In this episode of Northern Peacebuilders, we meet David Robinson, who discusses his journey into peacebuilding and community relations. He shares personal experiences from his childhood, involvement in Corrymeela, and later work at Belfast City Council, particularly in the Decade of Centenaries. David emphasises the importance of genuine reconciliation and building positive relationships to create a peaceful and safe society.
INTERVIEW POSTSCRIPT
What is your favourite book or resource on conflict resolution/community relations/peacebuilding?
Common Sense — a pamphlet that was produced by loyalists.
Peace is…
challenging.
Peace can only be brought about by…
me changing myself and my attitudes.
I was inspired by…
Bertie Ahern.
The Northern Ireland conflict could be transformed if…
we look at how we can change personally.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Allan: Today, I’m here with David Robinson, who works at Belfast City Council in community relations, and he is here to share with us his personal story of his work. So, you’re very welcome, David.
David: Thank you, Allan. Lovely to be here.
Allan: So what we would like to find out is where it all began. How did your journey into peacebuilding and community relations come about?
David: Gosh, right. I suppose when I look back on it all, I sort of wonder myself how it came about. And it really stems back to, I suppose, even thinking about when I was small growing up in Bray in County Wicklow in the south of Dublin.
I’m 49. So, whenever I was watching TV and watching the news as a child, I was seeing stuff that was happening on this island. It intrigued me because I thought I lived in the best place in the world. I thought Ireland was a great place to live. It was lovely. The weather was a bit questionable on occasion, but it was a, just a nice, peaceful place to live.
I grew up in a working-class estate called Old Court, where Katie Taylor, our famous Bray resident also grew up. And I think my first political experience, I would say, was whenever people in the estate put out black flags at the time of the hunger strikes.
And I remember there was graffiti on the wall out the back of where we lived, which said, “Free Nicky Kelly”. Do you remember Nicky Kelly from the train robbery?
I remember thinking graffiti and flags and I remember our local bin man, the guy who, who kept the streets clean around our estate — he was wearing a black armband around the time of the hunger strikes — and I remember asking myself, “What’s this all about?” And I was only seven at the time. That stuck with me.
I remember my grandfather — we used to go there every Saturday to my granny and grandad. They lived in Stillorgan in South Dublin. I remember talking to him and listening to him, I suppose, more than talking. He had some stories. He was born in 1911. So, he was a young boy, very young boy at the time of the 1916 Easter Rising. He had some memories of it, but he was evacuated out of Dublin city centre during the Easter Rising and went to Galloping Green, which is south side of Dublin. He just had some fantastic stories. he says he, and I don’t believe him, but he says he remembers Cathal Brugha being shot in Dublin and stuff like that. But he was able to paint pictures of stories. And so Irish history and the politics of the island became embedded into me at a very early stage.
Also as well, whenever he, you know, if Margaret Thatcher or Ian Paisley came onto the TV, he would turn it off, he would just turn the TV off. He wouldn’t be interested in listening. And that intrigued me as well. I said, “What’s wrong? What’s he doing that for?”
Whenever I progressed through school, I just became very interested in history and particularly Irish history. The teaching of Irish history in the south obviously is a lot different than it would be up here in terms of the curriculum. I became interested in people and their stories, and particularly, the whole Gaelic revival stuff that we were being taught around Padraig Pearce. And then the story of Joseph Mary Plunkett marrying Grace Gifford, and James Connolly intrigued me as well, coming over from Edinburgh to sort of try and get the workers, you know, and do all that. I might come back to that later on, because that sort of came full circle when I became a shop steward for SIPTU [trade union] a couple of years ago during the pandemic.
So, studying history in school, I was very interested in it.
My mum was a great example. She was involved in a lot of work in the community through — not church work, but through the church. So, the fundraising for the local community hall, the summer schemes that were ran, she became involved in that. She was always involved in the community and got us involved when we were sort of like 16, 17, as junior leaders in the local summer schemes and all that. I became very interested in the local community. And then one day a friend of the family… he’s a councillor in Wicklow County Council — an independent councillor, but at the time he was a Fianna Fáil councillor.
