OK, well, look, thanks very much, and thank you very much for inviting me here to speak to you today.
I am going to talk about Northern Ireland, as was mentioned.
And for those of you who saw the abstract, I took the title for the paper from a poem by Seamus Heaney, which is called the following.
And it's a poem where he talks about his father ploughing a field and how basically he was just an annoyance to his father.
And he uses this line in it and says, I was a nuisance tripping, falling, yapping always.
And then he goes on to say, which is sort of sad in a way as well, he says.
But today it's my father who keeps stumbling behind me and will not go away.
And in a sense, he's trying to talk about, I think, the sort of cyclical nature of life.
But I took that line of sort of tripping, falling and yapping to talk about the peace structures in Northern Ireland in a way,
as representative of a process where actually quite a lot of ploughing has happened, quite a lot of positive developments have taken place since 1998.
The violence has decreased dramatically. There have been institutions that have been functional and dysfunctional at different points in time,
but continually throughout this process, there has been this process of tripping and falling and yapping.
And the institutions have collapsed at different times, certainly as Brexit has approached.
They have not really been able to fully hold together some of the underlying tensions that existed before have not been fully addressed.
So in some ways, I'm going to tell you a little bit of a story of a process that got somewhere, but I don't think fully fulfilled its potential.
And in some ways, some of those divisions of the past, as in that poem, are sort of re-emerging in this cyclical type of a way.
So it's a sort of success story, but not a success story.
It's also quite difficult for me to talk to you today about this because the election is currently unfolding.
So I might sort of look at my phone in between and correct my talk as I as I go along.
And so it is quite difficult. But what we do know,
based on about half of the seats at the moment is it does look like there's a fairly seismic shift happening within the Northern Ireland context.
And the Sinn Fein, in fact, is now going to emerge as the largest political party rather than the Democratic Unionists.
I'm not going to go into the history of Northern Ireland.
I don't have have time, so hopefully you broadly know what I'm talking about, but it's a seismic shift now.
In some ways we could say that's a success of the peace process that actually the institutions have produced this type of a change.
But at the same time, for those of us who live there,
I think there's a real anxiety that because these underlying tensions of not being addressed that in fact,
the institutions may not hold out, that they may not be reformed post this election, that the DUP might not go back into into government.
So there's a shift happening again positive. But how will this actually go down?
Will it actually hold together? So how does this relate to the peace structures?
Well, what I wanted to firstly note is that there's been an enormous investment in Northern Ireland and investment,
which for most people working in other contexts. One would only be envious of, of course, there was a massive political investment.
I'm not going to talk so much about that. I'm going to talk a little bit at the the middle level.
But at the political level, there was an enormous investment from the British government.
Tony Blair, for all his failings, paid significant attention to the process, as did Bertie Ahern, as did the United States.
Probably an example of one of the few processes that I've been involved in that has been successful.
And there was a large political investment, but at that middle level, there was an even larger investment.
Over nearly 25 years,
there's been close to three billion or maybe more euro invested in community based infrastructure and community based programmes.
Some of that from the Atlantic Philanthropies, from the International Fund for Ireland,
but a significant amount of it through the EU peace and reconciliation type of programme.
And we've seen through that programme thousands and thousands of programmes supported.
If we look at where between 1995 and 1999, 15000 funded projects totalling 730 million,
just by way of example, 22000 projects funded between 2007 and 2013.
These included, I suppose, what we typically call people to people peacebuilding work history projects,
art projects, shared schools, relationship building, dialogue, arts projects and so on and so forth.
There's a long catalogue of some of the impacts of that. The I've.
By the International Fund for Ireland, one of the donors talks about creating 55000 jobs through this process,
you know, 13000 children engaging in shared schooling types of programmes.
Some of the other donors claim that it's brought people back into the welfare system, for example.
And as we know at a broad level, yes, violence is definitely decreased.
Inter-Community connexion is stronger than what it was. What the social surveys show is actually quite interesting, and it was interesting.
I think John or Tanya, I can't remember, mentioned having patients.
We can clearly see that attitudes have changed.
So if you ask people, how have relationships between Catholic and Protestant communities changed the last five years,
they show a steady increase over the last 20 years, but a very small increase.
