensionsin the city

inexplicable amounts of time grooming eachother, yet the point of this reciprocal indul-gence is a reassurance of the lack of mutualthreat. Open and honest (as against guardedand defensive) dialogue is the human equivalentof searching the hair on each other’s hands forfleas.

And yet in a divided society, where anycross-community conversations are normallyseverely restricted to the ‘polite’, these experi-ences can be all too rare. WAVE members haveparticipated in the discussions, sponsored bythe Healing Through Remembering project,about dealing with Northern Ireland’s ‘trou-bled’ past. Ms Peake said of such discussions:‘For some people that might be the first timethey’ve had them.’ Unpublished research forthe organisation by Gareth Higgins found ‘theconstant surprise of such diverse people shar-ing so intimately in a larger group the stories oftheir lives, when such sharing would not be pos-sible outside the context of WAVE due to thesocial boundaries in this society’.

The rest of this chapter focuses moreon answering the second questionabove—identifying the conditions for

successful dialogue. Overwhelming in the inter-views was the theme of safety. Creating safespaces for dialogue—a notion which has alsobeen recurrent in the Council of Europe’s workon intercultural dialogue, with which the authorhas been associated—is critical. As Ms Mc-Ewan of Corrymeela put it, ‘I think safety ishuge: creating a very safe environment is possi-bly the first thing.’

Dr Stevens saw this as a key lesson from

Corrymeela’s extensive experience: ‘I think thatsome of the things that are potentially transfer-able are: how do you create a safe space forpeople to work in? how do you create a situa-tion where people feel confident to tell theirstories, listen to other people? … Obviously wehave a residential centre; not everybody wantsor needs a residential centre. But the issue ofhow you create a space where people feel thatthey have some security, where they can reachout, is one of the issues that we have hit upon.’

This was confirmed by Mr McCallion, whoreflected that ‘lots of people say this aboutCorrymeela, but it is a place where I’ve heard somany stories that I never would have had achance to hear if I wasn’t there. So many peo-ple have felt the trust and the security that theplace provided, where people could tell theirstories, where people could say things and takechances that they normally wouldn’t takebecause they felt supported in that context.And certainly I heard many, many stories andmany of impacts on individuals that impactedon me long-term. And I certainly don’t feel Iwould have heard them if it wasn’t in that set-ting or it wasn’t part of Corrymeela.’

WAVE too has found this to be true, as MsPeake described it: ‘WAVE’s ethos, I think, hascontributed to the fact it has that open, inclu-sive atmosphere so that people feel comfort-able—not that we make an issue out of wherepeople come from: the thing is that their griefand trauma is what brings them. Now, quiteclearly in the background, that has been caused,generally, by one side or the other. But that’s asecondary issue to the trauma that they’vesuffered and the support is offered without


reference to the cause of it.’Safety for conversations depends on individ-

uals being treated equally, not just impartially—which is why the social orientation describedearlier is so important. As Dr Morrow stressedof Future Ways’ engagement with police offi-cers before the Patten review, ‘The wholeprocess, first of all, [meant] taking them out ofthe normal hierarchal situation, second of alllegitimising a set of conversations which hadnever happened before there—really acknowl-edging some of the difficulties of being policeofficers, Catholic police officers being able totalk about for the first time really what it was allabout and the compromises they made.’

Similarly, Mr Baker of Holywell said of theTowards Healing and Understanding projectthat it placed ‘at its core business the impor-tance of creating safe places for stories to betold’. This was partly a matter of using a venuethat would be seen as safe by all participants.

His colleague Mr Doherty described howHolywell was able to attract Protestants to thecity side of Derry, from which many felt alien-ated: ‘We also make this a safe place for peopleto be honest with each other in a caring way butnevertheless honest—and I suppose if you’redishonest you’re not at all caring. So, there havebeen many, many really, really in-depth conver-sations here between and with Protestants,Catholics and others about how to co-exist …’

Gary McFadden of Lagan College spoke ofhow even a bus could provide such a space,describing a tour for teachers around the northBelfast ‘peace walls’, which many had not seen.He said that ‘even taking them into that contextactually opened up conversations amongst

themselves—talking about their own back-grounds and the influence of paramilitarism ontheir own particular society’.

But safety is also about the rules of engage-ment, and these are best debated and writtendown before a group gets into serious discus-sion. As Mr Baker described it, ‘you wouldrarely be working with a group unless there’s acontract that espouses values and principlesaround listening or confidentiality’.

For example, Ms McEwan said that ‘one ofthe things we would always say when we’redrawing up our contract … is that if you’regoing to ask a question of somebody, that per-son has the right to ask you why you’re askingit’.

One such rule might seem perverse, but itmakes sense in terms of participants in anyprofound dialogue feeling a sense of controlover it. Mr Baker said that ‘you’re also saying topeople “but you don’t have to tell your story”’.Things had ‘to happen at the pace of the per-son’ and ‘it was inappropriate to push people,to badger people’.

Ms Montague stressed in this context theimportance of skilled facilitation. (Indeed, co-facilitation is ideal for such discussions, as itallows one facilitator to act as a foil for theother.) She said that ‘it’s no good saying to peo-ple “have a hard conversation” unless there arepeople in the room to support them in it, thathave the skills to facilitate that’.

Mr McCallion of CRIS agreed. He said that‘for me the key ingredient for allowing this tohappen is the facilitator being the enabler andactually the process belonging to the partici-pants that are involved, and that’s very, very key


to me. I have been in many a process where thathasn’t been the case and they’ve been the leastrewarding processes for me, where the struc-ture hasn’t allowed for the process to be drivenand belong to the participants.’

This isn’t just a democratic sentiment. It isalso a condition for reflexivity: passive individ-uals are very unlikely to reflect on their attitudesand behaviour in an active way. As Mr Dohertysaid, ‘you have got to be respected and if you

feel trapped it’s just not fair’.This may seem a small point but it illumi-

nates why it has proved so difficult to getunionists and nationalists to agree on the wide-ly canvassed constitutional solution forNorthern Ireland—devolution plus north-south co-operation—since the old regime col-lapsed in 1969-72. Unionists have sought toshoehorn nationalists into majoritarian arrange-ments for devolution, hankering back to pre-‘troubles’ times, while nationalists have tried toinveigle unionists into accepting north-southarrangements with a forward dynamic towardsa unitary Irish state. As a response in each caseto the double-minority Irish problem (Catholicsa minority in the north, Protestants on theisland), it is perfectly rational—and it is guaran-teed not to work because it is about ‘trapping’the other into a dialogue that is only allowed tohave an outcome favourable to the self.

If offering a safe space is tied up with thosewho enter it feeling ‘owners’ of it, thenresponsiveness becomes a prerequisite of

those working to promote dialogue. Publicagencies tend to be driven by direction and tar-gets from above, whereas the best voluntaryorganisations are stimulated to improve theirperformance by being sensitive to the concernsraised by their users.

Ms Peake agreed that WAVE did differ in thatregard from a statutory organisation. She saidthat ‘some people, maybe, have taken that stepand have found that avenue has in some waysbeen shut down, because the statutory persondealing with them is quite uncomfortable withwhat they’re hearing and they get that message


The Nerve Centre

Founded: 1990Base: Derry, with Belfast offshootPurpose: to act as a focus point for youth culture in Derry,including the exploration of cultural diversity through cre-ative use of technologyDirector: Martin MelarkeyWeb site: www.nerve-centre.org.uk E-mail: [email protected] Signal achievement: production of a stream of innovativeaudio-visual materials challenging stereotyped images andsymbols

that there’s an area really they shouldn’tprogress to’. By contrast, ‘I suppose in terms ofcoming here, it’s about knowing that there is amechanism for remembering and having someacknowledgment, which is quite important.People will use those words and sometimeswhat do they mean: “acknowledgement”,“recognition”? And yet they are things thatpeople strive for, because they feel that thosehaven’t happened or those haven’t taken place.’