He knocked on the door and was canvassing for Brian Lenihan in the 1990 presidential election. I said, “I can’t vote Joe. I’m too young.” And he says, “Oh, right. Stick your coat on, sure, and come out with me and you can tell people why they should vote.” So, I got involved with Fianna Fáil. But it was really from the point of view of Joe being, and my mother was going, “Oh my God, what’s he doing now?”
Allan: It sounds like you got collared into it.
David: Got collared into it, literally collared into it. I had this sort of idea of a sense of Irishness, definitely. But also a sense of what’s wrong with this place. So, I had this vocational sort of thing going on, whereby I was interested in trying to be involved in finding out what’s wrong, what’s going on, and trying to do something about it.
Allan: It’s interesting you say you want to find out what’s going wrong because so far, this could be a story of someone who gets involved in southern politics, in southern society, in southern community groups. So, I’m intrigued to know what was nagging at you about the rest of this island.
David: That became clearer after a while. When I was deciding what I wanted to do with my life I, became interested in this notion of the priesthood. Because I thought, well, I can do something useful through that.
And then I thought, “But I don’t particularly want to do that. So what could I do instead?” So, I sort of made a deal with the man above and I said, “Right, when I leave school, I will apply to become a religion teacher.
So, I applied to become a religion teacher. Got accepted into a course in the Mater Dei Institute in Dublin, which trains teachers for secondary school. And I thought that would be good because I think my school experience was very positive. Our teachers in St. Kilian’s Community School in Bray were very enabling, very empowering. if we were interested in something, they really directed us that way.
But the priest thing never went away. So, I applied to become a priest as well. Then I had both of those offers sitting on the table. And I thought, if I do the teacher thing, that’ll be me, and I’ll always wonder what would’ve happened if I had of been a priest.
So, I sort of went and said, well, I’ll do the priest thing first, and if that doesn’t work out… So, I went into seminary in 1992. And I spent four years in the seminary.
But what happened during that time really just changed my whole direction. Because every year, each class in the seminary gets a class weekend away.
And in our fourth year our class priest was a man, Father Gareth Byrne. Gareth was a classmate of a guy called Alan Hilliard, who was a priest in Dublin. And Alan Hilliard’s sister-in-law was a lady called Paula Hevey, who was from Belfast, and Paula was involved in an organisation called Corrymeela.
For our class weekend away Gareth said, “Let’s go up the north,” because the ceasefires had been called at that stage, none of us had never been, most of us were probably very frightened of going across the border as southerners. We said, “Okay, let’s do it.”
We drove up cause there was only five of us — we were a very small class. We drove up and we went and we stayed in Portaferry for a night. Apparently loads of people who dive — divers — go to Portaferry. So, we were pretending we were divers for the weekend. We weren’t a bunch of trainee priests in the bars and stuff like that, and having the crack.
I just loved the fact that I was frightened about coming north, but I enjoyed it. But on our second day, we drove into Belfast up the Ards Peninsula. And I remember, and I remember it well because I ended up using this place, this garage, hundreds of times subsequently. We drove in, up from Portaferry, in through Dundonald, and down the Newtownards Road into East Belfast.
I remember seeing the flags and I remember going, Jeanie Mac! In your body, you could start to feel the tension. So, this was like 1994. Ceasefires were called, but the flags were there and the tension was there or whatever.
Paula had set up for us to visit the Shankill Road as part of our trip to Belfast. Paula had set up with a lady called Alison Morrow, who is related to obviously Duncan and the family, and John Morrow, who had been involved in Corrymeela. Alison met us in a coffee shop on the Shankill Road. I am literally cacking it sitting there looking around me as nervous as hell going, people are going to recognise the number plate on the car. People are going to hear our accents. We’re gone. We are done for here. Alison spoke to us about Northern Ireland, the issues and the situation and all that.
