In this episode of Northern Peacebuilders, we meet Michael Doherty, a practitioner of peacebuilding and mediation in Northern Ireland. Michael shares his personal journey, from working in a barbershop to becoming a community relations worker. He discusses the complexity of the conflict, his experiences as a mediator, and the challenges in achieving lasting peace. He emphasizes the need for trust, dialogue, and understanding between divided communities, and expresses concern about the incomplete reconciliation process and the potential for a return to violence.
INTERVIEW POSTSCRIPT
What is your favourite book on conflict resolution/community relations/peacebuilding?
Mary Fitzduff’s Conflict Skills.
Peace is…
whenever people start stop threatening one another.
Peace can only be brought about by…
dialogue and humanising the other.
I was inspired by…
John Hume.
The Northern Ireland conflict could be transformed if…
people would agree to sit down and work together in a fashion where they’re not going to kill each other.
INTERVIEW TRANSCRIPT
Allan: Today I am with Michael Doherty who has been a practitioner of peace building and mediation in Northern Ireland and beyond for quite
Michael: some time, quite some time, a long time.
Allan: And we are going to explore your history, Michael of your practice of peace building and mediation and lessons learned and that can be shared with others. So, Michael, if we can begin just by you starting, at the very beginning, what was your personal interest in your work, where did it all start from?
Michael: It started from working in a barbershop, Spencer Road, in the Waterside.
Allan: How old were you at that time?
Michael: I was thirteen, and I was fourteen whenever I started full-time work.
On the day that I was 14, I left school. I come from a nationalist, Catholic background, and I’d met a lot of Protestant people. At that stage, I didn’t know I was ever going to be involved in community relations work, but one thing I did know at that time was that I didn’t want to be a barber.
I was brought into it through family. I mean, if you’re the second eldest in a family of seven, there’s money to be made, and it was a job in Derry, 1960s. Nobody would have had a job coming from the Catholic community, or very few anyhow. And I was fortunate in that sense, because when you’re that age and you have money, you have a wage, you’re great.
And I didn’t have to worry about the Christian Brothers beating me up, because I went to a Christian Brothers school that I wish I had never went to, but that’s another life that I had. So I ended up being free of the Christian Brothers and free of the school and a full-time job in a city that had no work.
So I had a very comfortable introduction into my working life.
I was also a youth worker and a musician. I would have taught the guitar to a lot of young people about the city here, within the different youth clubs. And I felt that I had created a career that I would like to have been involved in full time as a youth worker.
I did all the part-time courses that was ever involved with group work and whatever was going for youth workers. Part-time at that particular point in time. In 1985, it was called a year of the youth. I was a part-time field officer for the Association of Youth Clubs. And I decided to start a youth orchestra in 1985. It was a cross-community programme that I intentionally set up to encourage young people from the different communities. That all came about through my own daughter being involved with one of the youth orchestras. I wanted her to get a place on the Northwest Youth Orchestra through the Northwest Education Authority, but she didn’t get her place. I decided, eh, I’ll start my own orchestra and get her into it. The only way you could get into this orchestra was to be enthusiastic. So, I started the Enthusiastic Youth Orchestra. I knew a youth worker who worked from one of the, it was a state school. It was called the Templemore School, and she gave me the rooms on a Monday night. So, we started off on a Monday night. We ended up with a full orchestra. And by 1988, we took the Youth Orchestra on a trip of Europe. We went all around Europe.
But what happened was, in 1986, I had made a decision that I didn’t want to be a barber. I wanted to go back to school and I didn’t know what was happening to me, so on a part-time basis, in 1979, I took up the challenge of going on to do a full-time foundation course at McGee College as a mature student. Eventually I did a degree in 1980, ’83 period.
Allan: What was the degree?
Michael: The degree was in social administration. Eventually I ended up with a master’s degree in public administration and legal studies. But what happened was, my father took ill and he gave me the barber shop. So I had a decision to make whether to go on to the barber shop or go on to full-time work.
In 1986, I decided to go into full-time work. I kept the barbershop going full-time. So I had two strands to my bow. I was working full-time as a community relations worker for the Northern Ireland Association Youth Clubs, that later became Youth Action. And at the same time, I was working part-time in the barbershop with five people employed.
