Events in the Irish Jesuit Province
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Fr. Brian Lennon commutes daily to the Belfast office of Community Dialogue from the local community in Armagh. He is a member of the Jesuit community in Gardiner St, Dublin. I work in Northern Ireland with a group called Community Dialogue. It was set up some months before the Good Friday Agreement was signed in 1997, by a few people, including my self, who had been involved in community development and peace work for quite a long time. As the peace negotiations were taking place the politicians all gave the impression that no progress was being made but we knew from our contracts that in fact an Agreement was likely. The difficulty was that people in deprived areas for the most part knew nothing about these negotiations and their voice was not heard. So we started Community Dialogue as a three month operation to help people inform themselves about the issues around the Agreement and to give them a chance to say what they thought about them.Almost five years later we’re still in business. We produce leaflets on difficult issues, run residential events, and organise seminars and workshops. In all of these we try to ask the same three questions in some form or another: What do you really want? Why do you want it? What can you live with? Actually we ask the first question about ninety nine times because the answer is not simple. It’s the sort of question any of us can ask ourselves and keep asking, because I don’t think there is ever a final answer to it. In the context of Northern Ireland, with Republicans, Loyalists and others sitting together in the one room, the question is an interesting one. Very often an initial answer such as ‘I want a United Ireland’, or ’I want to remain British’ gets unpacked to something about wanting respect for one’s identity, a future for one’s child, or freedom from the fear of nightly petrol bomb attacks. And the other side find they can relate to those needs and fears. It doesn’t lead to agreement. It does lead to understanding, and that changes things. I find my work exciting – most of the time – because I’m privileged to see the change which takes place in people when they recognise some common humanity they have with someone they see as their enemy, or when they realise what they thought was a major problem may not be as important as other issues. |