A Cross of Wasted Suffering; The Peace People at War

On the day that Anne Maguire cut her own throat with an electric carving knife, January 18, 1980, her sister Mairead Corrigan was in her flat on the Cavehill Road, preparing for a three day trip to Cambodia, where she hoped to join Joan Baez and others in a symbolic march, bringing food supplies to refugees. She had that morning received her injections. A priest telephoned her around four in the afternoon to tell her of Anne's death. She went to the Maguire household.

Betty Williams was in a neighbour's house in Finaghy, bringing a present to a young woman who had just given birth to a baby girl. Peter McLachlan telephoned her there and she returned home to "open a bottle of gin and sit up all night" with a New Zealand woman who had flown over to join the Peace People one year before, had since resigned, and was now working as paid housekeeper in the Williams' household.

 

Ciaran McKeown was painting the windows of his home, which had that morning been declared suitable by the medical authorities for the imminent home birth of his seventh child. He received a telephone call from Peter McLachlan, then in the Peace headquarters, and he went that evening to the Maguire household where he met Mairead and Peter.

 

Kathleen Lennon, whose son Danny had been shot dead by the British Army while he was driving the car that subsequently smashed into Anne Maguire and three of her children in August 1976, had just returned from Long Kesh, where she visited one of her three remaining sons, all of whom are now in custody, on long sentences, two of them on the blanket. She heard the news on television. She then went out to work on a part time night cleaning job, leaving her husband at home.

 

Within a month of Anne Maguire's suicide, Betty Williams resigned from the Peace People, Peter McLachlan was voted out of it, Mairead Corrigan was voted Chairwoman of what remained of the movement, and Ciaran McKeown was preparing to withdraw from all leadership functions to write a book on world peace. Kathleen Lennon continued to visit Long Kesh and attend rallies organised by Provisional Sinn Fein against H Block.

 

Peter McLachlan was out of work, his reputation as a business person suffering from the Peace People's declared lack of confidence in him. Hetty Williams was also out of work, separated from her husband, her personal finance in a troubled state. She hoped to support herself and her household by monies earned from future lecture tours as a Nobel Peace Prizewinner. Ciaran McKeown had reached voluntary redundancy on the Peace pay role and was earning his living as a freelance journalist. Mairead Corrigan, now living in the Maguire household and helping to look after her dead sister's three remaining children, expected that she could exist simply for the next three years on that money which remained to her from her £38,000 share of the 1977 Nobel prize money. Kathleen Lennon was receiving visits from social workers about the contentious matter of rent outstanding on her home since she first went on rent strike against internment in 1971. She heard good news - her rent had been more than paid up and she might even get a rebate.

 

"The thing about Betty Williams is, she just loves being a housewife. I never saw her happier than when she arrived in home and saw her children. She would make herself a cup of tea, then fly round the house cleaning it. When it was spotless and people came round to eat dinner with her, that's when I saw her happiest, sitting by her own fire with a cup of tea in her hand ... it's desperate to see the state she's in now, even if she did always have a sharp tongue. She was a bit of a high liver, 1 suppose. Thank God I got out of the Peace People when I did. They nearly destroyed me too".

The woman who spoke, Margaret Watson, resigned from the Executive of the Peace Movement in June 1977, less than a year after it began.

When I called to see Betty Williams, in March 1980, her house was indeed spotless. She sat by the fire and produced two cups of tea, launching into the easy intimacy for which she was famed among the media who used haunt her house in the halcyon days of 1976. There were no other journalists present on this occasion. Her telephone, once constantly engaged, rang once while I was there.

 

As we sat chatting her sixteen-year-old son came in from school. Her eight-year-old daughter was being fetched by the live-in housekeeper. "Ralph used to be away all the time as a merchant seaman. Then I took off as a Peace Leader. It's been hard on the children and I'm glad to be back with them now". The framed photographs and citations on one wall of the comfortable room told the story of the last three and a half years. She and Mairead in Oslo receiving the Nobel award; she and Mairead in Rome in an audience with the Pope; she and Mairead and Ciaran receiving the Carl Von Ossietsky Prize from the Berlin Branch of the International League for Human Rights; the Variety Club of Great Britain's award for courage at its Woman of the Year ceremony in Leeds; a doctorate from Yale University, America; an invitation from the Royal Household to attend the Queen Elizabeth Jubilee reception aboard the royal yacht Britannia in Belfast Lough, on the 6th anniversary of the introduction of internment. The invitation was for "Mrs. Betty Willians and Mr. Williams".

 

She did not want to talk about the split in the movement. "The night I resigned I came back and sat by the fire and relaxed for the first time in years". Her daughter arrived in home and she invited me to join them on a trip to the seaside resort of Newcastle, Co. Down, forty miles away, where Ralph, who now lives there, had been taking the child for riding lessons.

"I don't own both these cars", she volunteered in the driveway. "That one belongs to Ralph. He leaves it here when he goes away on his ship". The Volvo which she drove was relatively new. "We always had a big car in this family. Now I'm driving all over the country I need my own car to get me there, quickly, safely, and without leaving me exhausted. I suppose you'll want to know about me fur coat. Well, I was going to Norway to get the Nobel award and the eyes of the world were on me as a representative of Northern Ireland. Christ, did people expect me to arrive in a duffle coat?"

As we approached the coast Betty burst into song.

"Where the mountains of Mourne sweep down to the sea". She knew all the words. The New Zealand woman told me how she had formed a branch of the Peace People there in 1977, and come over in 1978 to see things for herself. "I came for two weeks and stayed with the movement for a year. Money was coming from New Zealand for the movement. Money was going from the movement to the Third World. I resigned". She did not want to talk about the split.

 

We saw the child safely into the riding stables and went to a nearby inn. "I used to live in Newcastle you know", Betty said over a hot whiskey. "Ralph was away a lot and I looked at the tree in the yard and thought I'll be up there soon, like a monkey, if I don't do something. So I went back to work, driving into Belfast every day to do dogsbody for a firm of directors". She had worked all her life, and supported Ralph in the early years when he was studying for his master's ticket. He was an Englishman from Cheshire, and a Methodist, and she married him when she was nineteen. There was no religious problem for Betty, who was born a Catholic in Andersonstown. Her grandfather was a Protestant, a socialist and a Republican from the Tiger Bay in Belfast. Her father became a Catholic shortly before his own marriage to a Catholic. Ralph stayed with the religion he was born into.

 

"We got married in Bermuda in 1963 and I took a job with Bell telephones. Then we came back to England for a few years, then to Belfast in 1969, then Newcastle, then back to Belfast", to the middle class suburb of Finaghy. "I got a job as a waitress in the Dunadri Inn, at night, very posh it was. One time I served dinner to William Whitelaw. That was two jobs I had, one by day and one by night, and my sister looked after the children. Mind you, those days were a walkover compared with the job I've done with the Peace People. You know that story, if it's Tuesday, it must be New York? Jesus, I didn't know if it was Tuesday or Wednesday, America or Italy. Hotel rooms look the same the world over."

 

The April 1977 issue of the movement's newspaper, Peace by Peace, recorded that Betty was in North America, scheduled to address 88 meetings over 18 days, across Canada and the USA. Her marriage, she said, was troubled long before she became famous. "It happens to other people, and then it happened to us. We've been through the bad patches, scoring points off one another, but now you could say we're decent enough with each other. That's Ralph's house over there, look", she pointed to a neat bungalow on a hill. He was paying £100 a month support for the children, she said, "but naturally it's up to me to pay the main bills. I don't go in for alimony anyway, and God knows I've always been independent."

 

 

Her £38,000 share of the Nobel money hadn't stretched that far. "It's been two and a half years now, and by the time you pay this and that ... " She had put a kitchen extension on her house, bought the fur coat and the car, supported her family, paid a succession of housekeepers "and then there was all the travel abroad. All my fares and hotels were paid of course, but you don't arrive over there in rags, do you? And you have to entertain the people you meet. I stood me rounds. I didn't do that Paddy poor mouth, I was an ambassadress for Northern Ireland, and I kept up our image."

 

She had also given a lot away, "but you can't start saying who you gave it to. If people want to come forward and say so, well and good ... " She expected that some money would come now from lecture tours, "though there's fewer invitations than in the beginning, of course. I'll soon be spending a week with Amnesty in Canada, but that's free, naturally. Maybe I could get a job in PR - or would that be a disgrace to the Nobel award? I mean to say, I can hardly waitress in the Dunadri again, with the medal round my neck. Jesus Christ, I'd be like a freak show".