So, whenever 1986 was coming about and I was applying for the full-time job. I already had experience of doing cross-community work through the youth clubs and through the youth orchestra. When I went for the interview, I did that as a back up, and I got offered a job as a community relations project officer, based up in the northwest here.
Because I was getting busy doing the full-time work, I had no time for the Youth Orchestra, so I had to give up part of the community relations work that I was good at.
But if someone has to ask me why I actually became so heavily involved in it. In 1976, we were blown up in a barber shop in the Waterside, which is the other part of my story. Because we were cutting the hair of off-duty police officers and soldiers in the barbershop, and it seemed as if we became a target for those people who were totally against the British Army and against the police. I remember standing outside the barbershop on the day it was blown up saying to myself, what is really going on with our community that we’re making these efforts to kill one another?
So if you were to ask me why did I become involved in community relations work, my answer is quite simply to stop our community from killing each other.
In 1986, whenever we were beginning to develop community relations work, I realised we didn’t know what we were doing. We hadn’t a clue what we were doing. We knew a lot of good words. Tolerance. Intolerant. Reconciliation. We didn’t really know what it meant. Sectarianism. What was it all about? We didn’t know.
I remember, I had a meeting with a lady called Mari Fitzduff, who eventually became the director of the Community Relations Council and I got a copy of her book, Community Skills. Myself and one of my colleagues in the Youth Action called Chuck Richardson and a lady called Ann Dixon who was the community relations officer for the Corrymeela community — getting together with the four of them and designing the first ever training program in community relations work.
Allan: And when was that?
Michael: 1988. We ran a community relations training program and in 1990 the Community Relations Council appointed a training officer and it was a guy called Fergus Comiskey. I teamed up with him, and we developed a more sophisticated community relations training program in 1990. In that we had an action learning programme. What we did was we got twelve people, we divided them up into what we would call sets, say four or five in a group. Over the period of a year, we broke them up and sent them out to do some of the training that we were training them to do, to deliver in the community.
Allan: Was it kind of like a train-the-trainer?
Michael: Train-the-trainer programme. In actual fact they ended up writing a train-the-trainer booklet after that. But it was a train-the-trainer, yeah, that’s a good title for it, because that’s what we were doing.
Then we were coming back into the main group and everybody was feeding back as to how we were getting on. From that we were able to develop more sophisticated training programs. Some of the people who have been involved, now in present day, were beneficiaries of our first training program. Now I’m not going to mention any names because I don’t want to embarrass anybody, but they know who they are. Some of them will be on television quite regularly. And some are key people on top of some of the main community relations programmes.
One of the things that I realised in the earlier days, and I said it earlier on there, was that around sectarianism, nobody would take up the challenge of tackling sectarianism. And as I’m sitting here today, I said the same thing that I said in 1986. We need to tackle sectarianism. We need to be educating our people about what it actually is.
I remember being on a radio interview in a talkback program way back with David Dunseath. And somebody asked, what is sectarianism anyway, and I remember the answer I gave. I said it’s somebody that treats somebody more worse than they would treat one of their own. And that’s, for me, still to this very day, is what sectarianism is. We really don’t look at it. We try to do other things without tackling the issues that are dividing us.
Allan: Can you comment maybe elsewhere you’ve been where as a divided society has had to do with a deep division, whether it’s sectarianism or other ethnic division, where they have attempted, at least, to address that deep division.
Michael: I think one of the most difficult areas in the world that I’ve been in, where they’ve attempted in the earlier stages, and we’ve looked at it here as well, is in Israel, with the Israelis and the Palestinians. And I think that’s the worst conflict in the world that’s going on down at this particular point in time. And the world is choosing to ignore it, even though we know the history, and everybody knows what’s going on there. We haven’t really looked at it, but they have attempted, at one stage they were attempting, I think it was around about 1992, I can introduce the whole notion of coexistence. And that’s another example of what we would needed to have been doing here, about coexistence with each other.