Listening to that story on the Shankill Road really just had a huge impact on me. She also spoke about Corrymeela, and that became something that just went into my soul and my brain and hasn’t left me since, to be honest with you.
We went back, and I kept thinking about it and kept thinking about it, and after you do four years in the seminary — in years 5, 6, and 7, it starts getting serious, you start taking vows of various descriptions.
I spoke to Gareth, and I said, “Gareth, I really loved Corrymeela. I just found it fascinating, and can I take a year out?” Gareth said, “Yes, let’s work on that, then take a year out.” Then Alison Morrow connected me up with Reverend David Godfrey, who was in Bray at the time, him and his wife. I went down to meet them, and they told me all about Corrymeela, and David had a slideshow. And it just looked amazing, but the Ballycastle site. I applied for the year out, and then at the same time, David Godfrey said to me, “Just to let you know, if you’re interested, the long-term volunteer programme in Corrymeela are looking for a southern male, preferably a Catholic, but in order to get the balance in the volunteer team for the coming year.”
So, I applied for it, and I remember meeting the volunteer coordinator in the city centre in Dublin. She came down. On that day, there was a bomb scare in Dublin, there was a bomb put in a skip in Dublin, and she had walked by it and said I’ve just come all the way down from Belfast here for the day, and you’re bringing me into this place where people are…
The irony of it all just made it all meant to be.
I went to Corrymeela in 1996 to do a volunteer year, and I ended up staying there for four years.
What attracted me to it was, and this is this is no criticism of anything. But going from an all-male institution into a community of men and women from different backgrounds, different religious backgrounds, the ecumenical aspect of Corrymeela, and also then the work that we were doing.
It was fascinating. We did a lot of work with youth groups, community groups, women’s groups, family groups.
Allan: Can you explain the framework of the work that you did at Corrymeela? What it’s founded on, how it’s exercised, who you work with?
David: That is the most fascinating thing about Corrymeela. You cannot learn through a book how to engage with what goes on in Corrymeela. You just literally simply have to just be there and be open. Just be open in yourself and being open to possibilities of what might happen and the changes.
And so that, to me, was the whole area where reconciliation for me became a really important thing. Because through everyday human interaction with people from a different background to you, you can learn so much. Primarily about yourself. And that’s where it shifted for me. This is not about me.
One of the things I wanted to come up was to find out what the problem was with these unionists, why they hated us so much and why a united Ireland would be such a bad thing. Very naive, hadn’t a clue, and I was going up to sort of just, ” I will just charm them into a united Ireland.”
Primarily, it’s about learning about yourself. So, immediately for me, I was learning about myself all the time — where my attitudes come from, what they mean to me, how they influence how I carry on in my day-to-day life.
It is a journey.
I remember one guy saying to me one day he says, “God, this is the only place I’ve ever been where I can mess up, but it’s okay.
Allan: Non-judgemental.
David: Non-judgemental. It’s fantastic. After my volunteer year working with the director at the time, Colin Craig, we applied for some funding to run a youth development program for 18 to 25-year-olds, and I got the job to be in charge of that. I was essentially a youth development worker. But I, I had no,
Allan: I was just about to ask, “With what training?”
David: The only training I had was my experience. Interestingly at that time, so you’re talking about ’96, ’97 at that time. I was interested in the politics.
One of the things I was able to do was organise a conference one weekend for young members of the Ulster Unionist Party and young members of Fianna Fáil. And it was a fascinating, fascinating wee weekend. People talking to each other and I’m thinking, “This is what it’s all about.” And this is where this can all happen, in Corrymeela.
We had people like Gary McMichael come up to speak to the group. Really, for me, that’s when I started to try and push myself, to find out more about unionism and loyalism, because I felt that that was the bit that I wasn’t aware of, and that I didn’t know much about.
Sometimes it was very hard to find people who would tell that story. And I’m sure people were telling that story, but for someone like me, I didn’t know many people who were able to tell that story.
