Ireland’s “twisted knots of history” created division and violence, but are being dismantled by the peace process, President Mary McAleese said today.
Delivering the annual PJ McGrory human rights lecture tonight as part of the West Belfast Festival, Feile an Phobail, the President said huge progress was being made to end divisions.
Mrs McAleese told an audience at St Mary’s University College on the Falls Road that politicians were building a new society, but said it was grassroots communities that played the pivotal role in peace-building.
“It is the work that rarely makes the headlines but it is the lifeblood of reconciliation and healing for it is in the civic space that people stop being strangers to one another and build the bridges of mutual respect and friendship which make streets safe to walk for everyone’s children,” she said.
“There are old forcefields of enmity and distrust to be crossed and though the journeys may be short geographically from one side of a road or village or town to another, the journey of the heart is muchn much longer.”
Mrs McAleese spoke at length of the contribution of the late Paddy McGrory, who she said opposed political violence, but was attacked for insisting everyone deserved to be treated equally before the law.
MrMcGrory was involved in the 1960s civil rights movement and represented the families of the three unarmed IRA members controversially shot dead by the SAS in Gibraltar in 1988.
“We are not challenged to create peace with our friends but with our enemies and we on this island have reason to know the hell on earth that arises from the enmity of neighbours who see themselves as strangers to one another,” said Mrs McAleese.
“The context for all of us has changed radically just as Paddy knew it would when justice and equality took their place in the mainstream of the new political and legal framework now operative within Northern Ireland, between the two jurisdictions which share this island and between these neighbouring islands.”
She looked forward to Ireland in the future which she said would be home to a mix of nationalities, races and faiths at peace with each other.
“The old twisted knots of history that kept hell going for so long and brought devastation to so many are being untangled and straightened out, not by accident but by design, not by doing nothing but by doing something,” she said. “The more hands there are to the work, the quicker the progress.”
She said the picture was still “far from perfect” and referred to the heartache of the murders of two soldiers and a policeman by dissident republicans in March, plus the continuing tensions around Orange Order marches.
But Mrs McAleese said huge efforts were under way to ensure a peaceful future. “This place is worth the effort,” she said. “Its people are worth the effort. Its future will be a story worth telling.”