 

She hadn't seen Anne Maguire for three years. "I was the only one saw her and her three wanes crushed against the railings by that car, and we used to talk about it, and then it got so we dreaded meeting each other, so we didn't." The death of Anne was a culmination of "six terrible months .. I've hardly worked for peace since last September. I was coming as close as it was possible to come to a nervous breakdown".

 

We parted on her doorstep in Belfast, and I went off to meet Mairead Corrigan, who was selling the movement paper, Peace by Peace, that night.

 

Six months before, In September 1979, while she was on a speaking tour of Germany, Ciaran McKeown had requested a private meeting with the outgoing Executive of the Peace People, to talk about what her he termed "the private life of Betty Williams". He went before them with the expressed support of Mairead Corrigan and Peter McLachlan, and none of them told or attempted to tell Williams what they were doing.

 

Betty, Mairead and Ciaran had resigned from the Executive previously and had just announced that they intended to stand for re-election to it. "We were concerned about the pressures Betty was undergoing" McKeown told me, "and we wanted to help her". He did not at first tell the Executive anything about her that they did not already know. She had publicly stated in the press that she was separated from her husband. Her name had appeared, they already knew, in Stubbs Gazette, as owing £5,000 to a bank. She had gone guarantor in this sum to a man who subsequently reneged on his debt and left the country. Nor was this her only act of charity, they knew.

 

The Executive were sympathetic. There was nothing they could or should criticize. McKeown then revealed to them something which, he told me, "shocked and horrified them". He told them that the damage done to credibility by the "mishandling of the Nobel award money" was the sole responsibility of Betty Williams - it was she who made the decision to keep the money, he said, and Mairead Corrigan had no option but to follow suit, to avoid a rift in the movement.

 

After that night, Betty Williams' standing within the Executive was considerably undercut. McKeown, Corrigan and McLachlan subsequently paid a late night visit to her home to dissuade her from her avowed intention to stand for Chairwomanship of the incoming new Executive. Though she topped the poll and McKeown came near to the bottom, she submitted to their advice, accepted election as a member and withdrew into herself, visible only on overseas trips. To the rank and file it appeared that Betty was lukewarm in her participation locally.

 

"We suggested to her that she adopt a low profile", McKeown said, explaining the nocturnal visit to her. "She was living in an unreal world, and not involved in the day to day work of the movement. She wanted more development of local groups, for example, but she never took part in it." He agreed that she had not been asked to do so, nor had she ever refused an invitation to speak in the North. "But then, she wasn't available. I was even knocking on more doors than she was." I suggested to him that this seemed reasonable, given that she was a Nobel laureate on whom many international demands were made, while he was not. He replied that all Peace People were expected to do work in the North.

 

"Here was a lady who never had anything before", he said, "and suddenly she's a Nobel laureate. That's very hard to adjust to .. I would have said that by the October elections last year Betty did not rate the description of Peace Leader. The nature of her tours in the United States showed that she was unclear in her judgments, and Betty's prestige as a Peace Leader was a big factor in fund raising ... "

 

The funds, of course, were no longer flooding in, as foreigners looked for more than mere rhetoric about peace. Betty's dismissal of Irish Americans as "third generation leprechauns", when they questioned her campaign against the Provos, did not help the flow. Her tours of Germany, however, were more successful. Together with Peter McLachlan and her close friend Christabel Bielenberg, of the Southern Movement for Peace, she formed in 1979 what came to be known as the German connection, with a trust fund in that country which aimed at helping all movements for peace in Ireland. The promise of substantial German funding for the almost bankrupt Northern peace people, who had not sufficient money for 1980, led directly to the split on the night of February 7th of this year. The movement was virtually broke and needed the money; the Germans, however, attached strings to the proposed gift.

 

The financial affairs of the Community of the Peace People have been a source of puzzlement and contention, both within and without, virtually since its inception. In fact, the Community as such has controlled scarce a single penny of the foreign funding. In November 1976 the people of Norway collected £202,684.91 which they donated to Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan as a consolation prize, since it was too late to award them the Nobel Peace Prize for that year. An additional £9,000 was received from Germany and from Trusts and individuals. The two women announced that the entire sum of £217,000, which included bank interest of £5,800, would go into a Northern Ireland Trust Fund, which was set up by Ciaran McKeown in March 1977.

 

When it was discovered that a charitable Trust could not give money to potentially profit making institutions such as the small industries McKeown wished to aid, a separate company called Peace by Peace Ltd., was set up by him. The entire collection was paid into this company, which promptly lent it all to the Trust, reserving the right to claim it back as and when needed for industrial projects.

 

The directors of the company were the same as the trustees of the Trust, and included people who were not members of the peace people. McKeown was Chairman of both company and trust. The Trust was to operate as a completely separate body from the Community of the Peace People, made up of local groups, whom McKeown thought should be self-financing, although preference was to be given by the Trust to projects which the Community organised or supported; the priorities of the Peace People's Assembly and Executive would have "profound influence on the decisions of the Trustees".

 

After the original account was opened, money continued to flow in from the original fund raising group in Norway, from individuals, from speaking tours given by Betty and Mairead, until more than three hundred thousand pounds were in the coffers. The vast bulk of this money was controlled by either the Trust or the Company. Some was paid into separate accounts which the Trust opened and earmarked for special purposes. Money from the Ford Foundation subsidised the movement newspaper Peace by Peace, editor Ciaran McKeown; money from the Norwegian group subsidised a University of Peace in Achill, directed by McKeown, which opened in the summer of 1978. He taught the history of non-violent protest in the 19th century, in Ireland, to 24 students whom he selected himself.

 

Nearly one hundred thousand pounds was given in grants and loans to youth and community centres and welfare work. Fifty thousand pounds went to aid industrial projects. Forty thousand pounds was spent in buying the Peace House on the Lisburn Road. The rest went on salaries and administration expenses of the House.

 

In October 1979 Peter McLachlan, Chairman of the Peace People Community, announced that the Community would have to fund itself, since there was less than £50,000 cash remaining in the Trust. The Community, which had raised £4,000 in Northern Ireland in 1979, would require £80,000 for 1980 if it was to remain in operation. In November 1979, McKeown put himself on three months notice as the £8,000 per year director of the Trust. He had previously resigned as Chairman and trustee of it in May 1978 in order to qualify for a salary, but he remained on as Chairman of the Company in technical control of all monies.

 

 

In January 1980 McKeown announced that there would soon be a redefinition of Peter McLachlan's £8,000 a year job as projects manager employed by the Company, since there was no longer money available for such industrial projects. Future salaried staff would be at nominal wages for active 'retired' people and young postgraduates wanting to give a year or two of service.

 

On February 7th, 1980, the night of the mass resignations, Peter McLachlan arrived with a detailed report of the proposed German funding. The Germans had expressed dissatisfaction with McKeown's dual role as chairman of the company and Editor of a paper which was heavily subsidised. They specified that all monies donated by them would have to be used for charitable, practicable purposes, to be vetted by Christabel Bielenberg, and could not be used for either the newspaper or pressure groups. McKeown's pressure campaign for justice, particularly on the H Blocks, (which McLachlan supported), would not, obviously, qualify for such funding. McLachlan's practical projects, and by implication, McLachlan's salary, did qualify.

 

The meeting began as stormily as it ended. It opened with an announcement that three peace groups had sent letters demanding McKeown's resignation. McKeown proposed that the agenda be suspended to discuss the matter, declaring "There will be resignations on this table before the night is over". Betty Williams promptly handed in hers and went home. The lines of battle were drawn between those in the Executive who supported McKeown's evocation "May the peace of Christ disturb you", particularly on matters of justice, and those who supported McLachlan's emphasis on pratical reconciliation rather than disturbance. McKeown felt that McLachlan's projects in industry, housing and youth clubs were getting undue priority among the peace people. "There was far too much attention, energy and resources being put into projects that could be done by other agencies", he told me.

 

McLachlan felt that McKeown's insistence on total support for special status for H Block prisoners did not allow puzzled members to pursue understanding at their own pace. They wondered if this, plus the call for dismantling emergency legislation, meant tacit support for the Provos and withdrawal of support for the security forces, whom many saw as upholders of law and order.

 

Mairead Corrigan supported McKeown, because, she told me, "the peace people should refuse to be dictated to by outside organisations who wished to finance us". By night's end, McLachlan was requested by a majority of two votes, to resign as Chairman of the Peace People, and his employment as Projects Manager was terminated, an action which the Executive later adrnitted it had no right to do since McLachlan was employed by the independent Company. The Company announced that McLachlan had their support and the stage was set for further confrontation which McLachlan gracefully ended by resigning voluntarily. He announced as he left the Peace People "Betty Williams is no saint but I have come to respect her more these last few months". Mairead Corrigan was appointed Chairwoman in his place.