Allan: What’s the difference between, say, conflict management versus a conflict transformation? Because you can possibly agree on a coexistence, but then is a resolution too much, or if both parties aren’t sincerely interested in a resolution, they just learn to live with each other in a less violent way?
Michael: At this present point in time, people talk about a post-conflict situation here. I hark back to what I said years ago, and I mean this with sincerity. I talk about a conflict that’s been transformed to be less violent. We’re still in a conflict. We’re still living in our conflict. It’s being played out every day. In many ways at the minute, we’re quietly coexisting because it’s just less violent.
But coexistence to be true means that you stay in the political place that you are, and you’re not trying to change the other party. Or it looks like, if we’re living here, republicans want us to think like republicans, and loyalists want us to think like loyalists, and we’re trying to change each other’s positions. Whereas for a coexistence, you don’t do that. You live with each other side by side, peacefully. That’s in my view the true sense of coexistence.
Allan: I’d like to get to a specific example locally in regards to the dispute between the bands and local communities.
Michael: I wasn’t involved totally with the bands, I was involved with the loyal orders more than the bands.
What happened was, quietly behind the scenes, there were other people who were very out front about what they were doing. I worked more behind the scenes about what was happening. And what had happened was, I had been a member of the Parades Commission’s mediation team. And because of that, I was able to make contact with some of the loyal orders who had refused to speak to anybody from the Parades Commission. But one of the loyal order groupings, The Apprentice Boys, did not take up the same position as the Orange Order and they agreed to get into talks. Now the talks weren’t face-to-face. It was done behind the scenes, quietly, over a full weekend, until we eventually got an agreement. Then when it went public, other people have now been credited with getting in the agreements.
But the main context of that agreement that came back between the Apprentice Boys and the Bogside Residence Group is a signed up agreement that I have copies of. But I’ve never went public with any of that stuff because of the confidential nature. You will never hear from me who was involved in those meetings. I will never tell.
Allan: And there’s no need to. You’re demonstrating a role and responsibility of a mediator. You described in a way that you were part of the mediation team at the Parades Commission. It sounds like a good and interesting example in a professional capacity of what professional mediators can do, a role that they can serve.
Michael: Yeah, the mediator working behind the scenes should never be known, because the whole thing has to be kept totally confidential. Now there’s another mediator who worked with me on it, and I will never divulge who he was, unless he gives me permission to do so. It’s to protect the parties that were involved in it as well, because at that time, it was difficult for people coming from the loyal orders to be engaged in any sort of communication with our residents group.
All of that was difficult. Now not only in the city, but I’ve worked in other parts as well, of the North, using the same type of model. And it was, the development of how shuttle mediation works, where the mediator’s trusted to take communication between the two parties. And whenever we began to realise that that can be applied at different places, some people took it up.
So people could say there was no direct communication and say it quite openly and freely and be comfortable saying it, there was no direct communication, and there wasn’t, but there was communication.
One of the things that I have always insisted on when I was doing that type of work, that the communication is written down, because I did not want to be seen to be a negotiator on behalf of the other party. I’m a peace negotiator.
Now, when it comes down to the armed groupings, they know where I’m coming from. I’m totally against what they’re doing. Totally against it. But they know that. And if they want anything to happen, they’ve got to make up their mind how communication is going to be taken across either way.
So manys a night, I had sleepless nights worrying about where I was going to end up next, because we had to have secret meetings in different places, going from place to place.
I remember one night in particular getting a phone call as I was coming out of a meeting in Belfast, going to another part of Northern Ireland, where there had been a murder. The whole issue had been that the other party were not responsible for the murder and they wanted the other party to know that. They asked me to deliver it back because they didn’t want it to escalate. It was a row that happened in a particular area. I got caught up in the middle of that. I remember going into this particular area. Nobody knowing where I was going. I didn’t know where I was going. I got a mobile phone call to tell me, “My God, you’ve just taken a wrong turn.” What I didn’t realise was I was being monitored coming into this estate. When I eventually got to the house, I had to go through a steel door, and there were four boys sitting in a small room. The guy that I was there to meet, sitting across the table from me, saying, ” We’re glad you came, because we want you to deliver a message.” I delivered a message. Now I can safely say that the conflict did not escalate and nobody died after that, in that particular area, because of the work that I did behind the scenes then.