WAVE (2005) describes itself as ‘a user-ledorganisation’ and Rev David Clements, a volun-tary board member, pointed out how WAVE hadalways referred to its ‘members’, not ‘clients’.He explained: ‘We’re set up as a limited compa-ny and all of that. But, going back to the earlydays, “member” basically meant anybody whohad any involvement with WAVE and—I didn’tcoin it, it was before my time—my assumptionis it had to do with a sense of empowermentand of ownership. And that you came to WAVE

to be involved with others, to give and to gethelp, rather than to come and get somethingdone to you as a client. Part of the healing was-n’t just what was done to you and the servicesthat were offered—it was your own processesinvolved in making a journey yourself.’

Ms McEwan said of her work for Corry-meela across sectarian interfaces, that ‘the over-arching idea of the project is that we don’tparachute in and say, “I have an agenda, this iswhat I want to do, I know how to sort out yourinterface, therefore, come and do my work”.But, rather, a lot of it is about listening andresponding and reacting to needs that arealready being articulated by the communities.’

And Ms Lynagh of NICIE gave a similar

account: ‘So when I work with a school I get asmall group internally from different layers ofresponsibility together and work with them todevelop the training that they need, rather thanme saying “this is what you need” and deliver-ing it without any internal ownership.’ NICIE

had run a conference for parents of children atintegrated schools, she said, to find out fromthem why they had chosen the integratedoption—‘their aspirations, their hopes,etcetera’—and parents were also trained tobecome school governors.

Stereotypes can be thought of, given theirpotency and invisibility, as unexplodeddevices. Asked what he thought repre-

sented the biggest barrier to reconciliation, RevClements said: ‘The biggest barrier probably, inmy view, is our history and people’s present per-ception of it and the versions of it and thepropaganda that comes from it that makes peo-ple think that the other guys have got horns ofsome kind. And a related issue to that is theincreasing segregation which then allows thoseperceptions to be reinforced.’

And so inevitably the careful dismantling ofthose dangerous devices in a safe context, de-stereotyping, is at the essence of effectiveintercultural dialogue. And good practice hererequires a developed skill in disposal.

Ms Montague described the discussionsabout modern Irish history which she has led—and found to be remarkably popular—in theseterms: ‘So you’re trying to open up some andjust throw in a little bit of doubt that their his-tory is really as black and white as what groupshere seem to feel it is. It’s not as black and


white, and it’s all shared history, that’s the reali-ty. There’s no part in the history of this islandthat isn’t shared.’

Ms Peake told of how the experience ofdiverse victims coming together at WAVE couldchallenge myths they might have had. She gavethe story of a man whose son had been killedby loyalist paramilitaries and how he hadbelieved that he would never win justice for himas there was, he believed, only justice for theProtestant community.

And he came and he started to engage with oth-ers and what he found was that they were affect-ed in exactly the same way, and the reality was thatthey weren’t getting justice either. And he saidthat something which is very important to himabout WAVE was the fact that that myth that hehad lived with, which he said was a myth tohim—he thought it was a fact, but when he start-ed to think about it he said, ‘no, actually, it wassomething that had been perpetuated time andtime and time again for me and reinforced, whichin the end would have built my bitterness and mysense of injustice’—there was something aboutthe fact that he came here and he was able tomeet others who also had lost children and to seethat their pain and their grief were no different,and the reality was the system and processeswhich also affected them.

Mr Melarkey gave an example from the NerveCentre’s work in Derry with young people,using animation to address historical themes:‘What we went out and did was try to get youngpeople from the opposite traditions to look atthe main events that we were dealing with assymbols—a group of Catholic kids in

Fermanagh to do the 12th July, a group ofCatholic kids from Creggan to do the Somme.We got a group of Protestant kids from Bally-mena to do 1798. We switched and did it a bitlike that, so it was really about them having toresearch the other community’s history.’

Ms Lawrence from Studio One gave a fur-ther instance of work with final-year primarychildren from schools across the divide inBelfast:

So basically they were studying myths in schooland they wanted to do something around that, sowe used Cúchulainn because it’s obviously ashared myth. But we thought: how are we goingto do this so that it’s more interesting, more mod-ern? And we thought about who writes history:what is the truth? And we did a ‘Let’s Talk toCuailnge’. So they had different sides: there wasMedb’s side and then there was Cúchulainn’s sideand it was about people debating what the truthwas. It was really interesting, because then at theend we asked them, ‘Do you think that everythingyou see on the news is the truth? What do youthink about history: do you think that’s the truth?’And there were lots of things brought up. For P7it was actually quite a complex of issues that wewere starting to bring up with them, and a lot ofprimary teachers would be very hesitant aboutbringing up the whole Protestant/Catholic thing.But it was the way of bringing up these issueswhere people felt safe to actually discuss them.And it was fun and they did animation based onit—it was like a news report.

Ms Hetherington identified yet anotherinstance from work in Derry schools, whichshowed the virtue of patience in disposing ofdangerous stereotypes. She said that ‘one group


in one of the schools was quite difficult andthroughout the whole six weeks [of the pro-gramme], Protestants to them were just thescum of the earth—they were the devil incar-nate. They never met them, but there was justthis whole stereotypical notion coming out. Atthe end of it one of the facilitators [asked],“well what if you met one, what would youdo?” Anyway, she turned round and she said,“well you’ve been working with one for sixweeks, because I’m a Protestant”. And it was solovely because they all … said, “oh, we’ve real-ly offended you”, and she said, “no, youhaven’t, it’s not a problem but can you judgeme now, how do you see me now?”. So sheturned it into a bigger workshop and it was justamazing.’

Stereotypes, however, are not easily dis-mantled in one go. So, while contactacross sectarian and other ethnic divides

is necessary, it is not a sufficient condition forsuccessful dialogue. It needs to be recurrent.

Interviewees were united on this point. MrPeto of the Nerve Centre did not see muchvalue in ‘a one-day event for the group and thentomorrow they’ll probably forget all about itand move on’. Mr Lemon of Brownlow Collegesaid that ‘going for a day away with the neigh-bouring Catholic school is fine but it’s a one-offand very often there’s no follow-up or comeback, whereas here that’s how life is lived on adaily basis’.

Ms Anderson-Porter of Co-operation Ire-land similarly said that ‘a one-off football tour-nament may cause a life-changing impact onsome person but it just as likely won’t—there

would have to be a number of contacts, it hasto be managed and it has to be a progressionalroute’. Mr Kennedy said CI thus recognised ‘thereinforcing nature of several contacts ratherthan just doing a one-off thing’. An unpub-lished analysis by Catherine Lynch of CI of theCivic-Link programme with school studentsfound that ‘the number of exchanges in which stu-dents participated was found to be thestrongest predictor of their reporting decreasedlevels of social distance’.

Ms Borthwick of Tides recalled how whenshe was doing residentials with young people atCorrymeela, these would be preceded by per-haps eight sessions with the participants. It wasevident from the evaluations, she said, what adifference that repeated engagement made.And Mr McCallion of CRIS said: ‘In terms offacilitation and practice, you just can’t bringpeople together and expect them to tell theirstories in their first meeting.’

Studio One has worked with young womenfrom two suburban estates, one in the west andone in the east of Belfast, and Ms Lawrencesaid: ‘It’s all very well and good going in anddoing a brilliant programme for four days oreight sessions or whatever.’ But the relation-ships had to be fostered, especially when onetransposed that from the individual to theorganisational level. ‘So, for example, with thelikes of Poleglass and Tullycarnet youth centres,it’s about supporting them to continue on withother young people and doing similar pro-grammes, because at the end of the day obvi-ously young people are going to grow up anddo whatever, but it’s about actually those organ-isations that you’re working with—supporting


them to be able to continue as well is reallyimportant.’