 

I met her in the Peace House, on Lisburn Road, shortly after leaving Betty Williams. It was eight o'clock in the evening and some men had arrived in the large red brick manse, a former presbytery, to plan the Junior Football League which the movement organises across the sectarian divide. In the front downstairs room where they gathered, a large painting hung over the fireplace. It showed a long line of poor and wretched people struggling up a hill, their hands outstretched to Mairead Corrigan, who stood on top, smiling joyously, a light around her head. To the left, behind her, moving out of the painting, Anne Maguire, a sad faced woman with spectacles, pushed a baby in a pram, as two children clung to her coat.

 

Mairead proposed to sell Peace by Peace in the Clonard area, near the spot on the Falls Road where she had once been attacked while picketing the offices of Provisional Sinn Fein. A false front tooth bears witness to one of the many blows she has received in her campaign against them. We left the house accompanied by four other people - Alan Senior, Executive member and paid assistant editor of Peace by Peace; Steve McBride, Executive member and paid assistant editor of Peace by Peace; Anne Conville, unpaid member of the Executive; and a young boy, the only volunteer from the rank and file of the Peace People. The paper is subsidised yearly by several thousand pounds from the Trust.

 

 

We went into Dunmore Street, a poorly lit terraced ghetto, populated mainly by pensioners. When she introduced herself by name on the doorsteps, the old people smiled warmly at Mairead and expressed their regret at the recent death of her sister. When she announced anonymously that she was from the Peace People, they looked at her vaguely in the darkness. As we progressed down the street five sub-teenage boys gathered round us. They were tough, cheerful, excited and extremely cruel. "Cry, Mairead, cry" they flung the legendary taunt at the woman whose tears had often flowed in television interviews. She was very good with them. She stood there and asked them if they played football and showed them photographs of the young leaguers in the newspapers. They recognised one team and talked to her about it, boasting about their own prowess in the game. Then they became bored.

 

The eldest boy took a proferred paper from her, tore it up and let the pieces flyaway in the cold night wind. They ran away calling, "how's Betty the teeth?". They returned later as she stood talking with an elderly man who had retired home from England to live with his aged mother. He was a bit lonely, he said. She told him he would find plenty of friends in the Peace House and he said he'd never heard of it. The children started to whack me over the head with a branch torn from a bush in nearby chruch grounds. Then they ran away again.

 

A British Army patrol came by on foot. They immediately approached us, wanting to know what literature we were selling and on whose behalf. "We're trying to do you out of a job", Mairead told them cheerfully. "We support non-violence." Alan Senior, of the majority tradition, called the troop leader 'sir' and wished them good night. He told me later that he regarded the arms as "a peacekeeping force"; rifles, when carried by the right people, do not represent violence, he said.

 

In Aranmore Street a teenager on crutches came to the door and was surprised to recognise her. He had hurt his foot in an industrial accident shortly after finishing a jail term for paramilitary activity. Now he expected to return to jail again, as he had been charged with rifling the offices of the SDLP, an old offence, and membership of the Provisional IRA. He wondered if anybody could help him. She gave him a free paper, saying he should call at the Peace House. He laughed and said he wasn't at all sure about doing that. When she heard his name she said "I used to do a line with your uncle." "You must have been hard up", he said. There was warmth between them.

As she moved off the children returned, throwing stones. When the missiles began to fmd their mark, on her legs and mine, we hurried ignominiously back to the car. A woman called from a lighted doorstep "Where's Betty, Mairead? Are you looking for more money?"

 

 

Steve McBride said it was always Mairead's presence, or Betty's, or Ciaran's, that attracted animosity. We drove back to the Peace House and had tea and biscuits with the football managers and the two women who were in charge of the house that night. They were pleased and surprised to have sold nearly fifty copies of the outdated fortnightly paper - a new issue was due out the following day. The eight page edition which they had just sold contained a full page on the plight of Australian aboriginals; a half page on women under Islam; a half page on malnutrition in the Third World; a full page on the advantages of breast over bottle feeding, with specific reference to the Third World; a half page on the difference between cash and the monetary policy of banks, quoting a 1932 reference work; a full back page on the junior football league; a half page on youth clubs; and scattered photographs of the peace people Funline group at a barn dance.

 

The front page dealt with the split. "The entire story of what has been happening may someday be written", it said. ''What appears in this edition is as much as the Peace People Executive considers proper ... at long last the executive has assumed its responsibilities and made it clear internally and externally that the Peace People is now a democratic organisation". They had recently been ''bedevilled by constant talk of differing approaches" but this was now resolved and major areas of exciting work had been shared out. "These include such items as European invitations to hold political dialogue meetings in hospitable circumstances and several youth camps". The Executive, it said, had been "too long dependent on the founding leaders for funds and representation".

 

Another front page story announced that a British expert on yoga had given a talk on yoga in the Peace House. At the bottom of the page, in heavy black type, Betty Williams was quoted as saying she would be concentrating on family responsibilities. She "told Claran McKeown 'You and Mairead have all my love and support for the future of the movement'." The paper did not express a single word of support for Betty. Nor did it mention the apology which the Executive had publicly made to MacLachlan, exonerating him from any question of fmancial fraud.

 

Before this edition was printed, Mairead Corrigan went to Betty Williams' home at two o'clock in the morning, asking to see her. The housekeeper pleaded that Betty was exhausted. At 4 am the Williams household was again awakened as Mairead returned with Ciaran McKeown and Joe Johnston, press relations officer of the Executive. Mairead went up to Betty's room and woke her. They came downstairs and Betty was asked if she would pose before the media at 11 am that morning for a photograph of her Mairead and Ciaran together.

"By eleven tomorrow this whole thing will be over" Ciaran said. "There'll be no more talk about a split between us in the movement".

She refused, and flew off on a lecture tour to America, from where she issued a statement expressing love for Mairead only. "I did not express support for the movement" she said, adding "Women of Ireland, I love you."

Ciaran McKeown issued a reply. "Betty is often inexcusably inaccurate".

Mairead Corrigan invited me to lunch at the Peace House, where members take turns at preparing meals for each other and for visitors who drop in. On this occasion she herself prepared the mince pie. The all male company, apart from myself and Mairead, included Sammy McClure of the UDA and his teenage son, another member of the UDA, and a man from Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann. Also present were Alan Senior, another elderly retired accountant who handles the movement's books, and a young American law student who is advising the Peace People on Northern Ireland's emergency legislation.

 

Sammy talked for a while about his granny, to whose astounded hospital bedside he had brought a friend of his, a Catholic priest. Then the chat turned to modern morality.

The Comhaltas man told how he had attended a dinner dance in County Armagh where he was aghast to receive an invitation to throw his door key under the table for a bit of wife swapping. Sam deplored this, though he was not puritan about sex "as the evidence, my son here, shows". He was glad we had progressed beyond Old Testament restrictions, where people were instructed how to beget, by wearing in bed full length garments that contained aperatures for the appropriate mingling of the appropriate parts. They moved on to unmarried mothers, and Mairead steered the discussion to love, observing that people today seemed more genuinely and openly affectionate in their relationships with each other.

 

Later, in her simply furnished upstairs office, she showed me the volume of international correspondence she has to deal with. She was just then writing to her contact in the Vatican to try and arrange an audience with the Pope for Adolfo Esquivel, the Latin American non-violent leader whom she and Betty had nominated for the 1978 Nobel Peace Prize. She had met him in Argentina last September when she went over there to work on behalf of missing prisoners.

 

The Pope, she said, was the most impressive of all the world leaders she had met, and she had asked him if he agreed that there is no such thing as a just war, pointing out that early Christians were actually forbidden to become soldiers. "His reply saddened me. He said he couldn't say all wars were unjust because there are sometimes different circumstances. "

 

He had laughed when she kissed him goodbye on the cheek and said that her father wanted to know if he could have a contract for the Vatican windows. Her father had worked as a window cleaner cum ice cream salesman before retirement. Her mother had worked in a fruit shop, in a room above which Mairead was born, in the Falls Road, in 1944. "That's the shop Paisley marched on in 1964 because the Officials had made it their election headquarters and stuck a tricolour in the window."

 

The Corrigan family, comprising six girls and two boys, had long since moved to Andersonstown. One of her sisters had been killed in a car accident in 1969 at the same spot where Anne's children were killed in 1976. Two married sisters were now rearing families in Belfast, one worked for RTE in Dublin, a married brother was a bus driver in New Zealand, and the youngest brother, aged 23, an architect, stayed at home with her parents.

