Practising peace, practising listening

Peace and reconciliation only start happening if people practise them. Governments cannot sign them or legislate them into existence. People have to struggle, often painfully, to learn to bring them about over a long period of time. This involves genuinely listening to what other people - the "other side" - are saying. Young people, because they carry less accumulated cultural and political baggage, are more open to this process.

The effort to listen to and understand what one's adversary is saying is a vital part of the necessary process of compromise - or at least clarification of what is principled, fundamental and therefore worthy of respect in communal beliefs.

Essential experiences

In places where young people learn and relax, there must be opportunities to practice these skills. In schools, space for this can be made available by means of programmes like Education for Mutual Understanding.

More importantly, young people must learn about what the Let's Talk project calls the "essential experiences" of groups of people they see as alien or hostile. People from different faiths, ethnic groups and social classes must have the opportunity to mix and meet.

In "cross-community contact" schemes between Northern schools this often does not happen. A football match may be organised between young Protestants and Catholics, but they travel to it on different buses and have no opportunity to mix socially.

Security in one's own identity

Before people can appreciate other people's needs, fears, and identity, they need to feel reasonably secure in their own identity. People around the world who feel fearful and misunderstood often cling to simplistic labels. Irish nationalists, for example, often see English identity as crudely one-dimensional. But how is a black or Muslim English teenager to relate to the labels Irish people use?

The size of the Let's Talk conferences, with 300 to 500 participants, means that all shades of opinion in these islands are represented. This makes it easier for young people to refuse to be put in traditional "identity boxes" and to present themselves with all the complexity of the teenager.

Including the English

This is a genuinely East-West, as well as a North-South initiative. The organisers believe that English people, as well as Irish people, have a right to express their opinions on their country's relations with Ireland.

The central role of the government in London in resolving the ancient quarrel between the two countries - and its modern manifestation in the Northern Ireland conflict - is recognised by everyone.

However, English people are often assumed not to be interested in Ireland and are excluded from that dialogue.

Until English people accept that peace and reconciliation are also vital to their often class and race-divided communities, neither will truly take root in and between these islands.

Internationalising the dialogue

As an island people, the Irish tend to see their problems between Catholic and Protestant, Irish and British, as unique. But Ireland, north and south, is one of the world's most "monocultural" countries, with its population of white, English-speaking Christians.

On the world agenda, Northern Ireland ranks as a very minor conflict. There is much for us to learn from the far more complex, multicultural and violent conflicts - and their resolution - in areas like the Balkans, the Middle East and southern Africa. Outsiders, from Professor Torkel Opsahl to Senator George Mitchell, have brought us vital insights about how to manage conflict and bring about accommodation.