Earlier, Dr Stevens was quoted as sayingreconciliation was a process measuredin decades, and certainly successful

projects are measured not in weeks or months,but years. Projects to facilitate dialogue, that is,will need to be protracted.

As Mr Whyte of BCDA emphasised, ‘it’s time,no doubt it’s time, just building that trust bit bybit by bit’. Citing examples from his work, hesaid he’d ‘been involved with flags and the bon-fire issues for a long time now—four, five, sixyears—and I just built that trust up in time’.Trust is a category to which the next chapterreturns.

Ms Montague of Tides put a similartimescale on a successful piece of work. Shesaid that ‘there has to be a commitment fromthe group to stay in a programme—some formof programme around activities etcetera—forat least three years, if not more’.

Conversely, Ms Anderson-Porter of CI saidthat ‘all of the research that we have done issaying a one-year programme isn’t long enough,particularly if we’re going to work with thoseleast reconciled groups, or, as we like to thinkabout them, the hard-to-reach groups—thegroups that haven’t had a chance to meet or tohave their views challenged and to maybe chal-lenge other people’s views as well’.

And Ms Girvan of NICIE said that ‘for acommunity-relations projects to work it has tobe a sustained project over time’. She also tookup Ms Lawrence’s point of how the timescaleinevitably lengthens once an institutional

perspective is taken. Integrated education was‘one of the only community-relations projectswhich brings together whole institutions, whereit’s working from the children’s level, to the par-ents meeting at the front gate, to the teachersbeing integrated, to the governors being inte-grated—and that to me is getting people talkingin dialogue, meeting, respecting’.

These two points about the nature of suc-cessful dialogue—the need for it to be repeatedand extended—underscore a point in the firstchapter: organisations working in this arenamust be resilient to face the long haul. Yet thetimescale of meaningful projects comes upagainst the much more short-term horizons ofother organisations, for example in education,whose co-operation may be needed.

Marianne McGill of CI stressed that ‘time isneeded and a process is needed where, whatev-er the interaction is, it’s more frequent eventhan two exchanges, which is all we can deliverin a year. And some kind of long-term trust [is]built up before you can actually get to whereyou need to get, which is the open debate aboutthese issues. And in what sectors is that possi-ble and how practical is it?’ Being serious aboutA Shared Future must include public authoritiesthinking in similarly long-term ways.

The ‘contact hypothesis’ for promotingreconciliation is over half a centuryold (Allport, 1954). But recent work by

a large team of social psychologists—analysingprevious data as well as conducting their ownresearch—has vindicated the value of inter-sectarian contact in Northern Ireland (Hew-stone et al, 2005).


They found that the conditions for successwere ‘lower anxiety’—those safe spaces for dia-logue—and the possibility for increased ‘per-spective-taking’: reflexivity again. It was alsoimportant that individuals’ communal affilia-tions were recognised—to avoid the scenariowhere a positive experience of, say, a Catholiccould still be dismissed by a sectarian Protestanton the ground that ‘Sean’s not like them otherFenians’, with the stereotype remaining intact.Again and again, these aspects of the qualityof dialogue, and not just its quantity, came upin the interviews for this project as a criticalconcern.

Another analogy from the economic arenamay help clarify this. If a company is producingwidgets, its concern will simply be to producewidgets as quickly and as cheaply as possible;here the incentive is for companies to engage ina competitive ‘race to the bottom’ on prices(and so wages). In an economy beyond massproduction, however, catering for individualtastes among demanding consumers, price mayno longer be the main source of competitionand the most successful firms may be thosewhich can offer new products of higher stan-dard, tailored to diverse demands, even at rela-tively high cost. In this context, the winners arethose that can ‘move up the value chain’ interms of the quality of their output.

Mr Kennedy described how CI had changedtowards this more qualitiative, user-responsivefocus: ‘Our ideology would have shifted in thelast ten years from being a first-contact organi-sation to being an organisation that says, “it’sokay, yes, contact is good, but we need to thenmove on to the stage where we start talking

about the things that we’re not comfortablewith”.’ In the context of better cross-bordertransport links and increased north-southeconomic activity, an unpublished CI paperconcludes: ‘While “contact” was breaking newground in the past, there is a current desireamong many groups and individuals to amplifythis opportunity and enter into a process that ismuch more challenging.’

Mr Kennedy gave as an example a local-authority programme called Pride of Place, say-ing that ‘for a while we did it with councils andit fell a bit into the twinning trap of “let’s every-body go and get pissed together and say howfriendly we are”. So we tore this up three orfour years ago, and then set up a group of chiefexecutives from the associations north andsouth, who then work out what priorities theywant us to deal with. So we are working to theiragenda but we’re keeping their focus on thenorth-south agenda, and Pride of Place is aboutpeople working in their communities anddoing what they can to make their communitiesbetter.’

Ms Lynagh of NICIE said that mere contact‘doesn’t shift anything—I could sit with you forhours and I wouldn’t have any greater under-standing of your values, your beliefs, or Iwouldn’t have any greater respect’. Previously,people were being urged: ‘Just bring peopletogether—doesn’t matter what you do—espe-cially within the school sector. It was just bringyoung people together, get them on trips, that’senough.’ But, she said, it was now recognisedthat this was ‘just not enough’.

The interviewees had various ways ofdescribing the reconciliation equivalent of


‘moving up the value chain’. Ms Lynagh spokeof ‘that sense of how you move that perspec-tive further down the gradient’. Mr Craig ofTides talked of the ‘need to understand thatthere is a continuum, because in the daily reali-ty of running an organisation you get caughtinto what I would call the mundane or the ordi-nary’. And Mr Baker described effective groupwork as ‘like the Heineken ad: it refreshes partsthat other beers don’t reach’.

But if the way to better practice is to movefrom quantity to quality, this returns us to thequestion: what if the evaluators of this workare only interested in counting? Ms Lynagh saidthat ‘we’re probably reticent to say we wantrelationships to be improved, because thatsounds very hard to measure and it’s nebulous… but I think we also need to charge ourselveswith saying, “well, what are we trying to do ona bigger scale?”. And actually it’s not about 60people going through a particular programmethat we know is good quality: it is that wholetransformational thing.’ Ms Peake said thatwhat WAVE achieved was ‘not about the num-bers we put through here: it’s about the differ-ence you’ve made to someone, or the differenceyou’ve facilitated them to make’.

Dialogue is conducted through themedium of language. But it is alsoabout ‘body language’ and it takes

place today in a rich environment of soundsand images in the arena of popular culture. Andthe arts comprise a sphere where new imagesand sounds are constantly being created (‘art’has the same root as ‘artificial’ or ‘artisanal’).Taken with the earlier emphasis on creativity in

organisations working for reconciliation, it isunsurprising that the arts and electronicmedia figured in the interviews as a keydomain of activity.

One of the advantages of this is that it canprovide avenues for those who feel less articu-late than others, as a result of implicit under-standings of social hierarchy, to contribute to aprocess of dialogue that is otherwise purelyverbal-rational. Another, very simply, was high-lighted by Mr Fegan of Co-operation Ireland: ‘Imean it’s fun, for God’s sake! It can be funto do this and let’s not make peace and recon-ciliation a chore. It should be a celebration.And I would say that’s why the arts is a wonder-ful vehicle to try and promote peace andreconciliation.’

Ms Hanlon explained why BCDA had devel-oped a partnership with a theatre company,Partisan Productions: ‘Well there’s so many dif-ferent techniques across the world where peo-ple have used the arts to challenge and toaddress issues in their society and in NorthernIreland this has been confined to the arts arena.And, again in Northern Ireland we compart-mentalise things, so the arts can do the creativeapproaches and the community development[domain] does the community development.And I don’t think that’s right: community devel-opment can, an area like this can, inform thearts and the arts can inform the way we dothings.’