So for those of us who are not very patient, it's quite difficult to see because it's an improvement, but it's quite slow.
And interestingly, it actually doesn't show that the data does not support this idea that young people dramatically think different to their parents.
And in fact, because the society remains deeply divided. In fact, when you ask young people about how do they feel about other communities,
they often actually show more negative views than their parents because they've had no experience of that,
whereas because of equality legislation and so on and so forth.
Most adults, in fact, are operating in a mixed workplace, whereas for most children, 93 per cent are still going to schools, which are segregated.
So it's actually only as an adult that you might have more of a positive experience with the other community.
So we see attitudinal change, but quite slowly. So what are some of the lessons that we could take from this?
As I mentioned, some of the successes, but we've also seen really significant tensions over Brexit over the Northern Ireland Protocol,
a repolarization of politics, which in fact is what has played into the current election, the current election results as well.
So what are some of the lessons we've learnt from that? I'm going to mention five in terms of piece infrastructure,
and the first is that there's really been this tension between an institutional
idea of what peacebuilding is and a relational idea of what peacebuilding is.
And so if we look at some of those earlier investments that I mentioned, they were very much built around this model of peace by prosperity.
It was sort of this EU idea that if we just got everybody working and we got everybody, their lives lifted up,
that somehow these other types of political and inter-community issues would disappear.
To some degree, that has worked. But to some degree, it hasn't worked.
We sort of made the very easy realisation that in fact,
you can be a poor bigot and you can also be a wealthy bigots, and that we see that at times in the polls.
And so there's been this tension between we just need to uplift the economy versus other models where people are saying,
well, actually, it's about the relationships, it's about how people relate to one another.
And we've seen this tension all the way through these infrastructure on this type of issue.
The second, and it really relate to that,
is that actually the people to people work that I've talked about being invested in has often actually run on a
different track to the political track that the two of them have actually often run in quite different sequences.
So we can show a lot of positive development at community levels.
It hasn't always moved up if we think about it in terms of the models that John-Paul Liberec was talking about.
And I think there's a very interesting lesson from Northern Ireland and one of those is that actually
we invested very heavily in the community relationships in the early days of the peace process.
We invested very heavily in the political relationship process. We took politicians to South Africa and they met Mandela.
And I see John, all the boats sitting there played a significant role in a lot of those types of types of visits.
We actually invested in the relationship building. They got to know each other by the time they signed the agreement.
Actually, there had been no one was like massive friends, but they got to sort of know each other and there was some connexion.
We invested in trust. We then set up the institutions and we said, Right, we will invest in communities.
We'll fix up the relations in communities. Once these institutions are running and everyone's around the table together, it'll work fine.
And actually, what we've seen over 20 years is that that trust has gone down at the political level.
Madigan marginally up at the community level, but at the political level, it's gone completely done.
So we didn't really invest in relationship building at a political level, but we assumed the institutions would somehow take care of that.
And in fact, when people got down to the real business of where this Northern Ireland belong in the United Kingdom,
the Republic of Ireland, they realised the differences.
We're really deep and they got worse at the political level rather than better, even though they were cooperating with each other.
The third lesson and this, in a sense, comes from the work that Bronya, Kelly and myself have done, and I won't go through it here.
But we speak about reconciliation in Northern Ireland as having five dimensions.
The first is building a common vision. The second is dealing with the past.
The third is actively building relationships. The fourth is attitudinal change.
And the fifth is social and economic equality or building the sort of economic infrastructures and the peacebuilding.
And what we've seen in Northern Ireland is really a failure to deal with the top two levels,
the top two levels of how do we create a vision and how do we deal with the past?
We've seen an investment in relationship building. We've seen, although in the last five or six years, it's gone backward.
We've seen some developing the economic infrastructure, but actually it's those top levels.
And when I say common vision, I don't mean the same political vision. What do we want for our future?
It's interesting watching the video that Liz put up and being from South Africa,
I often think of South Africa's exact opposite on those five dimensions. We invested dramatically in political will gin.
We invested in dealing with the past what will be really bad relationship building and the economy.
