Fellowship scheme aims to promote peace in North

Eisenhower Fellowships is to assemble a group of 14 Irish people to travel to the United States to take part in exchanges of ideas around themes including "reanimating" a spirit of peace and collaboration in Northern Ireland.

The Eisenhower Fellowships is a non-profit organisation created in 1953 by a group of prominent American citizens to honour US president Dwight Eisenhower.

The group exists to “inspire leaders around the world to challenge themselves, to envision how they can effect positive change, to engage others beyond their existing networks and to collaborate with other like-minded leaders across national borders”. The organisation will assemble seven fellows from Northern Ireland and seven from the Republic to inaugurate a new programme of leadership development for “exceptional mid-career professionals on both sides of the Border”. For six weeks, starting April 30th, the fellows will crisscross the US to pursue individual projects and engage in “transformative exchanges of knowledge and ideas with leading thinkers in their respective fields”.

They will then all travel to Philadelphia to share observations. Reanimating past collaboration “with the capacity to contribute to the next stage of peaceful development” in Northern Ireland is among the goals, the Eisenhower Fellowships said. “It comes at a time when Brexit . . . poses major social, political, economic and Border-control challenges for Ireland and Northern Ireland.”