 

When the Peace Movement started she soon found herself obliged to leave both her job and her parent's home. "They were grieving over the children and the press were beseiging me day and night and through the night. So I packed a suitcase and stayed with a girlfriend for about six weeks, though I was spending most of the time in Betty's house". She got herself a flat then, and stayed there fairly constantly for over a year, until Anne returned from New Zealand where she had emigrated in search of release from grief. "It didn't work and when they came home I stayed with her for a while, trying to help".

 

She returned to her flat after the Maguires employed a young housekeeper. Anne was receiving psychiatric care and had made two attempts at suicide. In the months before Anne's death, Mairead was again moving between her flat and the Maguire household. Now she lives there semi-permanently.

Before the Peace Movement upturned her life she had led a regular, anonymous existence .... working as secretary to the managing director of a brewery, and doing welfare work for the Legion of Mary.

 

She had represented the Legion in 1974 at the World Council of Churches in Thailand, travelling over with Harold Good, a Methodist Minister from the Shankill, who is now a director of the Peace Trust. As a legionnaire she worked with the handicapped children in Andersonstown, moving into welfare when internment began. She used visit Long Kesh every weekend, and spent time with the families of the prisoners. Her own family was not untouched by the troubles. An aunt was burned out of her house in Norfolk Street by loyalists. Her teenage brother was taken away for questioning by the British Army and she could not find out where he was.

 

She understood, she said, why people were driven to joining the Provos. She had gone with a bouquet of roses to sympathise with Kathleen Lennon, and visited the wife of the young man who was wounded in the car with Danny. If her campaign for an end to violence had since been aimed mostly at the Provos, it was because, she said, "the loyalists who assassinated weren't openly identifiable, and they called for a cease fire within nine months, anyway". (The Shankill Butchers operated in the early months of the Peace Movement). She had never picketed British Army headquarters "because there was never a black and white case where you could be a hundred per cent sure that they had deliberately killed an innocent civilian". (Twelve year old Majella O'Hare was shot dead by the British troops on the day that Betty and Mairead held their first peace rally on Finaghy Road).

 

Even now, four months after she'd started, "I know so little about non-violence and how to handle it. Ciaran knows all about Ghandi and Luther King and pacifism. You'd need to talk to him about it." She seemed genuinely perplexed. "I haven't had the advantage of a university education that Ciaran has had. I left school at 15. I started going to the Polytechnic last autumn to do a BA in history, politics and philosophy but that's been interrupted with looking after the children." Ciaran was giving them education classes now in media training and non-violence, and had been responsible from the start for the philosophy of the movement, "but peace making is so hard, even among peace people."

 

In Dungannon last year, where she had spoken of dismantling the Emergency Provisions Act, because repressive laws increased the cycle of violence, "a woman grabbed me. She was a police widow. Her husband had been killed by the Provos." The woman thought they needed even more laws against the IRA, and was crying in anger and grief. "I had learned by then to lower my eyes and take it. The woman walked away after a while, then she came back and said 'I'm sorry'."

 

She recalled the night the three of them had gone to Turf Lodge in October 1976 where a protest meeting had been called by community leaders after the British Army killed a child with a plastic bullet. The crowd turned on them, physically assaulting them, and they were forced to seek refuge in a nearby Church. "I had to shout to make myself heard, and I knew even while I was doing it that the shouting lifted the anger up ... one woman grabbed my arm and said 'My husband's in Long Kesh. I don't know when he'll get out.' She pointed at my leather coat and said 'Haven't you done well for yourself?' At that time the movement was only seven weeks old, and I'd left my job and wasn't getting any money."

 

She had gone on salary from the Peace People, at £5,000 a year, in January 1977. When the Nobel was received in November 1977, she and Betty had come off salary, supporting themselves. "I also gave about half of the money away." She had given her old car to relatives, bought a new two door Skoda and some clothes. "But I had my half musquash coat since 1974." She now had no life insurance, had not stamped her own cards since leaving the brewery and hadn't "thought about a pension".

 

She said, wistfully, that she didn't expect now ever to have the marriage and children of her own that she would have liked. "It's been hard to keep up the personal relationships I had before all this started, but Betty kept me going tremendously, and I have a special relationship with Ciaran and his wife Marian."

 

She had been sustained over the last few years by her faith in Christ; she goes to Mass and communion every day, and visits Lough Derg once a year. "You could say I'm having a love affair with Jesus. When things are bad I go to church and sit there with him. At the worse moment I heard God say to me 'I have given you something tough. You'll have to bear it' and I knew that finally it all comes back to being on your own, no matter who is around you, husband, children or friends."

It was right for Betty to leave the movement, she said. "She felt herself that she had to get her own personal life in order, and she had to find money to support her family." It was Betty who decided to keep the Nobel money, she said. Mairead's first television reaction, when she said her mother needn't worry about Mairead not having a husband to keep her "was a joke, that's all. Later I said that some of the money would have to go to the Third World. Betty then wanted it all to go to the Movement."

Shortly after the Nobel award was announced, in October 1977, a meeting was held in Betty's house to discuss the disposal of the money that came with it. Present at it were Betty, Mairead, Ciaran and Max Magee, administrator of the Peace House and an expert in para psychology. Magee, Ciaran told me, came to see the Peace Leaders early in 1977 "and he noticed the special relationship between the three of us. He suggested that we be freed from routine duties to explore this and he took over the Peace House."

 

Magee is now principal of the College of Psychic Studies in London. "We had planned," said McKeown "that the money would provide each of the three of us with the £5,000 a year salary we were then taking from the movement. Some of it was to go to educational projects, which I was to direct, and some would go to the Third World project which each of us would adopt. When we walked in the door Betty announced that she had projects of her own in mind, and wanted to keep her own share for them. She didn't agree with what we had planned."

 

I asked him if he had advised her on the repercussions of keeping personal control of the money.

"No, I didn't. When Betty has her mind made up, that's that. You don't understand the effects of a Nobel prize on a person ... it's like a lay canonisation."

The canonisation process had begun a year earlier within 24 hours of the deaths of the Maguire children, when Betty Williams was made a press celebrity. It resulted from the convergence of two historical phenomena, - modem media techniques and the liberation of women - was fuelled by the worldwide threat to parliamentarians of armed guerilla movements, (particularly in Germany), and was sustained locally by a genuine sense of war weariness.

 

 

In August 1976, despair, futility and violence pervaded the hot summer streets of Belfast. Convention talks among the North's politicians had just failed; Ulster was in a political limbo, ruled directly and remotely from the British mainland; there was warfare involving the British Army, the Provisional IRA and myriad loyalist armies. On Tuesday August 10 there was widespread violence in Catholic areas as demonstrators commemorating the fifth anniversary of the introduction of internment burnt vehicles, smashed shop windows and set up roadblocks. At two in the afternoon the British army opened fire on a vehicle which they believed to be the get-away car from a previous ambush. The car contained two young IRA volunteers. Danny Lennon, at the wheel, died in the hail of bullets, the car went out of control and smashed into Anne Maguire and her three children.

 

 

Betty Williams, returning by car from Andersonstown where she had visited her crippled mother, saw what happened next. "The baby shot out of pram, into the air and bounced off the windscreen. The woman was crushed against the railings. So was a young child. I saw a young boy being dragged under the mudguard". She stopped and went back to the scene. There was blood and confusion and horror. She went home, thought about it, and the other violent deaths she had witnessed, and decided to organise a petition "calling on the gunmen to stop".

 

Accompanied by her only sister she went out that night knocking on doors. Women who had been trying unsuccessfully to prevent what they saw as the senseless destruction of Andersonstown, followed her like a Pied Piper and the peace movement was unofficially born.

 

Kathleen Lennon that afternoon had visited her mother, delivering bread, because she knew the Falls Road shops would be shut. As she waited afterwards in the street for a black taxi, her sister arrived in a car driven by a man whom she recognised as a member of the Provisional Sinn Fein. They offered her a lift home; on the way they told her of Danny's death.

 

Mairead Corrigan on that day was driving home from a holiday in Achill. She arrived home late and knew that something was wrong because the house was lit up. Her aunt was coming down the garden path. "Mairead, all Anne's children are dead", the woman said.

 

Ciaran McKeown, on that day, was painting the windows of his house, which had been petrol bombed the previous year. (He suspected left wing paramilitaries because a book on Lenin was found nearby.) He received a telephone call from an Irish Press colleague, telling him that an unspecified number of children had been killed in a suspected shoot-out, and that the evening shift would be a heavy one. McKeown started making phone calls.