I was in Corrymeela at the signing of the Good Friday Agreement at the time. And I remember watching it on a small little TV, watching it all unfold with a couple of American volunteers. We were all just fascinated that this could actually happen.
One of the best experiences that probably shaped the work that I’ve been doing since was whenever I was asked if I would work with a group of former UDA prisoners who were coming to Corrymeela after the prisoner release scheme. I spent a weekend with people who had just been released from prison, men and women. And that experience totally turned on its head the reasons why I was wanting to come up here in the first place.
They were the ones changing me rather than me trying to change them. By that I mean , I thought, you know, well, what’s the problem? But actually, if you ask people, so what is it, what’s it about, what’s your story about, what’s your politics about, your community about, and you actually listen. For me it was a great sense of, wow, this is a serious political, cultural identity that shouldn’t be just dismissed. Or it shouldn’t be just, “Ah, they’ll come round at some stage.” You know, that’s the sort of, the sense of the out-there conversation. But that sort of sense of confidence and pride and security was something that I felt I wanted to explore more about.
Allan: Perhaps that’s a segue into some of the work you’ve done since then. I mean, it sounds through your journey that you’ve put respect into action. You have this curiosity and your curiosity sounds like it’s led you to grow. I’m curious to learn how you’ve been able to apply that to other work.
David: The journey in Corrymeela, after four years working in a place like that, which is very intense, there was quite a bit of burnout, and I got a bit ill. The local GP actually came up and just said, “Pack your bag. You’re coming down to stay with me.” And I ended up staying with him for a number of weeks. The burnout thing, and that’s been probably something that’s been a reoccurring thing. So, you immerse yourself and you throw yourself into this and you’re trying to find out and it’s all a bit manic and it’s all a bit, “I need to know this now.”
I finished with Corrymeela just before Christmas in 2000. And I just took a bit of time out. Then I stayed in Ballycastle. I said to myself, I may as well be on the dole in Ballycastle as anywhere else. So, I stayed in Ballycastle and got involved in the local community. But also did a little bit of youth work, got a job as a part time youth worker.
Then I went and worked in the probation service for a year. They had a residential centre in Ballycastle called Ramoan. Again, met a totally different side of life in Northern Ireland that I hadn’t encountered much at all. Some people that I had met through the probation service who had been, victims of paramilitaries and all of that. So, you’re getting a number of different areas.
Then a job came up in Cooperation Ireland. So, I went and worked for them for a few years, for three years. Which was a fantastic experience. It was the cross-border stuff that was, and again, using my experience of the people and the contacts that I met at Corrymeela to try and get people from the loyalist community involved in cross-border activities and cross-border projects.
Allan: Were there some, successes and challenges with that?
David: There were. Some of the successes were that people did get involved from different parts of Belfast. Some of the challenges were for me going into places that I had never thought I would ever go into and estates and areas and social clubs and bars that I… When I tell people some of the places, “Are you serious? Are you mad?” Everywhere I went, I always was treated with the utmost courtesy and respect. And people making sure that I felt safe and comfortable. There was occasions where people were asking, “Who is he and what’s he doing here?” Partly, a bit of naivety on my part probably got me through that, but also as well I think the prior fear of going to meet people in their space and just going and doing it was something that… I can tell you some very funny stories. But working for Cooperation Ireland was good in that sense.
Then an opportunity came up to work for Belfast City Council, and that was in 2006. I applied for the job. I wasn’t sure I would get it. It was just one of those things. But I think for me, I felt that that would be a great place where I could really try and engage people from unionist/loyalist background in the work that was going on there at that sort of civic level.
In 2006–2007, the political environment transformed with Ian Paisley and Martin McGuinness becoming First Minister and deputy First Minister. I came into the job in the council at a really good time, when the political environment but also the community environment… There was something about those years that were really, you know, the golden years for community relations work in some senses.
Allan: It reminds me, that was about the time the A Shared Future policy in community relations had been developed.
David: I think you had a nice sense of where the top and the bottom were all working in tandem, and there was a golden thread going through it.
Allan: That’s a nice way of putting it.
