Glencree’s part in the peace process

In peace processes there are always the high-profile people – politicians and former military or paramilitary leaders – who make the headlines and garner the awards. Then there are hidden actors who rarely get recognition for their sensitive behind-the-scenes work.

Between 1994 and 2007 some largely unknown people working for a small under-the-radar southern peace organisation helped to keep an often faltering Northern Irish peace process alive through bringing together ancient enemies for weekend “dialogue workshops” – 55 of them in all – in a former military barracks and reformatory in the wilderness of Glencree, in the Wicklow Mountains.

In a new book, Deepening Reconciliation, Eamon Rafter, learning co-ordinator at the Glencree Centre for Peace & Reconciliation, brings together a number of these people to write about their experiences.

The centre was founded in 1974, during the worst period of violence in Northern Ireland, by a group of peace activists led by Una O’Higgins O’Malley, to provide a “safe space” to build peace on the island of Ireland. As a three-month-old baby, in 1927, O’Higgins O’Malley had lost her own father, the Cumann na nGaedheal minister Kevin O’Higgins, when he was assassinated by republicans.

In 1994, as the peace process started to take off with the IRA and UVF ceasefires, Glencree, with its beautifully situated, out-of-the-way facilities – far from the media's prying eyes – was perfectly placed to play a role. It had already organised its first series of private workshops involving the Ulster Unionist Party, the SDLP and southern parties.

At this stage neither Sinn Féin nor the DUP was involved. In the following year, however, Glencree won Sinn Féin's confidence by putting on a training programme for the party's youth wing, involving the then Presbyterian moderator, the Rev John Dunlop, and the loyalist leader David Ervine, to help them differentiate between Protestants and Unionists.

Sinn Féin, as the political wing of the IRA, was untouchable until the mid 1990s, banned from appearing on radio and TV and shunned by the political establishments in both parts of the island. A seemingly unbridgeable chasm of mutual suspicion lay between unionists and nationalists in the North: it would be many years before the DUP would agree even to be in the same room as Sinn Féin.

None of this deterred the peace activists at Glencree. They put on a series of three-day residential workshops in their rather basic accommodation in the mountains. The workshops involved 20-30 participants from the northern parties and took place at six-to-eight-week intervals. Other bodies represented included the Irish Department of Foreign Affairs, the British embassy, the Orange Order and the GAA.

Transition to democratic politics

This was only the first phase of Glencree’s involvement. After the Belfast Agreement, in 1998, it launched a training programme for 150 newly released paramilitary prisoners, to help them make the transition to democratic politics. It organised a trip to South Africa by a team of leading unionists, including

Peter Robinson

of the DUP and Danny Kennedy of the Ulster Unionists.

To make the DUP less fearful of the South, Glencree brought the party together with southern political parties that many in the northern party would have seen as only slightly less abhorrent and anti-unionist than the IRA. There were remarkable outcomes, such as Robinson and Martin McGuinness, of Sinn Féin, agreeing to meet a delegation of visiting Afghan parliamentarians, the first of many such joint meetings with leaders from other conflict areas.

As the former Glencree director Ian White, one of the main movers behind these developments, writes: “By the end of 2010 Glencree had positioned itself in the political arena and was for many parties recognised as the main non-governmental actor in peacebuilding in that arena.”

How was this done? The lead facilitator on the political-dialogue workshops was Geoffrey Corry, a Dublin-based family and workplace mediator and conflict-management specialist who has been involved with Glencree from the beginning.

Corry became familiar with the work of Herb Kelman, of the Harvard Centre for International Affairs, in bringing together Palestinians and Israelis in behind-the-scenes “second track” diplomacy after the Six Day War in Israel in 1967.

In a detailed chapter in Deepening Reconciliation Corry recalls that Kelman's workshops had shown that "psychological barriers of rigid assumptions rooted in past history, hate and fear – constituting 70 per cent of the problem in identity conflicts – could be melted through residential workshops that laid the basis for mutual acceptance.

“However, Kelman warned that overcoming these psychological barriers does not, of itself, resolve the conflict – that only comes through political negotiation and change. It was his emphasis on selecting participants who were influential within a political party at sub-leadership level and who had access to the top leaders that proved to be innovative.”

Many of these later moved up in their parties to become influential “subleaders” involved in the decisions that led to the Belfast Agreement and its implementation.

The key period was 2004-6, which Corry calls probably “our most important in contributing to the peace process”. Senior DUP politicians and officials agreed to participate in dialogue workshops with members of the Dáil for the first time.

“The workshops helped to change DUP perceptions of southern Ireland and supported the new political momentum orchestrated by the British and Irish governments that eventually led to the St Andrews Agreement and the restoration of the Executive at Stormont in 2007.”

What Corry and his fellow facilitators did was in four phases. The first was to create a “safe space”, to allow the clashing parties to voice concerns. The second was to help them to tell their stories. The third was to enable each party to reach a breakthrough point where old antagonists could begin to see the perspective and humanity of the other – “a sort of magical humanising moment”, in Corry’s words.

There were other, parallel strands to Glencree’s work. Jacinta de Paor, a psychologist, ran the organisation’s programmes for victims and survivors. Traumatised northerners, many of whom had never been south of the Border, had to be convinced that what was going on in the heart of the Wicklow Mountains was safe for them.

In 2002 Prince Charles attended a session of the survivors programme and talked about his personal journey towards forgiveness for those who had killed his great-uncle Lord Mountbatten, in Co Sligo, 23 years earlier.

In that year the ex-combatants programme was initiated by Wilhelm Verwoerd, whose own journey had taken him from being the son of the architect of apartheid to membership of the ANC to a job as a researcher on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

He was one of many hundreds of people from all over the world who have come to Glencree to work over the past 20 years, both as paid employees and as volunteers. At the same time Glencree has exported its experience of peacebuilding to other conflicted areas, such as Israel/Palestine, Sri Lanka, Colombia, Haiti and Afghanistan.

Vorwoerd concludes his chapter by stressing his belief that “this mostly behind-the-scenes, patient, often messy work highlights the fact that a relatively remote residential space like Glencree – guided by values of inclusivity and non-judgementalism as part of a carefully facilitated process of deepening understanding and cultivating humanising connections – has a real and ongoing contribution to make towards enduring peace on the island of Ireland.”

Andy Pollak is a director of Glencree Centre for Peace & Reconciliation and was the founding director of the Centre for Cross-Border Studies