Allan: That raises, to me, an issue of mutual trust. That they trusted you, and that you trusted them in the sense that you felt you weren’t being played, or that they would abuse your position and likewise that they knew who you were.
Michael: Well, let’s be clear about this. There are times when you’re involved in this work, you have got to make a conscious decision, are you taking a risk or not? In those times I knew the risk I was taking. If you’re gonna save a life, is it better for me to try to save that life? It was better for me to try to save that life.
Now, not everywhere was I trusted. Because there are some areas where I don’t work. Some areas where I pull out.
I’ll give you an example of what happened. There was a serious issue that happened in a part of Northern Ireland, and I was asked to go to it. There were two paramilitary people involved in it. I got them to meet up with two police officers in a police station to try to get this whole issue resolved.
I made a comment during that meeting that was carried outside that meeting to somebody else, and it came back to me what I had said. When the guy told me what I had said, I knew somebody from that meeting told what had happened, and I pulled out of it. I remember writing to the people that involved me saying that my position has been compromised, I will not be back.
So sometimes you’ve got to, for your own integrity and your own safety, you know when to pull back.
Allan: That reminds me of another anecdote you’ve told me in the past about you were in a situation where you were attempting mediation and you realised it had gone to a level of security. And you felt, my own physical security is at risk here.
Michael: I know exactly what you’re talking about. We got the situation sorted out in the city here. In regards to? The Apprentice Boys Parade. There was going to be a protest of the parade coming back, a return parade of the loyal orders coming back through this part of a city, and what had happened was, the guy who was in charge of the residence group said to me, that if we stand in a no man’s land between the police landowners and the protestors, the dangerous part will be whenever the police are pulling out. That’s the time when the guys were more likely to want to stone the police. He says, if me and you stand in that no man’s land, they’ll not stone it, because then that’s when they stone us. I remember standing in that no man’s land, saying to myself, what am I doing here? remember when I got into the car, saying to myself, I’ll never be caught in that situation again.
Allan: So, there are moments, even as a professional mediator, where you have to be cognizant of your own personal safety.
Michael: One other time, in another area, there was a protest, and there was going to be a parade coming down, and the Parades Commission had restricted any music to be played, coming down a particular street.
So I was standing this time, there’s police Land Rovers, and there’s army Land Rovers. The band and the lodge come down the street, and they were to turn in the car park and go back up again. I was requested by the police, could I ask the people who were protesting, could they move across the road to the other side of the road. Got that done, they moved. I went back over to stand in front of the police Land Rovers. The band came down the street, they went to turn in the car park, and the band started playing the sash, which is like a red flag to a bull, on the other side of the road. What happened was the guys on the other side started throwing golf balls, attacking the band and the police and the army. And I remember I dived between a police landover and an army jeep. And a policeman shouted at me, “That’s all your fault, you caused all this.” I went, “Aye, but you’re well, wearing tbe steel, but I’m not.” I remember, I’ve actually got two golf balls in the house somewhere that I lifted that night. So those are some of the…
Allan: Interesting souvenir. Unexpected souvenir.
Michael: One I could have done without. But those are some of the risks you’ve got to take it, and you do it at the time. Now I wouldn’t do it now in hindsight. I’ve been more careful ever since. So those are some of the escapades that I got to do.
Allan: How much of any kind of peacebuilder’s life like yours is acquired through what you study and read and earn in degrees and versus then what you learn on the ground?
Michael: Well, [in] 1996, I went to Fordham Law School in New York. I’d already been training as a mediator here through Mediation Northern Ireland at the time with different American tutors and other people. We spent three weeks at Fordham Law School doing an intense course with some of the top mediators. It was great, fantastic learning. I remember one guy called Leonard Riskin talking about the difference between evaluative mediation and facilitative mediation. It always struck me, it was a fascinating lecture. I really got hooked into it. I started looking at it.
But what happened was in 1997, whenever the Parades Commission got set up, we started doing work as mediators. I began to realise that the mediators sometimes were getting blamed for some of the stuff that was going down. I began to realise what was happening. We were applying what we were learning in America to a local context here and a conflict that wasn’t suitable for evaluative mediation.
