group” that pushed her ancestors out of the north centuries earlier. Over the years Protestants had established themselves as a majority group in the North, but were a minority on the island as a whole. In any case, Mari and Niall married and started raising a family in the late 1970s on land that belonged to Niall’s family in Northern Ireland. “We set up a furniture and woodturning business so that we would have the flexibility to rear our children together,” Mari recalls. But the war found the young family. “My husband’s family business was blown up, and the post office was robbed so often by the paramilitaries it had to close down.” Even for those who refused to take sides, there was no safety:
Women demonstrate for peace in 1986.
We had incredible choices to make, such as: How to deal with bombs that were being set off by the IRA from the family garden so as to blow up soldiers; coping with buses that regularly were set on fire outside our houses; how to keep our children out of the line of fire between the British [soldiers] and IRA? One morning in the early ‘80s, I looked up from changing nappies to see that the IRA were practicing out in the back field. I noticed that the British army were coming with their guns at the ready, through our house to try and arrest and capture them. And then it struck me…that there has got to be a different way than this. So many of our lives – mostly young lives – on all sides were being lost. Within a few square miles of our house, over 30 Catholics, Protestants, and British security forces had lost, or were to lose, their lives in this war. In 1987, Fitzduff, Sue Williams and a half-dozen others founded the Northern Ireland Conflict & Mediation Association, predecessor to today’s Mediation Northern Ireland.6
Campbell Tills Peace Soil
Funeral of IRA member Joe O’Connor in October 2000.
At the October 1989 funeral of the victim of an IRA attack.
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peacebuilder spring/summer 2009
Campbell arranged for Howard Zehr to make his first trip to Northern Ireland in late 1987. Zehr met with people linked to the judicial system and offered them restorative alternatives. Zehr suggested restorative justice would yield better outcomes than retribution. He also met with some former paramilitary men, helping them to envision replacing vigilante-style violence with restorative justice. International leaders in restorative justice – such as Zehr, John Baithwaite of Australia and Harry Mika – repeatedly facilitated trainings in Northern Ireland during the late 1980s and 1990s. Zehr came four times. Mika, who has taught at SPI, played a major role in getting paramilitary groups to move away 6 Fitzduff went on to initiate mediation and conflict resolution courses at the two universities in Northern Ireland and to write Community Conflict Skills, a book widely used in Northern Ireland after its appearance in 1988. The Community Relations Council, which Fitzduff founded and directed from 1990 to 1997, developed and funded many of the conflict resolution initiatives in Northern Ireland. From 1997 to 2003, she was the director of UNU/INCORE, a conflict-resolution research center sponsored by the United Nations University and the University of Ulster. Sue Williams, currently director of CJP’s Summer Peacebuilding Institute, also worked at this center from 1998 to 2000. In the coming year, Fitzduff will be visiting CJP as a new member of its Board of Reference.
PhotoS courtesy of Hugh Russell, Irish News