What is peacebuilding in 2024?
Belfast YMCA was set up in 1850 during the industrial revolution. Belfast was transformed by industry with many people moving into the city from the surrounding countryside. Our purpose then was to respond to the needs of the people of this city during a period of rapid social change. This purpose has guided what we do throughout our history. Our city has seen more change and turmoil than most in the intervening 174 years. During the darkest days of the Troubles, we were a place of safety and companionship for people from across our city. We had and continue to have a part to play in responding to the changing needs of our city.
26 years on from the Good Friday Agreement, what are the modern needs of our community? Thankfully we live in a society which is far safer and more diverse than 30 or 40 years ago, but are we really at peace? Is the absence of atrocities the end destination or is lasting reconciliation something further to strive for and ultimately harder to achieve? What does peace mean to young people who grow up after the Troubles? What about people who are genuinely neither “one side nor the other” or who have a mixed background? What about the new communities who have travelled to Northern Ireland to contribute to our society? What does reconciliation and belonging mean to them? I recently joined with colleagues to discuss these questions at Dublin Castle as part of the Irish Government’s Reconciliation Fund conference. Here are a few of my thoughts:
We need a new vocabulary to describe how the divide and legacy of our past permeate our lives. Young people do not experience the divide here in the same way that I do. They have no lived memory of the worst of the atrocities that happened here. This doesn’t mean that they unaffected. Queen’s University and Ulster University have a research partnership called ARK which measures attitudes of 16 year olds towards good relations. When they asked young people if they believe things are getting better, worse or staying about the same in NI, there has barely been any shift whatsoever in the past 20 years. Young people aren’t living throught the Troubles per se, but they are living in a period with many of the same structural issues. They grow up understanding that there is a difference and a contested history. They grow up with different sports, symbols, flags and commemorations. They may not always realise it, but they are a product of what happened here. The words that we used about the Troubles don’t feel like they fit anymore. We need new words.
We need to be creative. When I was at primary school in early 1990s we took part in a cross community project with a school from the ‘other” community. We had a day out where we all went to Castle Espie together. The other school were collected first by the bus which we shared, so they sat at the back. We got on later and so sat at the front. During the whole day, I think I had one very brief conversation with someone from the other school. This well intentioned cross community contact had no lasting impact on me or anyone else on the trip. Fast forward to 2024 and a lot of good relations work still looks a little like my school trip from 30 years ago. It’s about “two sides” coming together. It’s not good enough. We need to build dialogue, build trust and genuinely strong relationships between people. We need to give them creative experiences to explore their identity with others. It should be fun! It should be challenging! It should be inclusive and relevant!
Labels don’t work for me. I detest monitoring forms where I have to summarise a meaningful and transformative piece of work in terms of the ratio of protestants, catholics and others who were involved. I genuinely dispair when I have to tick a box to indicate who someone is. It’s reductive, its lazy, its based on an unambitious policy and, frankly, its impossible to quatify someone’s identity in a label or a box. We are so much more than two sides. We do a disservice to young people when we tell them who they are or what they are. We need to listen to them and we need to stop describing our society in terms of two unchanging blocks. Thinking like that limits our vision for our future and we need to be better (even if it makes the reporting form a bit more complicated!).
We need to have a global lens and a local heart. Young people are growing up in a highly interconnected world. Events in Ukraine and the Middle East and wider challenges like climate change are of genuine interest to young people here. We also need to tune into the issues on the ground in our own city. Substance abuse, paramilitary-style attacks, mental health issues, poverty and a shocking lack of hope in some parts of our city are very real issues. Any genuine attempt at peacebuilding in this part of the world should look at it in terms of the wider context both at home and abroad in 2024. We should help young people advocate for peace and reconciliation in the widest possible definitions at home as well as further afield.
For what its worth, being a youth worker for the best part of two decades has shown me that young people are always interested in the world around them. They just need a little help and support to do that well, and that’s why I do what I do. Much still to do.
Peter from Youth Team