Ms McEwan of Corrymeela gave a simpleexample of how she utilises the arts withgroups engaged in dialogue. She said that ‘we’vealso then built in the ability to have either anartist or a poet work with us and they capture


the process. So, for example, if we were havingthis conversation, the artist would be sitting inthe corner and although they wouldn’t havepicked everything that was said, through theirart they would pick the mood or hold the moodof the conversation. And then at the end of theevening that gets reflected back to the group.’

The media are, however, more pervasivethan the arts in contemporary culture. And herethe Nerve Centre and Studio One have pio-neered the use of modern media as, literally,media of dialogue.

Ms Arthurs from Studio One explained onecombination of exercises to stimulate reflexivi-ty and challenge stereotypes among young peo-ple. Participants are given photographs ofpeople they don’t know and are asked to gener-ate identity profiles of them and to act outthese roles. Then they are asked to intervieweach other and find out about each other’s iden-tities and to question these. Then, returning tothe photos, they could be asked ‘why did youthink such and such about someone?’ Forexample, did they draw a particular conclusionfrom body-piercing, or certain facial expres-sions, to compile that profile?

Mr Melarkey contrasted the experience ofyoung people in the Nerve Centre with theirexposure to didactic communalist murals—‘Stalinist’, he called them—on the streets out-side. ‘And it is thinking really about how youcan give people some other potentiality, someother possibilities, and for us obviously ourbiggest one is the creative one—that youngpeople can come in here, and they will still beexposed to a lot of that stuff, but maybethrough digital photography and through this

eclectic mix of media you can really be irrever-ent about anything or do anything and bring asense of humour to bear on all this stuff, andbring the sensibility of young people and ideal-ism of young people to bear on this kind ofculture.’

The Nerve Centre has developed a wealth ofelectronic-media educational resources, allied toworkshops, addressing images from this streetculture from its interactive CD about the two1916s—the Battle of the Somme and theEaster Rising—to its animated film about thetale of Cúchulainn. And now, said Mr Melarkey:‘We’re trying to use mobile phones and iPodtechnology. So really it’s about that business—


Political theatre: Partisan in partnership with BCDA

we’ve always seized the technology because wefeel that that does go beyond barriers, it gets usaway from geography, from behind “peacewalls” and you know the distribution platformfor this stuff is so exciting.’

This spirit of innovation is one of thethemes to be developed in the next chapter. Itbuilds on the demonstration (Hewstone et al,2005) of the ‘ripple effect’ of integrated educa-tion through indirect friendships: simply havingfriends who have friends on the other side ofthe sectarian divide, it turns out, tends to under-mine stereotypes. So it addresses the questionas to how all this valuable small-scale activitycan ripple out into the wider society and under-mine the hard sectarian pillars into whichNorthern Ireland has been divided.


The interviews with those in theintegrated-schools sector confirmedthe ‘ripple effect’ thesis. Mr Lee of

NICIE said that ‘one of the things about inte-grated schools which maybe define integratedschools a bit more than others is this under-standing and willingness to see themselves aspart of that local community—and not just adormant part but a really active part of thatlocal community. And if we’re getting the mes-sage through to those 61 integrated schools thatthat’s what they need to be focusing on ifthey’re not already doing so, then again thepotential is for 61 localised areas to be reallyenergised by the contribution of that school inthat area.’

And he said: ‘Even by its very existence, andby the very determination by parents in thatarea to want a different option for their chil-dren, now we see the ripple effect of that beingother schools in the area taking on board theneed to look at interculturalism, the need towork with each other, the need to work with

local communities.’ In its statement of princi-ples NICIE (2006) is committed to ‘seek tosecure and sustain deep parental participationin the life and work of the school, and in par-ticular in its government’.

Yet the forces of competition can under-mine this, militating against good practice inparticular being more widely shared and dis-seminated. Each integrated school is, after all,competing with other local schools for pupils—and so will naturally tend to guard its successstories. Mr Wardlow said: ‘We have some bril-liant examples but they stay within very localconfines. We’re hopeless at sharing.’

This raises a wider dilemma which this chap-ter seeks to address: how can the various ‘pri-vate’ initiatives described above make an impactin the public, even political, arena, which isgreater than the sum of their parts—particular-ly when the organisations involved are them-selves competing with others for publicsupport?


Ripple effects

Again, it may be helpful to glean the les-sons available from the much-studiedworld of economic organisations.

Competition plays an essential role in a marketeconomy, in which a variety of enterprisesstruggle against the threat of market failure inan atmosphere of ‘disciplined pluralism’. Butwell-functioning markets rely on ‘intermediateinstitutions’ if each enterprise is not simply totake a selfish, go-it-alone approach at the ex-pense of the public interest (Kay, 2003).

For example, universities can stimulate linksbetween themselves and individual firms, andbetween firms themselves, which encouragebetter sharing of research and development.They thus encourage networks to develop, sothat small enterprises can be part of largeragglomerations, and economies of scale canresult. Silicon Valley in California, stimulated byproximity to universities like Stanford, is therenowned example.

If the same NGOs working for reconciliationwere to be funded year after year and othersexcluded from the ‘market’, those organisationswould be likely to become complacent and keepdoing what they had always done. But if theyjust compete in isolation, the outcomes may beless than ideal—so an institution needs to pro-tect the wider good, for example by stimulatingnetworks between them. And this is exactlywhat the CRC has done in recent years with theregular meetings it has convened of practition-ers, bringing together representatives of thosein receipt of core or EU funding to discuss—including with each other—common concerns.These have been well-attended and livelysessions.

Interestingly, Mr Fegan of CI is from a busi-ness background. And the feedback he receivedfrom funded projects in the arts took him downthe networks route. When groups were invitedto a conference in Armagh to suggest to theintermediate funding bodies what would reallyenhance cross-border cooperation and recon-ciliation, ‘a lot of stuff coming out was net-working, just people knowing what otherpeople are doing, if they can provide that. Thissounds pretty basic stuff but this is new to us,because the whole Peace programme has beenabout IFBs asking organisations to deliver pro-jects, when what they really want is just to pro-vide a structure which is linking up all theiractivities—that perhaps even without moneythey are going to engage with each other on amore regular, on a more pragmatic basis.’

He said: ‘Certainly what we’re looking atnow is the support of both formal and, I sup-pose even as important, informal networks.’ Abig help here will be the electronic databaseresource developed by the Centre for Cross-Border Studies, www.borderireland.com.

Ms Killick of Lagan College spoke of thevalue of the links between the school—in aleafy east-Belfast suburb—and the CornerstoreCommunity at the Springfield Road interface inwest Belfast. This meant that ‘you have theopportunity to go out of school with the stu-dents, and with the staff as well, into areas ofBelfast they might never have been in before. Ithink those links then become very important,because the communities that are working onthe ground in some of the places where thedivision is much more evident can provide uswith real learning experiences.’


Ms Gormley described a network of sixschools in Derry with which the Nerve Centrewas going to be working for three years. Thiswas a ‘great opportunity’, she said, to ‘consoli-date some of the work that we’ve been doingwith people of like mind who are buzzing, whowant to get on with developing the work’. MrPeto referred to the partnership developedbetween the Nerve Centre, whose main skillswere on the technical side, and the Institute forConflict Research in Belfast, which providedmuch of the text to which the visuals andsounds were added.

Ms Lynagh described how NICIE had stimu-lated a partnership between two integratedschools, which had blossomed despite theirbeing a long way apart: ‘So these two schools,they’ve just flown with this partnership. Theywere foisted upon each other to a certainextent: I rang two different schools, they said“yes”, I said “okay, let’s get together”, and it’sjust worked really well. And you can hear themlearning, their conversations … like “well, howdo you do your timetabling?”, and that’s whatwe need more of.’

