Civic society in Northern Ireland could produce answers to the big problems we face, but is blocked by politicians who don’t want creative solutions, argues Sophie Long in the latest ‘Forward Together’ interview. Sophie is a former Assembly candidate for the Progressive Unionist Party and a Queen’s University graduate, whose doctoral thesis was ‘An Investigation into Ulster Loyalism and the Politics of Misrecognition’. She works as Northern Ireland grants officer for a major charity.
Strengthening civic society in Northern Ireland should begin, argues Sophie, by “giving recognition and appropriate resources to the civic society projects that are already doing interesting things”. She instances women’s projects that are engaged in “peace building activities and projects designed to overcome communal division”. Sophie explains: “The women’s sector is doing it, but it tends not to be discussed as peace building work. It gets categorized as women making friends, or women coming together. But women are probably doing the most interesting peace building work in Northern Ireland.”
She warns that peace building projects must be properly financed. “If they are not part of a well-funded, secure, healthy, community and voluntary sector, they are going to be a brief periodic intervention, an interesting project, but they are not going to stick to anything…. At the moment we don’t take things seriously unless they are done through formal political mechanisms.”
And, Sophie stresses, women’s projects are inherently cross-community in character. “I don’t know any women’s sector work that isn’t cross community. They were doing that from the 70s when they started doing their own community development projects. They saw a need and responded to it, before community work was professionalised.
“Around the time of the flag protests, there were women from East Belfast and Short Strand, that produced a really interesting book together, built friendships over years, did work at the interface, but that got drowned out because media outlets focused on stuff related to the conflict. But what do you say about a good news story?… Bomb scares get headlines.”
She continues: “Most of the work women’s groups do are about people dealing with loss, social isolation, or health concerns, keeping their kids out of trouble. Those kinds of things are not unique to any particular religious group. That’s why that type of slow, ongoing, constant connection works so well. And that’s why traditional cross-community work that brings kids together once or twice doesn’t have the same impact.”
Sophie speaks positively of the work of the citizens’ assembly in the south. “The reason the Civic Forum failed here is because power became more and more concentrated until it was just in the hands of two parties. And the reason [the citizens’ assembly] worked so well in the south was that it had the blessing of the government. If we had an appetite here from the two big political parties to reach out and look for creative solutions and maybe redistribute power a little bit, we could come up with really good solutions… We have concentrated decision-making in the hands of people things who don’t have to look for creative solutions. They are OK being able to say, ‘no I don’t want to do that’. And they are not suffering because of it. The people who are suffering are the ones who have the ideas, but don’t have the decision-making powers.”
To make significant progress now, we have to be more honest about what has happened in the past, believes Sophie. “Is all we are doing reproducing conflict? Are we all suffering from unresolved conflict-related trauma?,” she asks. “Are we unwilling to let go of those things?” The lack of trust in politics today holds back progress, she adds.
“We could have a shared, integrated society if we had a proper collective discussion about what went on in the past. That would involve recognizing the role of the British state as an actor in the conflict and it would involve proper inquiries into what happened in the past and their role in using informers and letting those state agents do terrible things that they could have prevented and by apologising to people.
“In 1994 the loyalist paramilitaries gave an apology. It would be really significant if all of the armed groups publicly reflected on why they did what they did. They do it in some small settings sometimes and say, this is why I became involved and I regret it. But if they did it publicly and said that violence didn’t work and everybody’s loss matters and they are willing to live in peace with one other – but that would take the British state to do that as well. If we had that conversation, looked properly at the past, instead of protecting some people and not protecting others, and started to desegregate the whole of society, so that we go to school together, live together. But without doing those big significant things, the tiny initiatives won’t change things.”
Unfortunately, because of the poor recording quality, this interview is not available as a podcast. Previous podcast interviews are available here. The podcasts are also available on iTunes and Spotify.
- Holywell Trust receives support for the Forward Together Podcast through the Media Grant Scheme and Core Funding Programme of Community Relations Council and Good Relations Core Funding Programme of Derry City and Strabane District Council.
Paul Gosling is editor of ‘Lessons from the Troubles and an Unsettled Peace’, author of ‘A New Ireland’ and ‘The Fall of the Ethical Bank’ and co-author of ‘Abuse of Trust’, the story of a child abuse scandal in Leicestershire. He is engaged by the Holywell Trust charity on peace and reconciliation projects.
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