Because evaluative mediation suggests that you can evaluate what’s going on with the disputing parties and you can offer advice.
A proviso is that they realise they’ve got to make the final decision. But what was happening was the mediators were possibly giving advice and the advice was going belly up, and the mediators were getting blamed. I began to realise, this is what is happening. I need to change my thinking in all that was going down.
I changed my way of doing work into a more facilitative model. I learned the skill of not giving advice.
Allan: So how does a facilitative model of mediation differ from the evaluative form?
Michael: The mediator at no stage at any time tells the parties what they could or should do. And that’s a skill in its own right. Telling people, ” Sure, all you have to do is not go down that street, and sure it’ll be grand.” That’s not what you do.
You use the language of, ” Well, how do you think this should be worked out? What’s the best way forward for you? How does that affect you if he does this, how do you do that? How do you respond to that?” You don’t tell them what to do. That’s the way that I have worked in those issues that I’ve been involved in down through the years.
Allan: And you have found that in a local context we’re talking about?
Michael: Well, I’ll put it like this. I haven’t ever been blamed for anything in relation to the parading issues that I’ve been involved in. I remember one person saying to me that I tried to stop a parade one time. I said, “If you repeat that in public, I’ll take you to court.” Because you will find nobody in this part of the world that said that I said I try to stop a parade, because I never did, and I never will. That has to come from the community, in the context of the conflict that’s going on at that particular point in time.
Allan: Can you take that knowledge and then going back globally just make some analysis about where you see other areas. You’ve been involved in programs in Tripoli, for example, I know your work with the Forum for Cities in Transition. So, some comments about this form of mediation and where you think it has been applied elsewhere successfully or has the potential to change approaches.
Michael: The other form of mediation that I alluded to earlier on was shuttle mediation. That is when the mediator is trusted to take communication back and forward.
This can work in any part of the world if the parties are willing to get an accommodation or an agreement. It can work anywhere. The parties have to be willing to do it. Now if you have a situation whereby, say we take the situation here from way back in the 1986/87/90 period, where you had a government that said there’ll be no talk.
The government knew they had to talk. What did the government end up doing? Talking. It was done in such a way that people could freely say, ” But there was no face to face communication, nothing took place, and everything had to be done.” that’s the way this stuff works. It only can work whenever people decide that they want to make it work.
Now if you look at the Ukraine and Russia at the minute, if Putin doesn’t want this to work, it’s not going to work. He’ll keep doing what he’s doing until he decides that it’s going to stop. Or you can decide that they’re going to give in and let Russia take over. Now, the dogs on the street and everybody else knows it. That’s not going to happen. So it’s allowed to continue. And while the rest of the world are participants as observers, and everybody afraid goes into World War III, everybody’s hands are tied until somebody makes a move.
And the same thing is happening here at the moment, where people are afraid, on principle, to change a position, because they’re locked in a fixed position and not prepared to move. And at this point in time, I would say what has happened is we have underestimated the strength of each other’s positions. Because we seem to have learned a lesson of not listening to the other side.
Allan: From a professional point of view in regards to mediation, or let’s just say peacebuilding, we know peacebuilding can be frustrating. It’s because, as you’ve indicated you can only apply proven methods if both parties are willing, you can’t force anyone to be willing.
Michael: No, no.
Allan: So it’s almost a riddle, but it’s the way it works, as I understand it.
Michael: It is the way it works, that’s the reality of it.
Allan: Often those in peacebuilding will cite the lack of political will towards the development of communities and reconciliation. What can people and communities do in that situation, in which politics takes a precedence over what many people would rather see?
Michael: I think what happens is every community needs leaders. Every community needs leaders at different parts of the community.
Some people need leaders at the government level. Some people need leaders, say the likes of me, mediating in the middle. Then there’s the leaders that are on the ground. And sometimes when those leaders are on the ground are not in communication with people from the other community, it creates its own narrative.
And if that’s not getting through to the people who are the leaders at the top, it creates its own narrative at the top as well as to what is actually happening on the ground and what’s happening at the top, and then it gets all mixed up.