 

On Wednesday, August 11, Mairead Corrigan, in the company of Anne's husband Jackie, visited her sister who lay unconscious in hospital after neuro surgery. They arranged for the removal of the bodies of two of the children. "You can come back and sign for the baby later. He'll be dead by then", a young policeman told them. The funeral, proposed for Tuesday, was delayed.

 

On Thursday morning, August 12, Mairead went to the offices of UTV and said, "I want to go on television". The interview was filmed on the roof of the building and broadcast in the evening. She was in tears and she said she wanted the violence to stop. That night she heard that Betty Williams was organising a rally to call for just that. "I rang her up and asked her to join my family in the Church on Friday for the funeral." She then went to the home of Kathleen Lennon.

 

"She sat on my sofa, with a bunch of roses she had brought me, and we were both upset", Kathleen Lennon recalls. "She asked me if I thought Danny knew what he was doing when he joined the IRA. I told her he had just come out of jail after serving a sentence since 1972, and that my other son had been interned and was now serving a sentence, and Danny was determined to work for his country. She told me to keep that thought with me, never to let anyone take it away from me that Danny was proud of his country. Then she went to America and said the IRA were terrorists. I never met her again. I didn't want to. Her sister Anne came to see me on the second anniversary of all the deaths in 1978. She wanted me to come and visit her sometimes in her own home, but she said she understood why I couldn't, because Mairead Corrigan was staying with them at that time."

 

On Friday evening, August 13, after the funeral, both Betty and Mairead went to UTV to take part in a Telefis Eireann broadcast on the burgeoning phenomena that still had no name. They arrived too late for the programme, which went ahead with Paddy Devlin and Ciaran McKeown, and met the two men coming out of a lift. Introductions were made. "I had never met Ciaran before" Mairead told me "but I congratulated him on a series of articles he had written about integrated education in the North". (McKeown's father, a headmaster, had clashed with Bishop Philbin on the matter and Ciaran had been debarred by the Bishop from entering his father's school as a reporter. His father was forced to retire early). McKeown told the women that he thought something big was about to result from the rally Betty had planned, and offered to help. Later that night, he told me, he dropped round to Betty's house, found she wasn't there, and left his name and home telephone with her only Sister.

 

The turnout next day, Saturday, August 14, surpassed and confounded all expectations, except those of McKeown, who told me he had "sensed it would be so". Thousands of people, mainly women, simply came and stood and shared an undefined hope. Protestant and Catholic women rushed to embrace each other, crossing the sectarian divide in scenes unprecedented in the long turbulent history of Northern Ireland. There were no speeches, no analysis of why they were there, or what they were looking for. The heart has its reasons, which reason may not know.

 

Over the weekend the foreign media followed the Williams household, asking Betty and Mairead to pronounce on every issue that had ever affected Northern Ireland. In desperation and confusion, they rang McKeown constantly, seeking his advice, relaying his answers. "They were calling me so often I suggested we meet and talk", McKeown told me and he arranged to meet them on Tuesday, August 17, in the presbytery of the Church of St. Michael of the Archangel, from where the children had been buried. By that time a flood of mail had engulfed Betty's house - letters, telegrams, money donations. "It was like monopoly", she told me. "I'd open one envelope after another and out would come funny money, coloured bits of foreign paper.

 

A Methodist woman had called, looking to help and I made her treasurer on the spot." The three met, that night, and Betty handed McKeown for perusal a declaration about peace which she had written, which ended with a call on gunmen to get out. McKeown told me he found her statement "simplistic, naive, one sided on the matter of violence, and even violent in tone". He took a page from Mairead's jotter and wrote, there and then, the Declaration of the Peace People. In the opening line he addressed it to "the world, from this movement for peace", and he recorded a series of simple aspirations for a just and peaceful society, that could be imbibed, like custard, by anybody, with the exception of line seven, which rejected "the rise of the bomb and bullet and all the techniques of violence".

 

They agreed to work together from then on, with McKeown initially in the background. He was still a staff journalist and he wished to avoid speculation, he told me, "that an undoubtedly spontaneous movement was being manipulated by a person of my background". McKeown was a former student leader and civil rights activist, with vaguely left leanings, who had stood for Dail Eireann in 1969 as an independent, collecting 154 votes. They discussed, he said, the sexist nature of the term Peace Women, and they decided henceforth to refer to themselves as Peace People.

 

The media, aware even then of McKeown's influence, were not interested in another bearded Irish male. They seized shamelessly on the Belfast women in those first four weeks, projecting Williams as super housewife and Corrigan as saintly spinster. Feminism however was an issue that attracted serious world wide attention at that time, and the elevation of token women regularly occurred. On September 17, 1976, Irish newspapers recorded that Williams and Corrigan had been jointly nominated for the 1976 Nobel Prize by the chairman of the Norwegian Christian People's Party, Mr. Kaare Kristiansen, and the President of the West German Lower House, Frau Anne Marie Renger. The call was echoed by the German branch of the World Council of Mothers of all Nations. The Peace Movement was then thirty four days old. The Prize was to be awarded in October. In the event, the nominations were made too late and they received the award in October 1977.

 

None of this is to deny that the two women who called for an end to violence raised a heartfelt response in the wartorn community of Northern Ireland. The response, indeed, was immediate and massive; on the first exulting marches no one asked to see the blueprint. Ciaran McKeown was busy writing it, and his pamphlet The Price of Peace, appeared in late September. Meanwhile, there were the heady rallies. A Southern Movement for Peace sprang up, holding rallies to coincide with the ones that were being organised in Northern Ireland and Great Britain. From September through to December it seemed as if, on successive Saturdays, the entire peoples of the two islands were on the move behind Williams, Corrigan and McKeown.

 

Ciaran had planned the marches, spreading Betty and Mairead evenly over the two countries. One of them would be in England every second Saturday. There were summonses from abroad to go there and tell their tale. The summonses were hard to resist; there was the chance to reawaken international interest in a country and a problem that had seemed to be boringly intractable. There was an opportunity of foreign funding for the movement; and there was the very human lure of travel and excitement for three people of relatively colourless backgrounds. Mairead's trip to Thailand, Betty's year in Bermuda, Ciaran's year as President of the Union of Students in Ireland - these brief bursts in the sun were as nothing to the invitations that now flowed in, to travel as media stars and the darlings of foreign governments.

 

For Ciaran McKeown, a thirty two year old local journalist, who had been stationed in the North for the previous six years, it was a sunburst beyond his wildest dreams. He provided the world's media with weighty thoughts on peace as a supplement to the human interest stories on the peace women. His pamphlet The Price of Peace which he published and paid for on his own initiative, represented, he said in a foreword, "the thinking which has largely guided the Movement of the Peace People." It suggested, he wrote, "an attempt to create a society closer to the tenets of Christianity than perhaps anything since the days immediately after the death of Christ himself." He was confident to tell his dream in public, he recorded, "because I am a professional communicator, as well as a philosopher by qualification, and a pacifist by conviction." In the third reprint, (the pamphlet sold like hotcakes on the marches) he wrote of his own thinking "Some (usually outside Northern Ireland) have made such gratifying observations that (sic) it is the clearest statement of the pacifist position since Ghandi."

 

The pamphlet did indeed attract the attention of the foreign editor of a right wing Norwegian newspaper, who read it and decided to launch a campaign for funds for the Peace Movement, to compensate for the fact that it was too late to give Mairead and Betty the Nobel award. Since the Norwegian fund was arguably the golden egg that choked the fledgling movement, it is worth exploring here the ideas which McKeown had put forward.

 

"No one is going to come down from the mountain with a new set of tablets," he wrote, but he "presumed to offer some guidance." He was convinced that the people of Northern Ireland could not only create a brave new world, but give a powerful example to such as Lebanon, South Africa and people under totalitarian regimes - "another way forward for the human race will have been proved possible".

 

He recommended self help for the North, which was in unfair competition with larger industrial states, by concentrating on arts and crafts. The Swiss, he wrote, had watchmaking. Northern Ireland could start with the men in jail who made money from leathercrafts. Work could be provided by restoring the bombed houses that separated the warring ghettos.

 

He hinted at a federation of the British Isles, in which there would be a new Northern Irish identity, distinct "but not separate from any of them", and sketches of the of government which would emerge from this new identity. Community associations, co-operatives, private enterprises, trade unions "and so on" would emerge as competing groups for the central authority of this new democracy. ''What is certain", he declared "is that the old parties are as good as dead in their present forms."