And actually Northern Ireland were stronger on the bottom two than they've been on on the top two.
But having said that,
what we failed to really acknowledge is that where the reconciliation work has to happen is in the tensions between those levels.
In the tension between saying, well, to build an economy, we have to invest in one community and not the other community.
But we want you to build the relationship with that community at the same time or to create a common vision.
We have to build a peace process, which means the prisoners are going to come out of jail.
But at the same time, we want you to also work towards a common vision or build a relationship.
And I think we fail to see that it's actually the tensions with the relationship where the reconciliation is built,
rather than a mechanical delivery of relationship building or building our institutions.
The fourth area and I'll move towards ending is that what we've seen is also very different models of reconciliation operation.
Our research on a lot of community groups,
they've tended to often operate on what we call an individual transformation model that you sort of build peace by
changing individuals and then you bring them into contact with one another and then you build this sort of compact out.
And because in Northern Ireland, the two levels, the top level in the middle level have not always been connected.
Actually, those relationship building has not always resulted in a sort of change in the structural or a feeding into the structural,
whether it's a social justice type issue.
And then at the top level, we've essentially seen a very thin model of reconciliation, reconciliation, essentially coexistence.
As long as the political parties are talking with each other, stuff's going on.
You walk down one side of the street, I walk down one side of the street and so we'll coexist.
But actually, it hasn't really been enough to fully cement this peace process.
So we've seen these different models operating with each other. The fifth area where I think we have lessons to learn from.
It was interesting because John Paul and Tanya mentioned them as well is that
we've often seen a very desegregated approach to how we fund peacebuilding.
And it's really they both used the word NGO ization. I use the word projective ization.
We turned the world into a series of projects. And so how do we measure the peace programme?
The numbers I gave you there actually had to do one of those evaluations,
so I started working on the evaluation, said how many projects we got to evaluate 15000.
And can you summarise that into a full page statement for the EU?
So what we've done is we've project devised it, and the result of that has been if we think of young people,
for example, their projects for young people are seen as victims. So if they lost a parent, they're part of a trauma programme, a victims programme.
Then this programme for young people at risk, young people who are maybe at risk because of antisocial behaviour or drugs.
Or then there's programmes for those who might be under threat from paramilitary type organisations,
but actually, you don't necessarily see programmes which try to bring all three of those things together.
And so by funding at the rate that we did, we often ended up splitting the work rather than looking at it collectively.
So where does this leave us? And I will end on this, and there's so much more that I could say.
A quick couple of lessons or recommendations from it. Firstly, for me,
I think what we've learnt is that actually relationships matter at all levels of the peace process and particularly in divided societies.
So building a road is never building a road in Northern Ireland.
It's like, who benefits from that drug demons or demons? So it's always a relationship dimension.
And I think, as I've said, a.
I think we invested at the community level, but we sort of failed over time to fully invested that relationship to play well at the political level,
and that's quite hard because politicians don't really want you to sort of say, we want to build trust between you, blah blah blah.
The second is and John Paul said this actually, I used different words.
I said that you need to fund an interconnected process over a long time, at least 20 years.
It's just quite interesting what you said. Perhaps we need to fund an interconnected web of environment process.
Over 20 years, the EU funded the peace process for 25 years.
And they funded it in five year tranches that often didn't always overlap.
If we'd sit out at the beginning and said, let's fund a 25 year process, it would have looked completely different today.
The final two two points is that some of the institutions do matter.
So we've had a Community Relations Council and Equality Commission, the Human Rights Council, and it's interesting.
As the political trust has decreased in Northern Ireland, we've actually seen a tailing off of investment in some of those institutions
that were supported during during the peace process and perhaps my final well,
my final recommendation is that we also do need to get the conceptual right.
And I think that the failure to really say, what do we mean by reconciliation in Northern Ireland?
This is just coexistence.
Is it a deeper emotional change and the failure to really understand what we even mean by peace and at the moment within the peacebuilding area,
the failure to really connect that with environmental change, with economic degradation,
with the welfare system, with social justice questions is a big unanswered question.
So I think we do have to also get sometimes the conceptual issues right.
So I hope that that gives you some insight and thank you very much for listening to.