And Mr McCallion explained how CRIS hadbecome part of a network with others workingwith children and young people—NICIE, theYMCA and, potentially, Corrymeela—for thepurposes of the organisational self-criticismreferred to earlier. He said that ‘we have fourreflective learning days a year where we critiquewhat we have done and why we have done itand we learn from each other’.

NICIE sees itself ideally as the hub of a net-work of autonomous schools—and we knowthat autonomy for individual organisations is

necessary for them to be creative. Mr Wardlowsaid:

Now, what tends to happen is schools tend togrow and move away from NICIE for all sorts ofreasons—it’s a bit like cutting the umbilical cordand away they go. We tend then to come in ifwe’ve got a programme to offer or there’s a par-ticular issue of concern. What we would love is


Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education

Founded: 1987Base: BelfastPurpose: to co-ordinate efforts to develop integratededucation and to assist parent groups in opening newintegrated schoolsDirector: Michael WardlowWeb site: www.nicie.org E-mail: [email protected] Signal achievement: sponsorship of and support for morethan 60 integrated schools across Northern Ireland,pioneering interculturalism in education

that we build up a network of the schools them-selves, because this is the only way this is going towork. And NICIE, a metaphor for it might be thatwe’re like a heart pumping out, and we’re maybesaying to Brownlow ‘do you know Lagan aredoing that?’. We’re finding ourselves being a con-duit, we’re actually telling schools ‘did you knowso and so?’. So it’s a bit like a wheel and we’re thehub and we’re sending wee spokes out.

Ms Hanlon described how BCDA had facilitatedthe emergence over a decade of a fine-grainednetwork of associations in the community,whose capillaries reached individual streets.This meant, she said, that ‘we can actually calltogether any grouping in this society wechoose—any incident that happens, I know wecan go directly to the source’. Independentresearch (Murtagh and Carmichael, 2005: 34-5)has highlighted ‘the construction of networksand informal governance arrangements’ byBCDA in addressing issues ranging from hatecrimes to housing and planning.

Mr Whyte explained his work for BCDA interms of joining up these strands on theground. Over and above troubleshooting, hesaid, ‘it could be creating networks where peo-ple can come together and work together as awhole because what we’ve found is there’s a lotof residents’ associations, there’s a lot of activegroups within the area, [but] there’s no struc-ture for them to communicate together. So partof it will be trying to allow the opportunity forcommunication through various means.’

For example, there were tensions in the area,as in any urban neighbourhood, between gener-ations. One of his tasks would be ‘to create anetwork with young people so they have a

collective voice as well as residents, becausenow we’ve got all these young people who wantto make things change but we’ve residents whodon’t talk to each other. So it’s about bringingthem all together now too.’

Mr Deane of Holywell outlined how a par-ticularly striking network of significant figuresacross the city had been established which hadhelped to stop the ‘degenerate spirals of com-munication’ referred to in the introduction—interms remarkably similar to an account of thepeace-keeping role of cross-communal civicassociations in Indian cities (Varshney, 2002). Inthis case the network had arisen from a forma-tive trip to Israel, organised by Holywell, in themid-90s. He said:

That was one of several experiences which wouldallow you to very clearly understand, when thingsare bad between the two communities, the impor-tance of a personal relationship on the other side.You have to phone and say ‘Here’s the shit thatwe’re getting, here’s what people believe is hap-pening, how do you see it happening and whatcan we do about it?’, absolutely knowing—absolutely, in your profoundest level of being,knowing—that that’s sectarian stuff you are beingfed. Like the Prods who were going to burn downthe cathedral or whatever it is, that this is not true,and that there’s a way in which you can connectto another human being and you can say ‘thisdemolishes rumours’—so that the fears and thefantasies, the worst devils, can be dealt with.

His colleague Mr Doherty was in no doubt that,while it hadn’t been the reason why such net-works had been established, their very existencehad helped allow of a resolution of the paradescontroversy in Derry. There was, he said ‘an


easier openness in Derry as a result’.In today’s world, of course, networks don’t

have to be face-to-face. Ms Montague of Tidesexplained how the idea of mobile-phone net-works had emerged as a means to help suppresstensions between the pockmarked neighbour-hoods of north Belfast: ‘I did a lot of work inthe Limestone between Tiger’s Bay andParkside. We had very well formed relation-ships there but it was a different scenario.Because there had been a level of very severeviolence at that interface, it took a while beforepeople would come together as two groups. Butwhat had happened before the two full groupscame together, I had community activists com-ing together. And in fact the idea of the mobilephones originated from those people.’ It wassubsequently disseminated by the CommunityDevelopment Centre in the area, and support-ed by the CRC.

Inevitably, the Nerve Centre is at the fore-front of developing an electronic network topromote interculturalism. The Diversity Onlineresource will allow the centre not only to makeexisting materials more widely available but alsofor these to be updated frequently, offeringtraining on issues such as intolerance and hatecrime. Mr Peto captured the relationshipbetween innovation and network dissemina-tion, describing how through ‘the animatedseries, through the symbols [CD], the UlsterWeans A-Z comes to our mind, you can seewe’ve constantly evolved and adapted. You getto one solution, you do the animation and thenit’s about looking at the conflict so then wemove into more direct symbols—1916, Easter,Somme, direct conflict—so we’re no longer

coming at it from a tangent, we’re hitting ithead-on and then with that there’s some issuesabout the format. CD-rom, it’s complicated, tooacademic. So we move on to a DVD, so it’s justliterally watching telly. You don’t have to inter-act, whatever else. Then we realised with a DVD

still you actually have to physically put some-thing in somebody’s hand, so we move on todelivering stuff online.’

What would be seen as another keyfeature of Silicon Glen and simi-lar agglomerations has also pro-

vided a significant ‘ripple effect’ in the work oforganisations committed to reconciliation.

Individuals working in university depart-ments or particular firms incubate an idea oftheir own in such secure environments, and thisbecomes the basis of a new and sustainableenterprise. It was remarkable how often inthese interviews individuals spoke of havinghad a stint with Corrymeela, even just as a vol-unteer, before spreading their wings elsewhere.

Dr Stevens described Corrymeela as offeringan ‘apprenticeship’, which over 300 long-termvolunteers had experienced since its establish-ment. ‘So in this sense you learn about goodpractice from seeing other people do things. Sohow you teach is a very interesting question inthat regard. I think actually it is better seeingsomebody else do.’

And, interestingly, he used Californian lan-guage to describe how this learning hadspawned new organisations, like Tides. It was ‘apattern of spin-offs’, he said.

Mr Deane spoke of an identical diffusionfrom the Derry base of Holywell. He said that


‘people come along and say, “look, I’m thinkingabout doing something here, what do youthink?” and we help them to create their pro-ject. We would help them to go after the fund-ing and sometimes we would give them space inhere to start it off … So we would have pro-jects like that that were spawned in here by peo-ple and then take an independent wing and goon their own.’

Dr Stevens’ discussion of ‘apprentice-ship’ relates to the other obvious wayof creating ripples: training. And, as

Mr Craig of Tides Training encapsulated it,training is ‘primarily about how to facilitatepeople to have tough conversations while wedo not agree’. He stressed that ‘there’s a pointat which you have to agree some initial stan-dards’, as there were ‘real skills involved in thisand yet anybody—the guy in the street crossingthe road there—could put the coat on and say“CR trainer”’.

Mr Craig is of the view that the CRC needs toengage in ‘kitemarking’ in this regard. Others,reflecting on the failure of the CommunityRelations Training and Learning Consortium,felt the CRC should take on a more active train-ing function itself.

