A CROSS-community centre to assist those affected by suicide was opened yesterday in north Belfast by President Mary McAleese.
President McAleese joined Progressive Ulster Unionist leader Dawn Purvis, former north Belfast priest Rev Aidan Troy, who is now based in Paris, and local community activists for the opening of the PIPS House in Duncairn Gardens.
PIPS – Public Initiative for the Prevention of Suicide and Self Harm – was started in 2003 by Philip McTaggart, following the suicide of his son, Pip. Over two months in 2004, 13 young men in north Belfast took their own lives.
President McAleese also spoke at a conference celebrating the role of women in the life of Belfast.
She said the “real seed-bedding of the peace process” was carried out by a “massive army whose quiet, unseen work in their homes, streets and communities, changed the thinking and changed the future”. Women were central to that work, she said.
Describing her experience studying law at Queen’s University in 1969, she said that for generations “women’s life chances were reduced by a culture of misogynistic bias”.
She said it was “no accident” that peace had been constructed in the first generation “to experience and benefit from the talents of women going where they will, rather than where they are permitted to go”.