 

The news media should rethink its role - "the badness of violence is so repetitive as to be scarcely newsworthy" and Peace by Peace should quickly establish itself as a key organ of the new genre, stimulating "pacifist and near pacifist thinking". (McKeown had launched the movement paper in September.) In a chapter on sexism, he urged that women should have "a couple of nights out in the pub or whatever, with a certain amount of pocket money." Women, he said "appear to have grasped much more surely and intuitively the real fundamental change in our Northern Irish situation. Men will follow when it is spelled out more clearly."

 

 

He concluded his 32 page pamphlet with a suggestion that those who were sometimes unjustly maligned "as the fur coat do-gooders" should twin with a place in Latin America and help them establish their own peaceful society. ''We will move all the more quickly towards our own destiny if we begin now to work for peace elsewhere."

 

Gunnar Borrovik, foreign editor of the Federelandsvennen, read this and launched a campaign for funds. Peace by Peace published an article which explained what happened after that. "At first it was only the right wing papers that appealed for donations - the left wing didn't know how to react at all." The fund halted at £15,000 and then took off again after a televised interview with Williams and Corrigan called "Two Women For Peace", mounting to £202,000, which surpassed the original aim of reaching a sum equivalent to the Nobel money. "I also suspect," the correspondent wrote "that people were motivated by an urge to take the Norwegian peace thing into their own hands for once, rather than leave it to a group of politicians to honour the likes of Henry Kissinger - a sense of shame undoubtedly obtains."

 

The three went to Norway in November to accept the money. The people there "may have fallen in love with sweet Miss Corrigan but the impression that remains is that of a cool balanced head of the man in the background." The article recorded Norwegian amazement at the trio's naievety in believing that they could offer an example to the whole world, recommending "a little less of the crusading spirit and a bit more humility".

 

When they left the formality of the town hall where the presentation was made "the visitors visibly changed; they were clearly in their element as they stood at the head of the 10,000 slogan chanting marchers… almost totally dependent on the emotional factor… would they dare to talk of the common plight of small nations to a crowd in Woodvale Park, Belfast?". Betty said the money would be spent on a recreation centre for children. Ciaran set up a Trust fund to dispose of it. In the formative first two years of the Peace People he was Chairman of the Trust, the Company and the Movement, editor of the paper and author of the pamphlets which explained movement thinking.

 

Even as they were in Norway, in November, things had already turned sour. The H Block blanket protest had started in September and the marches in Catholic areas met fierce opposition from Provisional supporters, angered at the movement's concentration on the IRA while the Shankill Butchers assassination campaign was virtually ignored by it. (The UDA, of which some of the Butchers were members, had publicly welcomed the Peace March up the Shankill Road. Their offer to provide security for it was, however, turned down). When the British government lifted the ban that had been imposed since Bloody Sunday 1972 against Irish demonstrations in Trafalgar Square, in order that the Peace People and Joan Baez speak there, there were suggestions that the government were exploiting Peace activities as a smokescreen for their own political inertia. The Queen's mention of the Peace Women in her Christmas address lent support to this view.

 

But the masses who flocked to the banner peace banner remained inspired. Margaret Watson from Belfast who joined the Movement in those early days described to me what it was like, "I was watching television in September and I saw Betty Williams. I sat up with a shock. For years I had left politics to my husband; I watched his enthusiasm, saw him take part in citizens defence committees, was used to being introduced as his wife, and sat back with nothing to say. When the Peace Movement started, I identified, straight away. I found a place in the vacuum.

 

"I saw Betty Williams and I thought 'she's just an ordinary housewife like me. If she can speak up, why can't I at least support her.' But I thought she was wrong to tell the gunmen to get out. That was wrong. They were part of our community. I knew that much. They had to be stopped, but we couldn't just fling them out; that was dishonest, and immoral.

"So I sat down that night and wrote a letter, explaining that I thought we had to offer a place also to gunmen, if we really felt peaceful to everybody, and I sent it to her. About a week later, in the evening, her husband Ralph arrived at my door and asked me to go to Betty's house. I did. I joined the peace movement, in her house, that night, just like that. Ciaran McKeown talked to me about the gunmen staying with us, and he said I was right, and before I knew it I was on the executive, just like that. There were no elections, you just joined, and made up the movement as you went along".

 

Her eyes were bright, as she spoke to me in the sitting room of her home, her face animated in the way I have seen many women's faces animated in the first flush of the Womens Liberation Movement, in Dublin when housewives suddenly felt they had a voice.

"We used to meet in the Presbyterian centre and then we moved to the Peace House in the Lisburn Road. It was the most exciting year of my life. I'll never forget them for it, and I'll always thank them for that. I worked morning noon and night for them, and couldn't sleep at night sometimes for the excitement. I tell you how busy I was. I came home one evening, I had missed the tea, my husband made it for the three children, and I was reading a Ladybird book to my young son, just before he went to bed, and he pointed to a picture of a vacuum cleaner, and said 'That's the thing Daddy uses about the house'. That's how involved I was with the Peace Movement."

 

There had been, she said, strong criticism of the Peace Leaders for always being abroad and the makeshift executive had been very sensitive about it. "Ciaran thought other people should make some of the trips, to ease the criticism and give others some experience. One morning, in January I think it was, the phone rang in the Peace House and someone spoke from Belgium saying they wanted to make Betty and Mairead honorary members of the Union of European Federalists, whoever they were, I hadn't a clue at the time. I told them Betty and Mairead were booked up for foreign travel, and this voice at the other end said 'Will you come please?'. Me? I told them I was nobody and this voice said 'No, no, you are a member of the Peace Movement, please come'."

 

Within two weeks she found herself with another female member of the Executive flying to Belgium.

"It was ... how can I put it? It was like being a film star. I'd been abroad once before, in a camping bag, and worrying about the price of food. But now, here I was, flying, no worry about the fare, they paid it, and they met us on the tarmacadam and presented us with a bouquet of roses each. Then we were swept into a limousine by a member of the Union; he actually owned a big building company, and he came with us into town and showed us to our hotel.

"Well, I can tell you. I would have been content to spend that weekend in the hotel suite alone, it was luxury beyond my wildest dreams. They took us on a tour of the town, all these important business people, and their wives; they were totally charming. I kept wondering if they minded that I wasn't Mairead or Betty, but not once did they make me feel like a second class peace person. It was like we were idols. Members of the Peace Movement, and that was a passport to idolatry.

 

"When we were presented with medals and scrolls I got up to read my speech, a little one, that I had prepared in French, then I discovered that the area was Walloon, and French was sacreligious to them, that's how well we were prepared. I read out the declaration of the Peace People instead; there was television and everything in the hall, and some of them actually had tears in their eyes. Of course, in those days, the Peace Declaration actually made me cry; I meant every word of it, I really did."

 

She had already been through the peace rallies on the Falls Road and the meeting in Turf Lodge where the leaders were attacked.

"I thought we were going to be killed on the Falls Road. We were marching up to the park, where Anne Maguire, on crutches, just out of hospital, was ready to read out the declaration. As we got near Milltown Cemetery, the Provos started stoning us. The stones and bits of metal were raining down on us; I often wondered since if it was God's intervention that sent us a rainy day, the first march on which there had been bad weather, because our umbrellas saved us. The movement was like that, you really believed God was watching over us. I was terrified, terrified.

 

"I'd often seen civil rights marches being attacked, on television, but I never knew it was as fearsome as that. And there was poor Anne Maguire, inside the park, up on a platform, alone with a priest, and the Provos between us and her, and her on crutches and pins in her legs. I came away from the march convinced of being a pacifist, because you know, you felt you were facing death, from your own people, if you like, that you'd been reared among, and yet I felt love for them, I really did."

 

The first split in the movement occurred as a result of that march. Ciaran McKeown afterwards wrote an article in the 1977 January edition of the magazine Fortnight, which he edited, in which he compared clergymen in the North to "apostles hiding in the upper room - an image which leapt to mind at the spectacle of Bishop Philbin and Monsignor Mullally lurking behind the gates of Milltown Cemetery when peace marchers were being stoned in the Falls Rally".

 

Margaret Watson thought McKeown wrong to so accuse them. "Poor Philbin was an old man, too old to march anyway, and he had been waiting for us at the top of the Falls". As a result of McKeown's article, there were resignations from Tom Conaty, a prominent Belfast lay Catholic and leader of the Andersonstown peace branch, demanding an undertaking from the leaders that they refrain from criticising Churches and churchmen.