The ripples can begin within individualorganisations themselves. Ms Peake of WAVE

spoke of how ‘people like Alan [McBride] andothers that are on the staff team represent avery strong mentorship system in terms ofwhat can be achieved’. And Mr Lemondescribed a system of training in peer media-tion for selected young pupils at Brownlow: ‘Ihave very strong evidence that that really sticks

with them right into year twelve even. Becauseby that stage, or even before that stage, they canarticulate very clearly what skills they’ve learntthrough peer mediation and they really do valueit.’

This could have its lighter side: ‘They’ll say,“There was a row in our house on Saturdaynight but I got it sorted out because I appliedmediation! I put my Mum in that room and myDa in that room. Did a Kissinger!” It’s quitefunny.’

The next stage is to generate formal trainingprogrammes and/or resources to spread theword. NICIE and Corrymeela have produced anextremely impressive training manual (Potterand Lynagh, 2005), which is already, accordingto Mr Wardlow, in international demand. Themanual demonstrates in an eye-catching man-ner how schools—all schools, not just those inthe integrated sector—can and should setabout addressing issues of interculturalism.

Notably, the manual stresses the importanceof a ‘whole school’ aproach, of establishing adevelopment group across the school staffhierarchy, and of engendering ‘safe spaces’ fordialogue in which genuine ‘reflection’ can takeplace. It rehearses, then, many of the themeswhich have recurred throughout this report,while offering much practical advice and sug-gesting many concrete exercises. While orientedtowards the educational community, it is there-fore of wider interest still.

A decade ago, NICIE pioneered an early-years‘anti-bias curriculum’, which has latterly beentweaked and re-issued. Subsequent research byPaul Connolly highlighted the significance ofthis, demonstrating as it did how children in


Northern Ireland begin to recognise the sectar-ian connotations of symbols as young as threeyears of age (Connolly and Healy, 2003). MrWardlow said that ‘the interesting thing is theuptake of the training in the anti-bias curricu-lum is extremely impressive in schools thataren’t integrated’.

And, finally, there is the training whichreaches way beyond its source. Here, FutureWays has played a valuable role in its work withpublic agencies. For example, Mr Wilsonexplained how some years ago he and DrMorrow had engaged those responsible forsocial work training: ‘These were the trainers ofsocial workers across Northern Ireland. Andwhen they had sessions with Duncan and I onpolitics and scanning the environment here,that was the first time they had done it. Now itwas liberating once they did it but they didn’tknow how to do it.’

Dr Stevens of Corrymeela made the remarkthat ‘voluntary organisations are often moreflexible than the statutory bodies and theycan pioneer. But unless this sort of thing ismainstream—and not just mainstream as asort of tick-box, lip-service exercise—then vol-untary bodies will always remain on the mar-gin’. Mr Wilson had one answer to thisconundrum, suggesting that a system of ‘shad-owing’ for public servants might allow atransfer of knowledge and practice across thevoluntary-statutory divide.


The alternative to a divided society isone strong in social capital—more par-ticularly, one strong in ‘bridging’ social

capital that establishes networks across com-munal lines, rather than narrowly intracom-munal, ‘bonding’ capital.

Ms Hanlon of BCDA said that ‘the whole ideaof a place like this is you can have your ownidentity, you can have your own beliefs, but youcan still work together on the common good,which to me in that jargon is bridging capital.And that is what this society needs, not bond-ing capital.’

Social capital can perhaps more simply beunderstood as the ‘social fabric’ (Halpern,2005). It is at one level easily torn but very dif-ficult to repair, yet at another it is strongly inter-woven and can withstand much day-to-daystress. Weaving that social fabric in NorthernIreland, and repairing its holes, is the task ofreconciliation for the decades ahead.

Mr Tubritt of BCDA described what thismeans in Ballynafeigh:

I suppose I’m looking to build a community, andI use that word in the broadest sense, which is asinclusive as is possible but where difference isn’thidden or swept under the carpet and, wherethere is conflict, it’s acted out in a way … thatdoesn’t tear down the social fabric around it. Anda lot of my role is helping groups through theprocess of conflict but trying to at least minimisethe damage to the social fabric around that con-flict, and that isn’t the same as trying to push peo-ple into consensus—that’s not what I’m talkingabout. I think it’s very healthy for people to dis-agree but as long as that disagreement isn’t apoc-alyptic, which is often what happens in NorthernIreland. Because we have a disagreement about amarch at the bridge, it becomes an apocalypticthing where everything about Northern Ireland isfocused on that bridge.

Another common theme in these discussionswas trust, a key ingredient—along with socialnetworks and widely-accepted norms—ofsocial capital. Several interviewees said thattrust was the foundation of their credibilitywith those with whom they worked. Speaking


Social fabric

of how residents in Ballynafeigh viewed BCDA,Ms Hanlon said that ‘a lot of the things can bebrought down to the simplest level, that peopletrust you, that people know they are not goingto be shocked by what you do, and that peopleknow you are going to act on their behalf, evenif they accept that you are kind of different.Then that trust is something you can do allsorts of things with.’

Ms Kelly of Corrymeela said the organisa-tion’s accumulated trust went before it: if ‘yougo and you meet a group and you say, “hi, I’mLisa from Corrymeela”, there’s automatically acup of tea on the table, the door’s open a weebit more for you and you’re accepted slightlymore sometimes … It’s been there for so longand lots of people know about it and the sto-ries are all quite positive.’

Ms Montague of Tides explained how thistrust allowed her to address political issues in achallenging way in discussion groups. Havingestablished her reputation in mediation andwork with prisoners, she said that ‘that givesyou a level of credibility to allow you to say thethings that are hard for them to hear. Becausethey know that you’re not doing it out of asense of sectarianism or trying to trick them,they trust you.’

Ms Hetherington told a similar story aboutthe value of personal, as well as organisational,credibility. She said that ‘if people know you byreputation, that you’re trustworthy, you can dothings that you couldn’t otherwise do. And youcan open doors that wouldn’t otherwise open.’She added that ‘the other thing too is that whenyou do develop that sense of trust, then acuriosity gets people to go way beyond the

realms of other conversations’.A big positive about social capital is that it

tends to strengthen with use, whereas physicalcapital—money, for example—is expendedwhen it is deployed. Trusting behaviour tendsto be reciprocated, particularly in more egal-itarian societies, and the reciprocation itselfreinforces the initial trusting gesture. The hand-shake is a simple embodiment of this.

Dr Morrow contributed an insight into whythe work by Future Ways with the police hadbeen so effective. His explanation was that ‘feargenerates fear and trust generates trust’ in whathe called a ‘multiplier effect’. What had hap-pened with the police was that ‘the ones whowanted this [change] started to pile in on theback of trust, believing we would back them,and all of a sudden you got a virtuous circle ofpeople articulating what the issue was’.

But here’s the catch. As so often in thisreport, the need for a long-term perspectivearose here too. Mr Whyte spoke of ‘investing alot of time and effort into making sure thattrust is there’. The implication is clear. If organ-isations working for reconciliation are to beable to build, or rebuild, the social fabric, theyneed to have the long-term support to allowsuch a painstaking process to take place.

The other side of trust is the relation-ships it binds between citizens.Reflecting on what had worked in his

experience with young people at WAVE, MrMcBride said relationships were key: ‘It’s notjust the relationship with the young person, it’sthe relationship with the young person’s parentsand, yeah, the relationship is key. So when I


think about the projects that have worked welland the young people that I think I have prob-ably made a difference with, a lot of it has beento do with the extent of the relationship andsome young people have benefited more thanothers from that.’

WAVE (2005) cites academic evidence in sup-port of this from a psychologist, Maura Burns.Writing of the value of befriending for victims,she argues: ‘Building up social relationships …can redeem the relationship with the commun-ity which is frequently damaged or fractured bythe traumatic event.’

