Healing a broken society takes time

I took this photo in 2018 on my seventh visit to Derry (Londonderry), Northern Ireland.

Six trips were with college students, and in 2018, I was accompanied by twenty-four adults aged 50 to 80.

Everything in this little statelet of under two million people is contested, including what to call its second-largest city. Catholics prefer Derry; Protestants Londonderry.

Historically, Catholics identify as Irish and with the Republic of Ireland.

Protestants as British, and with the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland.

It is a conflict about national identity more than religious dogma.

The killing goes back 800 years.

Many wars, with The Troubles, from 1969–1998, the most recent. (source)

3,568 dead, including 1,879 civilians. (source)

In such a small place, every family knows sorrow.

And each has a reason for hatred.

*

In 1998, a peace agreement was signed. Catholics called it The Good Friday Agreement; Protestants labeled it The Belfast Agreement. (source)

But the killing slowed and then stopped.

Peace.

Harold Good, then President of the Methodist Church in Northern Ireland, was intimately involved in the late 1990s Peace process. (source)

Whenever he talked with my groups, he always said the following:

On a scale of 1–10, compared to the violence of The Troubles, we are now at an 8. On a scale of where we want to be, fully reconciled, we’re at a 3.

Complete reconciliation, to Harold, meant Catholics and Protestants marrying, attending school together, and living in the same neighborhoods.

*

Five years before the 1998 Peace Agreement, artist Maurice Harron created the sculpture in the photo.

You can see better photos of his vision here.

Two Northern Ireland men, one Catholic, one Protestant, are reaching their hands across a great divide. Their fingers are not touching.

History matters; peace is difficult; reconciliation is more so.

But, slowly, the people of Northern Ireland move Harron’s fingers closer. (source)

20% of new marriages are between members of the different communities.

Today, Northern Ireland’s two First Ministers are Catholic Mary Lou McDonald and Protestant Emma Little-Pengelly.

The 1998 agreement requires co-leaders, one Protestant and one Catholic.

Two women are a first.

Perhaps their fingers will touch.