 

"That's when I first saw how clever Ciaran was", Margaret said. "Tom Conaty came to see the executive in our headquarters in the Presbyterian centre, in the upper room, funnily enough, and presented us with the ultimatum. Well, he was on a loser from the start, because of course the Peace Movement could not withhold criticism of churches, where it was merited, and Philbin anyway was a very rigid Catholic and we weren't feeling all that warm about him. But it was Ciaran's manoeuvring that night in January that amazed me.

 

"He looked Conaty right in the eye and said 'If you want to complain about that article you'd better go down the road and speak to the Editor of Fortnight'. 'I am speaking to you, Ciaran', said Tom. 'No, you're not. You're speaking to Ciaran McKeown, editor of Peace by Peace and I have no control over what Ciaran McKeown of Fortnight publishes; Ciaran said. He ran rings round poor Tom". Conaty and the Andersonstown branch resigned.

 

Nor was this the first example of McKeown's manoeuvring. He had announced that a prominent Protestant would be joining the movement, confounding those who accused the leadership of being Catholic oriented. "I can tell you I was confounded when McLachlan arrived one night in October 1976 at a meeting, and the next thing I heard was Ciaran calling him forward and announcing him as a member of the Executive. I was shocked. Here he was, a member of the Unionist Party that had introduced internment and done down Catholics, joining the Executive on his first night. I went up to him afterwards and told him I hated him. He asked me to give him a chance and said he was surprised at Ciaran promoting him like that."

 

McKeown later appointed McLachlan Projects Manager of McKeown's Company, with responsibility for small industrial projects. Betty Williams was also shocked. She told me she had spoken briefly with McLachlan that first evening merely to tell him she hated his guts. In fact McLachlan quickly won the confidence and trust of the membership including Williams. "That was the thing that was really wonderful", said Watson. "Protestants and Catholics were talking to each other, actually saying hello."

 

While faltering communications were begun, and people were learning to talk without getting at each other's throats "things were going on above our heads that we had no idea about", she said, "and there was nothing we could have done about them anyway because there were no formal structures until April 1977. There were no rules, really, is the best way to put it".

Betty Williams had announced that the Peace People were helping ex-paramilitaries to resettle abroad, using an escape route that few in the movement knew about, for reasons of security. (£4,000 was spent by the Trust on such resettlements in the first year). Ciaran McKeown had called for the disbandment of the Irish army and co-opted the British peace groups into the Northern Peace Movement saying the Peace People had no geographical limitations and could handle an English branch dealing with racial problems. The movement announced in January 1979 a Strategy for Peace, based on McKeown's pamphlet, which called for a federation of the British Isles and a Northern model parliament elected from community groups.

 

"There was one really weird night" said Margaret Watson, "when he came into the Executive and told us that he had discovered a Third World island, the same size as Ulster, with exactly the same population, and he proposed that we adopt it, send money and advisers to them, and bring them up to the same material level as our own. We voted him down."

There was confusion among the rank and file about the monies collected from abroad. Northern peace groups, thinking they had access to it, came up with ambitious schemes for using it, offering ideas that ranged from a battered wives home to a portcabin youth centre. The peace movement, McKeown deflected them, should try to be self-sufficient and pay for its own schemes. The Trust Fund, would consider sympathetically applications made to it, both from within and without the peace movement.

 

In April 1977 the Peace People held an interim spring assembly, at which an ad hoc caretaker committee was elected which would run the Movement formally until proper elections were held in October. McKeown was appointed Chairman. He was also Chairman of the Trust and the Company and Editor of Peace by Peace. McKeown through his newspaper, made perposterous claims on behalf of the peace people, which the inexperienced rank and file took at face value. In April, for example, he ran a front page lead story in doubled size heavy black type, written by himself, accompanied by a large photograph of himself, which read: "The mammoth task of shifting the thinking of the Northern Irish people from the violent tribal patterns of the past into new peace making channels gets a great lift this fortnight, with direct access to the resources of the Norwegian Peace Institute on the one hand, and the potentially influential international conference in Derry featuring such renowned peacemakers as Dom Helder Camara". In smaller type McKeown explained that he had received from the Norwegian Institute a £4,500 scholarship usually reserved "to eccentric native geniuses who don't fit into any of the normal categories", and an invitation to a Pax Christi conference in Derry.

 

On June 9th, a delegation came from the rank and file to the Lisburn Road to ask for a greater say in management.

"Peter McLachlan, came into an Executive meeting that night and said that a delegation outside wanted to talk with us," said Margaret Watson. "They were allowed, and I mean allowed, in for ten minutes. It was humiliating. They said they felt they weren't in touch, that decisions were being taken by the Executive that they only hear about much later and that something should be done about it. It was pitiful. They couldn't put their fmger on any hard evidence but I knew what they meant. Suddenly I heard Ciaran say their views would be taken into consideration, but there was an agenda to be dealt with and he told them to leave. So they went, like peasants who had just visited the tribal chiefs. At the end of the meeting that night I asked Ciaran what was to be done about the delegation. He said we had no more time to talk about it but he looked around the room and appointed three people to look into it, telling them to visit the groups and report back to the Executive".

 

Next day she was in a supermarket, pushing a trolley and she ran into another female member of the Executive, which then comprised six women and three men.

"We started talking, little things you know about the movement and that, and - I'll never forget it, - I was holding a cereal packet when something the other woman said indicated to me that she was feeling a bit uneasy too. Suddenly we both started to talk; it was like opening a flood gate and we discovered that there were lots of little things we didn't feel great about and we both went home and started telephoning other members".

 

As a result, the ad hoc executive decided to hold a secret caucus that weekend when the three peace leaders, Williams, Corrigan and McKeown were out of the country. "We met and talked, in the headquarters of the Ballynafeigh Peace Group. There was nothing sinister in it, and nothing sinister in our complaints, it was just that we all agreed that we were holding back at Executive meetings, letting the three of them make all the decisions. It was partly that we weren't used to politics ourselves, didn't know how to pass motions and so on, and partly that we couldn't believe that ordinary people like us could possibly have anything to offer. Whereas Betty and Mairead and Ciaran were lionized by the world and we were in awe of them. And you know, when the three of them were together, there was a special relationship between them, they had something between them that the rest of us couldn't touch".

 

There was one dissenting voice at the caucus, she said, that of Steve McBride.

 

On the following Tuesday, Betty Williams arrived back from America and went to the Peace House. "When I got in that evening, I heard roaring and shouting; you'd have thought the place was coming down. I asked what was happening and I was told that Betty was fighting with Peter McLachlan. He had told her about our meeting that weekend and what we had decided.

"Poor Peter, he went in to see Betty, all democratic, so that she and the other two would know we weren't doing anything behind their backs and she tore strips off him. They were together about an hour, and then Peter came out of the Board Room, white as a sheet and shaking. He was actually frightened. He told me he had never been spoken to like that in his life and he went home. I telephoned him that Thursday night and he said he wasn't coming to the Executive meeting, and I told him he would have to; that if we didn't show and put on a united front that we could never complain again about not having control. So we went along and it was a quiet meeting, you'd think nothing had occurred and it all went peacefully.

 

As the meeting ended, I asked what was going to be done about the delegation we had received the previous week, and I was dismissed out of hand. I was shocked to see the way they were treating the complaints of the delegation and I went home that night very worried. I was sick over it, and I sat up most of the night thinking and I decided to resign. So I wrote a letter to Ciaran, left it in the peace house next day, Friday, and the next night, Saturday, about midnight there came a knock on my door. Ciaran was there. He came in, talked to me, for several hours, and said I would be a big loss to the movement and that my complaints were valid.

 

"Then he did such a clever thing. He took out my letter and said, "This only says the words "I wish to resign". That is not the same thing as saying that you do resign. It isn't really a letter of resignation, if you look at it like that. It could be interpreted as merely a wish, unless things are straightened out. He then offered me a job I really liked. He said the Peace Movement should consider dismantling some part of the barricades that the Army called the peace line, the walls that sealed off Catholic from Protestants living in the same street and asked me to investigate the possibility of it in one specific area. I thought it was a great idea. If we could get Protestants and Catholics, living in the same street, to dismantle the wall that divided them, then we could show that there was hope that we could live together, without fear of each other. It would be a first step towards dermilitarisation".

 

McKeown did not then or ever show the letter of resignation to the rest of the Executive. When I questioned him about this, he said that the Executive was an ad hoc one and as such was not bound by the formal rules that obtained after the October assembly, some months later.

 

Margaret Watson studied the designated area for two weeks and made her report to the Executive. "I was really excited. I told them that I had discovered it was possible to take down the barricades, that the people on both sides were willing to do so, but that it would take time. We would have to spend two years, first I said, dismantling the barricades in their minds. When I said that, Betty started to thump the table and she shouted at me that this was no pussyfooting peace movement, like Women Together or PACE, that we should act at once and that she personally would go to the area and start dismantling the wall brick by brick to set an example.