In their joint chaplains’ report at LaganCollege, Ms Killick and Sr Kilroy affirm: ‘Re-lationships are, at the end of the day, the objectand means of integration for students and staffalike.’ The peer-mediation training at Brownlowreferred to earlier is one example of relation-ship-building, which Mr Lemon described as‘integration in practice, because if we’re talkingabout, at a very basic level, the peaceful resolv-ing of disputes, for 11 year-olds, some of thoseconcepts are fairly abstract, but what they do

understand is bullying and being unhappy interms of relationships’.

In an unpublished paper, Dr Stevens arguesthat the founder of Corrymeela, Ray Davey,developed ‘a language around relationships andreconciliation’. His vision ‘expressed a commit-ment to encounter, interaction and positiverelationships between all sorts and conditionsof people’. Dr Stevens notes how this languagehas entered A Shared Future, which affirms that‘relationships matter and are central’ and that‘moving from relationships based on mis-trust and defence to relationships rooted inmutual recognition and trust is the essence ofreconciliation’.

A simple demonstration of the importanceof relationships was given by Mr Deane ofHolywell Trust. Just being photographed withanother member of the cross-community net-work Holywell has stimulated—‘doing ordinarythings together’—perhaps in a hall or a bar withsectarian connotations in which one is per-ceived to be out of place, could chip away atstereotypes: ‘it does send a message where peo-ple say “maybe they’re not all like that”’.

Mr Tubritt of BCDA explained how pre-exist-ing relationships had constrained tensions in amixed residents’ group, following an argumentat a meeting over the issue of Protestant-communalist parades:

What happened was at the next meeting—whichI didn’t even think was going to happen—every-body turned up, it was a lovely summer’s evening.There was fairly frank discussion and they said,‘let’s talk about a way of managing this situation,of managing the march, of managing the rela-tionships’. And what happened was that yes, there


WAVE

Founded: 1991Base: Belfast (and outreach centres)Purpose: to offer care and support to anyone bereaved ortraumatised through the violence, irrespective of religious,cultural or political beliefDirector: Sandra PeakeWeb site: www.wavebelfast.co.uk E-mail: [email protected] Signal achievement: supporting victims, on a cross-community basis, with a reach and sensitivity no statutoryagency could match

were Catholics and Protestants who had strongly-held views on a number of things and issues todo with the march, yet the higher value was thatthey were neighbours in that street—and thatthey agreed that, however they did this, theywould try to respect the views of the other, what-ever that may be.

For him, ‘the key factor, the brake on it becom-ing apocalyptic was the recognition by thosepeople that they lived in this community, andthat this community was a little bit more thanjust a group of Catholics and a group ofProtestants living together. They were actuallyneighbours.’

Indeed, more positively, he said: ‘You get aflag, a Union Jack going up near the Catholicchurch, the people who are most concernedabout that are actually some Protestants whothen go “that shouldn’t be happening”. And thepolice will very quickly go “that’s not on”.’ Headded that ‘you do get a fairly sizeable elementof one side of the community looking after theother, and self-censuring in the expressions ofpolitical culture and things like that’.

Mr Wilson of Future Ways echoed, in theinstitutional arena, what Mr Tubritt said ofcommunity:

I suppose our whole work … was building a rela-tional model of reconciliation, which then fitsinto organisations and structural things. In a rela-tionship where people acknowledge one anotherand do not threaten one another, they still havedifferent views, they still disagree. But in a rela-tionship where people acknowledge one anotherthe threat is either less or absent. You can stilldisagree, you can still fundamentally disagree,but in a relationship where you don’t have any

relationship, if you like—where it’s just a contest-ed, conflictual one all the time, where the rela-tionship doesn’t exist—nothing is mediated. Isuppose that’s my point. If you are in good rela-tionships they mediate different views, they keepyou together. If you are just in a conflictual rela-tionship without any sentiment for one another,which our politicians are in—I mean, they don’treally get anywhere.

Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998established a statutory framework where desig-nated public authorities were required to have‘due regard’ for equal opportunities along nineaxes and ‘regard’ for ‘good relations’ betweenreligious and ethnic groups. There was consid-erable tension during the debates leading to thelegislation, with some egalitarians expressingconcern that the ‘good relations’ provisionmight lead to a soft-pedalling on equality, whichthey felt was the key to addressing intercommu-nal tensions.

But Mr Wilson argued it was misguided tocounterpose the two: ‘You can’t build goodrelations on top of nothing: you have to build iton an equality platform. But legislation itselfwill not bring us into new relationships.Legislation will protect people who are vulner-able, but legislation of itself won’t give us therelational experience, by which we learn toacknowledge one another’s different opinionsbut get into a relationship with one another.’

Moreover, he argued, ‘if you look at organi-sational change literature, not around equalityand good relations but just around how do youbuild imaginative organisations, they have hadto address the relational dimensions of theirlife. And when you look at those organisations


that have been imaginative and creative andgenerative, they tend to be organisations thathave a relational culture, on top of whateverminimum is required legally.’

Ms Lynagh of NICIE also suggested that eventhe notion of ‘good relations’ was too static tocapture the fact that ‘if we’re about anything weshould be about relationships’. She said that‘relations is just like your second cousins orsomething like that. You don’t need to do any-thing with them or know them too well; youjust send them a card at Christmas and that’s it.But relationships … are where you have a con-nection with somebody.’

Building this social fabric is a much larg-er task than any one organisation canperform. Indeed, grossing up the earli-

er point about holistic approaches to the socie-tal level, one of the keys is ensuring that thewhole of the work of all of the organisationscommitted to reconciliation is greater than thesum of their parts. And that has importantimplications for agencies—funders, govern-ment, the CRC and political leaders—which canplay a positive, brokering role in this regard. Yetthere were some criticisms, and self-criticisms,in this regard, suggesting on the contrary thatgood work was not being adequately supportedor was even being undermined.

Mr Craig of Tides claimed that some Peacefunding had reinforced communalism. He said:‘Part of the Peace money, if you want to put itthat way, has funded sectarian division, becausewe now have community centres, if you like,that represent sectional groups: they don’t rep-resent communities in the broadest sense. So

we’ve lost the idea of interdependent commu-nity. We now have independent, self-seeking,self-concerned neighbourhoods.’

A less insidious, but no less important, con-cern has been the volume of work required oforganisations in receipt of funding to accountfor their expenditure of it. This can not onlyrepresent a distraction of resources but, ironi-cally, can be at the expense of assessment ofreal outcomes—easily lost sight of in a blizzardof spreadsheets and bean-counting.

Making clear this was a personal view only,Mr Fegan of CI said that ‘the demands foraccountability and transparency can very oftensuffocate the outcomes that a project can deliv-er’. And Ms Eyben of Future Ways argued thatthe CRC should seek to model a ‘different way ofbeing a funder that’s actually about the qualityof relationships rather than the money, or aswell as the money’.

Mr Fegan also took the view—against thebackdrop of the big reduction in EU supportanticipated for Peace III—that funding shouldbe used to lever co-operation between organ-isations. He said: ‘I don’t think a single organ-isation should be able to apply for a project. Ithink it should be a collaboration; if we aregoing to deliver projects they should be collab-orative.’ Ms Eyben felt that the funding remit ofthe CRC had not sufficiently allowed staff withgood administrative backgrounds to developtheir practitioner base and experience.

Government, too, was seen as havingresponsibilities to address. Despite the exis-tence of A Shared Future, Ms Girvan of NICIE

said that ‘another job to do, I think, is just topersuade government to recognise the value of


community relations [activity], and that’s a hardold battle.’

Extraordinarily, it became evident during theresearch for this project that one of the organ-isations involved was facing an imminent cashcrisis, another had recently undergone such anordeal and a third had only been saved by a bigprivate gesture. Yet, as Nick Acheson (2006)points out, generic public-expenditure supportfor voluntary associations in Northern Irelandhas increased substantially—on the implicit,but unevidenced, assumption that association-alism itself breeds social trust—while inter-communal divisions have significantlydeepened.