So, if you get a situation whereby on the ground, and you’ve got republican groups who are split into six or seven different categories of republicanism, and somebody gets shot on, say, the nationalist, Catholic side, and the republicans are being blamed. And it’s one strand of republicanism. But the view is, which strand of republicanism do you talk to? Who do you believe? If you go to the other community, and say the other community is the loyalist community, there’s so many strands of the community groups in the paramilitary side in there as well.
Who do you actually talk to? So, there’s a mismash of who’s responsible and taking the blame for what. And if the people in the middle, like me, who are trying to make sense of what’s going on in the ground, we’re finding it difficult. Who is it you actually talk to? So you have got Continuity IRA, the new IRA, Republican Sinn Fein, Republican this, Republican that. On the other side it’s UDA, UVF, Red Hand of Ulster. All the different splits in the community groups. So all that’s going on, and it’s like a mismash of what’s actually happening.
But for the most part, we all want to live in peace. But we don’t know what peace looks like, because we’ve never had it. We blame the politicians. Those on the ground blame the politicians. The politicians are saying they’re blaming the people on the ground. But who votes the politicians in?
We’re all striving to get peace. But it’s peace in our terms, whatever that may mean, whoever you’re coming from. So, if you get a situation whereby the politicians aren’t talking to one another, what sort of example is the leadership at the top giving the people at the bottom?
Allan: Is it issue of visioning? We’ve had a variety of community relations policies. Our current one is Together: Building a United Community (T:BUC). The Belfast/ Good Friday Agreement talks about striving towards reconciliation. They are laudable ambitions, but arguably not fleshed out in what it would actually mean in regards to a policy that would help us realise any of this.
Michael: I remember T:BUC coming out I remember saying to myself, how? That was the first question that came into my head, was how?
I remember at that time, the ambition that the peace walls would be down by 2023. Ten years later, we have had a measure of success. We can’t deny we have had some success. There has been a couple of peace walls changed. But if I was to take this city here, that wall that divides Bishop Street and the Fountain area in this city, will not be down for my lifetime.
We’re not there yet. We’re still afraid of each other. We’re still a threat to each other. The one on Tullyally/ Currnierin, the fence that’s there will not be taken away in my lifetime. And there’s a large gap between the Top of the Hill and Irish Street and the Waterside. The amazing part about that is that there’s a new building there, a shared future building. It’s absolutely tremendous. And it’s been left alone. Now that’s a step forward in this city.
The main parts of T:BUC, of bringing people together in summer camps, it’s great. Get young people away, it’s great. But if you’re going to take them away to have fun, and not have the hard end discussions that need to take place, the kids go back into their own camps.
We talk about shared future, and we talk about integrated education. But all we do, we have a subject, kids go to one school, they take that subject, but they don’t talk about the stuff that’s dividing us.
Allan: Is there not a difference between the shared education programme versus integrated education, which does attempt to look at multiple narratives?
Michael: Yeah, that’s the whole idea, yeah. But shared education seemed to be an excuse for not doing the integrated stuff, as far as I was concerned.
My granddaughter goes to a secondary school, a high school in Limavady.
They’re going to be one of the first shared campuses. But she woudn’t be more interested in what’s going on in our political sense. She’s just not interested. She just wants to live her life. She wants to go to dancing and music and sport. Not interested in the politics of it all. But they’re not taught about it in school either.
I just scratch my head saying sometimes we need to look at the whole education system and look at where do we start teaching our young people about sectarianism, about consciousness, and unconscious stuff [biases] that goes on all the time. That we don’t really realise how hurtful we can be to people.
Allan: What is it that we could do ourselves in regards to becoming more engaged, or putting pressure on those who make policy for us? Does there need to be those who become peace activists, are there those who need to lead by example?
Michael: Tell you what you could do. Don’t stop trying. Don’t give up. I am at the grey end of all of this work now, I’m 75. So I’m beginning to get a sense of, I don’t have much more life left on me to do this work, and they keep bringing me back. It could come quicker!
That aside, I will never give up talking to people or doing what I can do to stop our people, and I mean this most sincerely, from where I started, to stop our community from killing each other. Because we run the risk, we can go back to doing that. There are people out there, quite capable and willing to go back into what they would call their war.