David: And it made people like me able to do a good job. And it was easy enough. And again, I got involved in all that sort of work, particularly around unionist/loyalist cultural expression, through my work in the council. The people that I met and the contacts that I had again through a number of years now of this sort of work was really, really helpful and beneficial to try and just draw people into what you were doing. That was very good.
Then the work progressed into the whole work around the commemorations. That really started back in 2011. But again, trying to use our history as something that could be shared, as something that we could all get involved with.
I think this has happened over the course of the Decade of Centenaries work. Something that we can all learn something about each other from. One of the benefits of the whole Decade of Centenaries work was the fact that it was out of current living memory. So, what happened, happened a hundred years ago. And when you look back on it and engage people in the conversations around it, you can find ways of commemorating it in a really positive way.
Allan: David, what were some of the dimensions behind the Decade of Centenaries, some of the policies and some of the stakeholders that were involved?
David: It was a very, very interesting program and the approach. Because I think at that time, back around 2010, 2011, people were, people were saying that this is coming down the line. And I think, and particularly the Irish government as well, were onto it. I think I remember Brian Cowan, at one stage, gave a speech where he outlined what an approach from the Irish government could be. Then the Community Relations Council and the Heritage Lottery established a group, a round table group, to put together a set of underpinning principles that would inform how commemorative activity could work.
And those principles were quite simple. It was around being factual, so looking at the facts. It was around not doing anything that would be triumphalist in nature. It was about adding of different perspectives. So, it was really about saying that, look, there’s lots of different ways we can do this, so let’s do it together. In our place, councillors adapted those principles, and agreed back in 2011 that anything that would be done under the Decade of Centenaries would be done under these series of principles.
That was really the beauty of how the whole process worked. Commemoration in general and in today’s world commemoration is generally can be seen as contested, can be seen as potentially disputed. We don’t agree on the narrative around the commemorative activity and event and all of that.
But for the decade of centenaries, we did. And it was a fantastic example of how if there’s goodwill there and if people are willing to find ways to say, well, let’s, if we want to do this, let’s find a way of doing it as best we can for all of our benefit. And that’s what happened.
So, the whole work around the Decades of Centenaries, which I was privileged to be involved in, did contain those multiple narratives, those multiple perspectives, and gathering all that into one place was a really fantastic experience, but also a fantastic example of how commemoration can work in a divided society, but a way in which you can promote sharedness.
You’re talking about particularly contentious things. I mean, when you’re talking back to the decade of centenaries, it started really with the Balmoral Review, the Ulster Covenant, ending with the partition of the island and how to create activity and events, exhibitions, multimedia, because COVID put us all into the multimedia world of how to have these conversations online.
It was it was a great experience. And if I can acknowledge, God rest him, but Éamon Phoenix, who was my sort of Belfast daddy teacher. Working with him was an absolute privilege. We were in the Linen Hall Library one day discussing an idea for a conference type event, and we were hushed twice in the library by people who were sitting reading books. And we just burst out laughing, the two of us, because we were so excited about what we were talking about. That academic expertise and input into the whole area of the Decade of Centenaries was fantastic.
But key to it all was the work of community organisations, and particularly within the unionist community, a lot of the Somme societies, and a lot of the groups who have commemorative organisations for aspects around things like the First World War. To be able to work with them in such a positive way was again, another part of my whole journey around me finding out what it is that is important to people from unionist, loyalist communities.
Allan: I’m glad you pay tribute to the late Éamon Phoenix. You’ve highlighted the role of good local history, working with local communities to bring stories to wider audiences. Can you share with us some aspirations about other work, whether it’s here or abroad that chimes with you, that you recognise as good practice?
David: I think one of the things that I struggle with is that we have differing cultural identities within our society. And I think while most people and particularly young people… I have an 18-year-old son who’s interested in politics and is doing it in school. But his politics and his experience of what he was seeing on the news compared to mine, which I talked about earlier on, is totally different.