The clear implication is that there must be a muchmore targeted investment by government in non-govern-mental organisations specifically and explicitly commit-ted to tackling those divisions head-on, over and aboveEU programmes.

But perhaps the greatest frustration revealedin the interviews for this project was with theNorthern Ireland political system. This was notcoming from a group of political naïfs, mindedto rehearse tabloid attacks on politicians as‘only in it for what they can get’. Rather, thesewere very politically engaged and knowledgableindividuals. And they were capable of discrimi-nating judgments, rather than tarring all politi-cians with the same brush: Ms Girvan, forexample, highlighted and welcomed in herinterview what was then a recent statement bythe South Belfast SDLP MP, Alasdair Mac-Donnell, in favour of integrated education.

Mr Baker of Holywell criticised the repeti-tive televised political exchanges, noting that‘we say [of] our politicians, “talking heads”, or

Let’s Talk—let’s repeat the routine’. Mr Tubrittwas saddened by the associated remoteness,disappointed that ‘in various guises I’ve beenworking in the community sector in southBelfast now for 13 years, and I’ve yet to feelthat anything I’ve said to a politician has beenunderstood, valued’.

Ms Montague of Tides complained that‘there isn’t sound leadership towards a sharedfuture. I feel that it’s very difficult to ask com-munities to make a move to dialogue overissues that are diverse, that are dividing them—for example, the interfaces, there is an expecta-tion that the communities at the interfaces willdo something that at a higher level politicalleaders should turn [to].’

Ms Peake intimated that WAVE continued toreceive some 600 referrals per year, a figurethat showed no signs of decline. Indeed, somepolitical developments caused it to rise:


Projecting alternatives—the two 1916s at the Nerve Centre

‘Interestingly we can see, if you look at refer-rals, positive and what’s perceived as negativepolitical development, or lack of development,will bring people forward. Even the recall ofthe assembly quite recently caused a surge inreferrals …’

The absence of political reconciliation sincethe agreement, she said, was ‘part of what peo-ple are battling with now, the disillusionment ofwhat that all meant’. In the most recent reporton its work by WAVE (2005), Ms Peake writes:‘Anger, disbelief and feelings of isolation areperpetuated due to the political stalemate.’

Ms Girvan suggested that ‘what’s wrongwith the politics up here’ is that ‘trust has total-ly broken down, and if you don’t build trustfrom the bottom up how are you going to havea better society in the future? I often say if theyhad gone to integrated schools in the first place,some of the politicians, maybe we wouldn’tactually have been in this situation we are now.When I hear them up in that assembly, theycan’t even select a [committee] chairperson, Ijust [sighs] I just can’t comprehend …’

And Mr Wilson of Future Ways said that ‘ifwe’re talking about building a civil societywhere the public space is that sort of spacewhere people engage, or where people bounceoff one another—where, if you like, the hardedges are softened a little—that’s only possiblein a public space that is relational and that’s notwhat this society has … [Political figures] don’thave a sentiment for one another, so they don’teven see the importance of public space. Theyjust have a conflictual space where they bounceoff one another as arrogant adversaries.’


The interviewees’ negative portrait ofthe Northern Ireland political systemreinforces evidence from DD’s earlier

work on reconciliation. This found the samefrustration among practitioners in case-studylocalities vis-à-vis the politics of the local coun-cil chamber (Kelly and Hamber, 2005b).

But there was much in this research to indi-cate that the apparent intractability ofNorthern Ireland politics is not so evident as atfirst glance. Indeed, it explains, at least in part,a number of unanswered questions.

Why has the parades controversy beenessentially settled in Derry, but not yet inBelfast? How does it come that the police serv-ice, of all the major institutions engendered bythe Belfast agreement, is the one that is intactand thriving? How can integrated schools proveto be such oases of mutuality amidst sustainedsectarian polarisation? And how can a neigh-bourhood in south Belfast be far more mixedthan any in the north of the city, without beingcriss-crossed with ‘peace walls’?

Precisely because of the modesty of the par-ticipants in this research, they would not makegreat claims in this regard. But their stories indi-cate how invisible networks and intense dia-logues have helped make these very realachievements happen. Good practice, in otherwords, has had very tangible outcomes, includ-ing in ways the political process has yet torealise.

What is lacking is the official and politicalsupport these hugely worthy and selflessendeavours, on any objective assessment, clear-ly merit. As this report has indicated, we know‘what works’. So why is government support somodest—particularly given the obvious savingsin policing and other arenas of public expendi-ture that such investment can bring?

The answer appears to be that governmentitself is unclear in its collective mind as towhether it is merely accommodating, and so‘managing’, intercommunal division inNorthern Ireland or whether it is seriouslycommitted to engendering ‘a shared future’.


Conclusion

But it is increasingly hard to see, in today’s glob-alising context, how maintaining two pillarised‘communities’ in Northern Ireland, hermetical-ly sealed from each other and from the widerworld, is politically (or morally) sustainable.

Indeed, the very mistrust and intolerancewhich Northern Ireland’s political system hasembodied appears to have been one of thespurs driving those committed individualsinterviewed for this study. And it is not hard todetect, in the emphases of their often verymoving testimonies, the outlines of a differentpolitical culture in the making, more attuned toour reflexive and intercultural times.


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The list below identifies the interviewees. In bold are the directors of each organisation, followedby others who were interviewed in that context, including subsequent or different organisationalaffiliations.

Katie Hanlon Ballynafeigh Community Development AssociationGerry Tubritt BCDA

Philip Whyte BCDA

Tony Kennedy Co-operation IrelandMarianne McGill CI

Ann Anderson-Porter CI

Des Fegan CI

David Stevens Corrymeela CommunitySusan McEwan CorrymeelaColin Craig Tides TrainingShona Borthwick TidesLisa Kelly TidesMary Montague TidesEamonn McCallion Community Relations in Schools

Derick Wilson Future WaysKarin Eyben Future Ways

Appendix a: interviewees


Duncan Morrow CRC

Eamonn Deane Holywell TrustTerry Doherty Holywell Eamon Baker Holywell Maureen Hetherington The Junction

Martin Melarkey The Nerve CentreJohn Peto Nerve CentreJennifer Gormley Nerve CentreSarah Lawrence Studio OneIngrid Arthurs Studio One

Michael Wardlow Northern Ireland Council for Integrated EducationDean Lee NICIE

Nichola Lynagh NICIE

Deborah Girvan NICIE

Gary McFadden Lagan CollegeSister Anne Kilroy Lagan Helen Killick Lagan Errol Lemon Brownlow College

Sandra Peake WAVE

Alan McBride WAVE

Rev David Clements WAVE


1. What would you say represented the biggest barrier, or barriers, to reconciliation that you haveexperienced through your work?

2. How does your organisation attempt to overcome that barrier / those barriers?

3. What do you consider the term ‘good practice’ to mean in relation to what you are trying toachieve?

4. What in particular have you found has been a successful project or practice?

5. What factor(s) do you think, specifically, made the difference in that regard?

6. Were there any particular conditions enabling this success which would have to be present inorder to achieve similar results in another context?

7. Are there any other projects or practices that stand out in this way?

8. And why did it / they work, do you think?

9. Again, were there any particular conditions on which this outcome depended?

10. Can you think of an example of work in which you have been involved where the outcome hassurprised you—for better or worse—in terms of your expectations?

Appendix b: topic guide


11. And why do you think this was the case?

12. Are there any episodes in which you gleaned a new, perhaps unexpected, insight from your work?

13. Conversely, are there any where you felt you learnt a negative lesson?

14. Are there any other aspects of good practice that you have learned from organisations other thanyour own, or just happened to observe?

15. Finally, if you were advising someone setting up an organisation working for reconciliation, howwould you suggest from your experience they avoid reinventing the wheel or making unnecessarymistakes?

what works for reconciliation?

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