And I’ll never forget that.
Allan: You hear frequently that people don’t have an appetite to go back to the way it was before the ceasefires. But are you inferring that we’ve transformed our conflict to be less violent, but there’s no guarantee that it could transfer back into being more violent, perhaps not as violent as it was in the past?
Michael: There’s no guarantees of anything. Absolutely not. I would not say here, now, at this particular point in time, we will never go back to where we were. I’ll never say that. I do say it’s less violent, and at this present point in time, I say for many, many people there’s no appetite for it. But all it would take would be a spark that can light the flame.
Now, if you look at this particular point in time, the way that the politics is going, if you look at the inquests and the legacy issues, if you look at the rationality of why there’s an amnesty, And we all know this is coming forward to save British soldiers. People are even afraid to say that as well.
I’m not. Because I know. I was there on Bloody Sunday. I knew what happened in this city. And other people know the answers. People are holding back and using the security issue as a way of redacting names and not having proper inquests. All of that’s bubbling in the background.
The legacy issue has been one of the issues that I have always argued that needed to be… I remember I think it was 1990. I was in St. Columb’s Park House and I remember the conversation. I remember somebody, one of the British politicians, I’m not going to name who it was, talking to me about it, and I said, I remember saying very clearly, “See, until the policing issue is sorted out, we’ll never have peace.”
The policing issue still isn’t sorted out, holding inquests back by holding up documents from going forward. While the government are not admitting their role in what happened here. All that’s still going on in the background.
The Orange Order are in a position of being a sectarian issue in relation to not allowing Catholics to join, and still parading, and wishing to parade all the time in areas where they’re not welcome. That’s a big issue. It’s still going on to this very day, while Catholics are not understanding why Protestants, or Unionists, or Orangemen want to parade.
Sectarianism is underneath it all. It’s there.
But I’m coming from a nationalist, Catholic background, and I see it with my eyes, the way that I see it. But there are times when you have got to call out what it is, is actually going on. And I have said it clearly, while the British Government have allowed this to develop here, the ball rests in their court. They know what they needed to do to get this place sorted out. They’re still not prepared to do it.
Allan: If in the future majority here freely and democratically vote to form some type of union with the rest of Ireland, and without these issues having been addressed, then whose responsibility? Does it to still remain with the British government or is this something that the new Irish government would inherit?
Michael: I think it’s something that we need to be very clear about how we actually go forward with this, because if it’s not planned out properly, there’ll be a total reaction from the unionist community. I think we should not underestimate the strength of their position around the view of moving into a united Ireland.
It cannot be done overnight. It needs to be addressed and worked at over years to make sure that we are going to be accommodating to everybody. It won’t happen any other way. It’s in the gift of the people of this whole island to get a peaceful outcome on this. But we need to nurture, train, acknowledge, and respect the other parties, and give each, each person their position. And allow the people from the unionist community, if they want to remain British, to do so within a united Ireland, if that’s the way it’s going to work out.
But also if it’s going to stay the way it’s going, then the British government need to understand that they need to respect the nationalist position of what happened to them down through the years at the hands of the unionist community. And why it ended up… I think the comment was made by Michele O’Neill when she made the statement that violence was inevitable. According to her, and the way that she’s thinking, and people who think like her, it was inevitable for them. But people had choices. I had a choice. I chose not to go down that violent road. So, we have all had choices. We cannot deny our responsibilities for all the actions that we took. But we need to admit.
South Africa had a truth and reconciliation commission. I’ve said there’ll never be a truth and reconciliation commission here, as long as people decide that they’re not going to tell the truth anyway. So, we’re bluffing one another if we think we’re ever going to have a truth and reconciliation commission as far as I’m concerned, because I don’t think Britain will tell the truth. I don’t think the IRA will tell the truth. And I don’t think a loyalist will tell the truth.
The better option at the minute, as far as the British government are concerned, is to give an amnesty. But they’re giving an amnesty, they give it for the wrong reasons, the way I look at it. They’re giving it to save the British soldiers, which is wrong.
So, it’s a puzzle.
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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