His worldview is much broader, I think, than mine. The issues that are of importance to him centre around things like poverty, cost of living, the environment, mental health, and he’s not really interested in getting a deposit to buy a house. He’s not really interested in amassing material things.
He’s interested in the world in a very different way than I was. Even though my interest brought me to live 140 miles away from where I was brought up.
We have that part of our society now, but we still have those competing cultural identities which are bound up in political identity, religious identity, and that still causes issues for our society.
What I’m interested in is a genuine reconciliation process that isn’t about political outcomes or cultural outcomes — that it’s about people. that’s what I felt I experienced in Corrymeela. But I struggle to see where those in positions of power today are engaging in a genuine reconciliation process.
That’s why this, this conversation was meant to be today, because as I was walking down the street, I walked past Lord Robin Eames and we exchanged a couple of brief pleasantries. I’ve never met the man before, but it was one of those things where I’m sort of going… I met people in Corrymeela who were really genuine and open about self-reflection, which enabled them to be able to then talk about reconciliation. The self-reflection thing, I think, is where it all starts.
I know we talk about big issues around legacy and stuff, but I had experiences, human experiences in Corrymeela around things like forgiveness, around things like reconciliation, but on basic day-to-day stuff, you know, not big huge things, and I couldn’t put myself in anybody else’s shoes who has suffered loss and grief here, because I didn’t grow up here. I’ve met people who have suffered grief and loss and I think they are amazing. But I would love to see some sort of societal reconciliation without precondition process, because I think that will be what transforms this place, I think, for once and for all.
We have a cohort of young people, people under the age of 25. You could maybe add five years to that, people under the age of 30, who have no experience of the violence. When I came up for the first time in ’94, I still remember the armoured cars on the streets and the guys out the top with the guns pointing at you and being afraid to put a tin of Coke into a bin in case the guy thought I was doing something. So, I’m walking for half a mile with an empty tin of Coke.
This place has changed hugely. But I think… I think we’re trying to preserve what we have, politically and culturally, rather than trying to maybe reconcile so that the future, politically and culturally, will be something that we’re all content with. That may be very simplistic and very naive. But if I’m friends with my neighbours and I want the best for my neighbours and I am at peace with my neighbours in a truly genuine sense — not just an absence of violence, but I am in tune with my neighbours — well then, the future really will be what it will be, but we will be okay.
I remember one time, one experience I had working with a couple of communities at a particular interface area in Belfast. I remember one guy saying to me, and this was an Eureka moment, one guy saying to me, “I need to go over there and meet those people. And I need to build a relationship with those guys over there on the other side of the interface.” And I said, “Oh, that’s great, yeah.” “No, but the reason is,” he says, ” I need to support that leader, the leadership in that community and make sure that they’re strong so that the people here, these pensioners here, won’t have their windows smashed. So, I need to make sure they’re strong in order for me to be able to do my job over here.” That was an Eureka moment. Now that’s a long time ago when that was said to me, but that was somebody saying, “Do you know what? We are interdependent. The wellbeing of my community is dependent on the wellbeing of that community, and we need to build relationships.”
Look, we still have 97 physical barriers that separate communities across Belfast. There has been some progress in terms of some parts of Belfast, where they have been either transformed or removed, or adjusted. But until we have genuine reconciliation where people feel at peace in the broadest sense, but also that they feel safe, people probably won’t feel safe until they feel at peace. And the only way to be at peace is to have positive relations. I think that’s the thing that the Corrymeela experience taught me — that by doing day-to-day things, you can build relationships with people and transform your attitudes through self-reflection. You can actually then become reconciled with those from a different background to you.
And that’s not just a Belfast thing. That’s about social class. It’s about race. It’s about LGBT. It’s about all of those areas that we are defining difference within in order to generally exclude people or make ourselves feel better.
Allan: Thank you very much.
This episode is part of our series on Northern Peacebuilders — interviews with individuals whose work and efforts contribute to better community relations in Northern Ireland.
The theme song, The Trouble’s Never Over, is used by license from Scott Anderson.
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