 

I disagreed and she said that if we held back now, she would resign. I said there was no need for her to do that and I left the meeting. When we were outside I looked at Ciaran and told him to put my letter of resignation into effect immediately and I went home.

"Some nights later, after midnight, he knocked at my front door again, came in and asked me to reconsider. I told him my mind was made up. He said that they were about to have a peace rally on the Boyne and that an American was attending it, who was bringing over funds to distribute among the peace groups in Ireland. If there was a public split in the peace movement now, he said, they might not get the money. The rally was for the 2nd July and I was about to go on holiday. I said I wouldn't withdraw my resignation but that I would keep quiet about it.

 

"What else could I do? I didn't want to be the first to split the movement. That seemed like an awful burden - it would have been sacreligious to cause dissension in a movement that everybody was calling the great hope for peace in Northern Ireland. Lots of people resigned over the next few months, quietly, like myself; nobody wanted the moral blame for desertion or destruction, or at least that's how it appeared to us. So members and even groups drifted quietly away, like snow off a ditch".

 

When she returned from holiday, in August, Watson received a letter containing the minutes of two executive meetings that had been held in July. "My name was there, under apologies for not attending. They still didn't even know themselves that I had resigned. I wrote to them at once, saying I'd resigned at the end of June and wished the minutes to be amended accordingly. Ciaran read it out, as Chairman, and said 'I wish she'd told me she had resigned'."

When I questioned McKeown about this, he said that Margaret Watson had resigned verbally so often that her words couldn't be taken seriously unless written down. The one written letter he had personally received was not valid since she and he had agreed that the words did not constitute a real resignation.

"I've often wondered since if McKeown steered us onto the Executive because we were political innocents", Watson said to me. "He should try and handle me now. I've enrolled in Queen's University for a degree in political studies".

 

In October 1977 the movement had its first formal gathering in the prestigious Belfast Europe Hotel. McKeown introduced the theme of community politics suggesting that the Assembly of the Peace People legitimately regard itself as a model for community government of Northern Ireland. His motion was passed, after heated debate, though Peace by Peace recorded that "many delegates felt restricted by their unfamiliarity with debate procedures and public speaking".

 

Reality was introduced when the Relatives Action Committee came along and made an impassioned plea on behalf of the prisoners of H Block, who were then still confining themselves to a blanket protest only. There was suspicion and unease during the three day assembly as the hard reality of H Block contrasted crudely with the vision of governing Northern Ireland, and the rank and file were frankly bewildered. The gathering ended on October 9th.

 

On October 10th, Mairead and Betty were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. A rush of mesmeric international publicity revived sagging morale and killed it within weeks as the women announced that they were keeping the money for themselves. The Executive under McKeown endorsed their decision. Disillusionment reached the point where only fifteen hundred people turned out to greet them in the cold December streets, after their return from Oslo to Belfast. City Hall delivered a cruel blow in its refusal to grant them a civic reception, as the politicians had their revenge on a movement leadership which had consistently humiliated them in public speeches.

 

So removed at this stage were the Executive from the rank and file that they renamed the headquarters Fredheim, Norwegian for Peace House, and letters were signed Shalom. By Christmas 1977 they weren't even speaking English.

In January 1978 McKeown announced to the press that he was looking for a candidate for the European elections who was above the sectarian squabble. An Executive statement followed, confirming that the movement was now looking for means to ensure this, and the rank and file became even more confused about the distinction between vetting candidates and not being involved in party politics.

 

In February, after a UDR man and a child were killed by the Provos, the Peace People organised a peace train from the North to the Dublin headquarters of Provisional Sinn Fein. They arrived on Saturday as news broke that 13 people had died the night before when the Provos fire-bombed La Mons restaurant. The Peace picket attracted a pitiful few hundred supporters. McKeown, Corrigan and Williams called on families to inform on each other if any relative were engaged in violence. Betty said that Jack Lynch's suggestion, made some time before, of a future amnesty for political prisoners, gave the green light to the IRA. Southern support melted away in the face of her faux pas. Northerners reeled, aghast, at the idea of informing.

 

The trio announced in April that they would not stand for re-election in the October assembly. McKeown relinquished chairmanship of the dwindling Trust Fund to James Galway, an elderly man who had seen the Wall Street Crash. The movement issued a trilogy of pamphlets by Galway on international banking and monetary policies, one of which was written in 1939, and was now published for the first time.

Support continued to erode, through apathy confusion and misdirection as Executive claims and proposed actions created an ever widening gulf between Fredheim and the peace groups that now met in each other's homes. The leadership suggested accompanying the British Army on all searches of all houses and to all interrogation centres in the North, though the Army processed 1500 people per year through Castlereagh alone and the movement claimed only 1,000 members.

 

In October 1978 Peter McLachlan was elected Chairman of a dissipated Peace People, which proceeded to fade from the public view. McKeown, no longer on the Executive, continued to make headlines from the sidelines, arguing that the movement should become more involved in issues of justice. He campaigned vigorously for the dismantling of emergency legislation and special status for H Block prisoners. The difference between special status and the political status claimed by the IRA eluded many of the rank and file who bitterly opposed the Provos.

McKeown then published in 1979 the Path of Peace, developing the theme of community politics that had severly disrupted the movement. He envisioned the creation in Northern Ireland of "the most advanced democracy in the world", through the coming together, in an Assembly, of groups drawn from cantons of not more than 5,000 adults each. An Upper House or Senate would be composed of "sporting, cultural and other networks". By 1984, he wrote, there should be community policing, demilitarisation, no emergency laws and community government.

"My certainty as I write these lines was not easily won", he wrote, but "I started life with a bright little brain which was subsequently polished by a considerable amount of thinking and playing with ideas as a science and philosophy student of some ability ... it cannot hurt you to come with me for this hour" (of reading the pamphlet).

In August 1979, in Peace by Peace McKeown reviewed his work over the last ten years and concluded "Sometimes I wish that people who are not happy with the gift of life would hide themselves away and do the honourable thing - well I don't really but you know what I mean, all this belly aching instead of rejoicing that they are alive and can breathe and feel the coolness of rain that grows the food they eat". Anne Maguire was six months away from suicide.

In October 1979, the trio announced that they were standing for election because, Mairead told me "the movement was going slow and we wanted to lift it back up a bit". McKeown and Corrigan had their doubts about Betty, of course, expressed when McKeown told the outgoing Executive about her "private life", but it was still necessary to provide a united front to a membership that was deeply troubled. McLachlan, too, had his reservations about Betty, and he let it be known that he was embarrassed by the enthusiastically exaggerated claims she made to German business people about the attractive industrial packages available to investors in Northern Ireland. They were both working Trade Fairs in Germany and Peter had to deflate the rush of investors who came straight to him, from front women Betty, for details.

The four stood successfully for re-election and Betty took a back seat on the Executive. The German trust issue was beginning to surface, as Betty continued to battle in Germany for funds. To which campaigns would the money be available? Ciaran's injustice, or Peter's projects? On one occasion Corrigan contributed to the Executive by saying "I will really have to tell you more about Betty's moral character".

 

On the night of February 7,1980, matters came to a head. A dispirited Williams resigned on the spot. McLachlan fought on and was asked to resign. Corrigan was elected Chairwoman to replace him. Resignations from branches and individuals flooded in. The spring Assembly of what remains of the movement took place in a priory in the countryside before 30 delegates. Corrigan announced that the movement would be taking the emphasis from politics to spiritual commitment. McKeown announced that he had resigned as editor of Peace by Peace, handing over to McBride. He was relinquishing all leadership functions this year, he told me, so that he could write a book on world peace that would synthesise European and Eastern thought, up to and including Camus.

"I should have no difficulty getting an outside publisher now", he said.

It was all a far cry from the October 1977 issue of Peace by Peace when a massive front page photo of Betty and Mairead bore the thick large legend "these rightly applauded ones who receive 'the highest honour any human being can receive on this earth'." In a signed inside editorial McKeown wrote "It is right that Betty and Mairead should, in a very personal way tremble before it (the Nobel award), because of the awesome responsibility it places on them for life. Everywhere they go and everything they say, from now until the day they die, will be reported as 'Nobel Peace Prizewinner Betty Williams said today' ... or 'Nobel Peace Prizewinner Mairead Corrigan today flew to .. .' if we fail to grasp the opportunity we will have deeply depressed a world that dared to hope; and for good measure we will have nailed Betty and Mairead to a cross of wasted suffering".