‘The next time the Assembly goes up, it needs to stay up’: Monica McWilliams reflects on slow progress in Northern Ireland

To mark Northern Ireland’s first powersharing Assembly, Monica McWilliams planted a tree. For the first time, she has gone back to find it.

“I have been thinking: the tree could have grown up nice and sturdy and strong like my young son, or it would have needed a lot of watering like our peace process, or it could be a bit stunted and then take off again for another growth period like our Assembly,” she says.

From the gatehouse that marks the side entrance to the Stormont estate in east Belfast, McWilliams leads the way along a path that skirts the boundary, then turns left. From the brow of the hill, Parliament Buildings looks down upon us. “A big icing cake, sitting empty,” she says.

They are buildings the academic, peace activist and former politician knows well. In 1996 McWilliams cofounded the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, and she was a delegate to the peace talks that led to the 1998 Belfast Agreement that, in turn, established the Stormont Assembly.

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A quarter century on, the scene there is suddenly familiar.

“I think that’s it,” says McWilliams, spotting a cluster of trees. “They’re all different – we all got to pick a different tree, and we stood in a circle.”

Hers was a rowan, chosen after her son Rowen; she points to a tree bearing glimmers of berries to come later in the year.

That’s my concern about young politicians ... They’re probably saying: I am not sure I will go into that if it comes up and falls down every time

She and other MLAs in that first Assembly planted their own trees. “Then we just stood back and each one of us actually, kind of in silence, remarked on each other’s trees,” she says. “It was a very poignant moment.”

A generation on, most of the trees are doing well, though there is no shortage of metaphors to apply to the North’s political situation, not least given one wizened specimen that has failed to thrive.

That initial Assembly – set up following the signing of the 1998 agreement – sat for the first time on July 1st, 1998, yet in the 25 years since it has not been functioning for 40 per cent of that time.

“That happened four times during my first Assembly,” says McWilliams. “I lost my job [as an MLA] four times, and I was a university person with a house and a mortgage and bills to pay and children to feed, and I kept asking myself: If this goes on, have I made a massive mistake in entering politics?

“That’s my concern about young politicians ... They’re probably saying: I am not sure I will go into that if it comes up and falls down every time.”

This latest hiatus has lasted more than a year, part of the DUP’s boycott of the powersharing institutions set up by the agreement in protest at post-Brexit trading arrangements.

“The next time it goes up, it needs to stay up, even with all the wobbles,” says McWilliams. “The alternatives – and I am sure the DUP know this – are not good.”

In 1998, McWilliams was one of two Women’s Coalition candidates elected to Stormont. She is now an emeritus professor at Ulster University, and has worked in conflict resolution in Northern Ireland – particularly with the Wave Trauma Centre – and around the world, and sits on the Independent Reporting Commission, which monitors progress on paramilitary disbandment.

“Every conflict is different, but every conflict has something in common,” she says. “Everywhere I have gone they’d say: ‘Nobody understands us, nobody’s been through what we’ve been through’, and I would sit there and think, Well, I kind of do, but I am here to listen, and then I always bring something back.

“In Rwanda what I brought back was the amount of good psychological services that have been put in, along with the employment and training – they’ve done the two together.”

[ Stand Up, Speak Out by Monica McWilliams: Memoir captures energy of Women’s Coalition ]

Colombia, she says, was “remarkable in that it was very similar” to Northern Ireland, but “they’ve done a much better process than us, much better, in terms of monitoring their peace agreement”.

The “biggest mistake” of the agreement, she says, was that there was no implementation committee and – the “lesson learned” from the Patten Commission into policing – that independent international observers were needed.

Now, she says, “there’s a long yawn that still goes on about that section called reconciliation”; 25 years on, “maybe it’s now time to make them institutional guarantees, put them into the programme for government, put them into decision-making bodies and say: here’s the timetable, here’s the target”.

Although many more women are now involved in politics, McWilliams emphasises she wants them to be “progressive women” who “want to make a difference to the generation coming behind them and [know] that they have struggled themselves to get where they are and they are not going to pull the ladder up behind them.”

As we leave the cluster of trees, their trunks glinting in the sunlight of this bright spring day, we pass another memorial, a sculpture of two grieving people.

“In as much as it is joyful to remember that we made a peace agreement, it can also bring sad memories of those who are no longer with us, like my own good friend, Michael Mallon, who as a student was murdered,” she says. “He should have been an economist, thriving with a livelihood and a family around him, children perhaps like myself, and his life was cut short at the age of 20.

“You don’t forget those things, but that doesn’t mean you don’t make peace with your opponents either,” she says. “So many of the victims made so many sacrifices and asked the politicians to sit down together and promise them that there would never be a return to what they had to deal with, and that’s a promise that should still be delivered and a promise that can only be delivered by good political leadership.”

[ Belfast Agreement at 25: Plea for Stormont renewal to avoid leaving peace efforts ‘in vain’ ]

To plant a tree, she says, is to look forward. “None of us knew if our trees would grow up sturdy, they were only saplings, but if you plant something you do it in the hope that you’ll get to see it grow.”

Today, she finds herself constantly asking questions: “How can we move this on? How can we get some answers? How can we pay restitution to the people who most need it?

“It’s hard work and, as Mo Mowlam [the UK secretary of state for Northern Ireland at the time of the 1998 peace agreement] said, ‘Who said it was going to be easy?’ ”