Peace Proms return with strong message on harmony and inclusivity

If you have been to a Peace Proms concert, you will know what an incredible experience it is. And if you have yet to go but your child is lucky enough to be involved this year, then you are in for a treat. Having been rudely interrupted for two years by a pandemic, Peace Proms is back and it’s as spectacular as ever.

“It’s a very significant year for us in that it’s the 25th year of the Good Friday agreement. It’s our 28th anniversary as well,” Sharon Treacy-Dunne, founder of the Cross Border Orchestra of Ireland (CBOI) says. Treacy-Dunne grew up near the border in Dundalk and says she “would have been very aware of the Troubles growing up”.

Having studied music in UCD, Treacy-Dunne returned to Dundalk where she was teaching “during the first ceasefire and then all the peace negotiations”. It was at this time that Treacy-Dunne had the idea to bring together schools from both sides of the Border to form the Cross Border Orchestra of Ireland (CBOI).

The Peace Proms evolved from the CBOI when, in the early 2000s, the orchestra was looking to try something new. “We started putting together a programme that the kids would love singing, that teachers would love teaching and that audiences would love listening to. The very first one [Peace Proms] was held in 2003 and it was just two schools in Dundalk, about 200 kids in all.”

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The CBOI is composed of more than 130 musicians from Ireland and Northern Ireland and 35,000 children from 700 schools.

“Peace in Northern Ireland needs to be reinforced,” Treacy-Dunne says. “We have to keep educating the young people. One of our greatest achievements is our Belfast Peace Proms. When we started it we had mostly just Catholic schools involved ... and I remember someone from the Protestant community in the North telling me we were trying to brainwash their kids and destroy Protestant culture. But we eventually got everybody’s trust. And people knew that we had no hidden agenda, there was no ulterior motive. We genuinely just wanted to bring children together from both communities.”

Peace Proms is about “reinforcing that message of peace and harmony and inclusivity”, she says.

Greg Beardsell, the energetic and charismatic conductor and presenter of the Peace Proms, manages to control the movements of a 2,500 strong children’s choir with one movement of his little finger. And though you may have heard your children practising their songs at home in preparation, this is not just another children’s choir performance.

One of the most “thrilling things about it is that we’re really smashing expectations”, Beardsell says. “I think parents have come to expect so little in terms of the artistic output from their children – there’s many reasons for that – but when they come to the Peace Proms, it really is far and away above what they expect from a mass school singing event, which is still what it is.”

Beardsell is based in England but does a lot of work in Ireland. He sees the Peace Proms as “an opportunity to introduce thousands of young people and their parents to high quality music. We try and reflect in a very light-handed way, the history of the Irish story. It’s an opportunity to put music, dance and the arts front and centre as a tool for the betterment of future generations of Ireland”.

“There’s no benefit of me telling Irish people, certainly from the point of view of an Englishman, what they already know. That’s not the purpose of it. What is the purpose of it is to find common ground and say that these stories exist in our common history, they’re to be celebrated and very much the idea that the past is the torch which lights our way. And, of course, with lots of modern music as well.”

It’s not just traditional music and dance that will have you on your feet at the Peace Proms. This year there will be songs from The Cranberries, Faithless, Madonna, Harry Styles and lots more.

The Peace Proms are at SETU Sports Arena (South East Technological University) in Waterford on March 4th and 5th and at the Carnegie Hall in New York for St Patrick’s Day. They are hoping that many of the diaspora will come along to see the cultural spectacle. “The connections between America and Ireland are very important”, Beardsell says. “It’s the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, so it’s actually got an even deeper cultural perspective than it might otherwise have had.”

The mayor of New York will open the concert and Tánaiste Micheál Martin, the British Consul General Emma Wade-Smith and director of the Northern Ireland Bureau will be in attendance.