Peace People

Peace People, peace organization with headquarters in Belfast, N.Ire. Founded by Máiread Maguire, Betty Williams, and Ciaran McKeown, it began in 1976 as a grassroots movement to protest the ongoing violence in Northern Ireland. Hundreds of thousands of people, not only in Northern Ireland but also in the republic of Ireland and farther abroad, subsequently participated in protest marches and other manifestations of support for the movement, and Williams and Maguire received the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. The Peace People later developed into an internationally influential nongovernmental organization dedicated to building a peaceful world in which the highest standards of human and civil rights are upheld.

The Peace People movement was a response to Northern Ireland’s “Troubles”—a period of violent conflict between Protestants and Roman Catholics, a religious division that often paralleled the political divide between those who supported rule by the predominantly Protestant United Kingdom (loyalists) and those who favoured a union with the predominantly Catholic republic of Ireland (republicans). By the early 1970s the unrest had led to an increased presence of British troops in Northern Ireland, which in turn incited a campaign of bombings and shootings by the anti-British Irish Republican Army (IRA).

One tragic incident in particular sparked the formation of the movement: on Aug. 10, 1976, three children of Maguire’s sister Ann were killed by a careening car after its driver, an IRA fugitive, had been shot dead at the wheel by British soldiers. The accident not only personally affected Maguire and Williams—a local mother who arrived at the scene shortly after the accident occurred—but it also touched an entire community fed up with violence. As the public reacted to the killings with prayer vigils and protests, Maguire and Williams spoke to the local media and became voices for the aggrieved community. Williams, Maguire, and McKeown—a journalist and nonviolent activist—met on the day of the children’s funeral, and a few days later they founded the Peace People.

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McKeown named the movement and wrote its declaration, which read:

We have a simple message to the world from this movement for Peace.

We want to live and love and build a just and peaceful society.

We want for our children, as we want for ourselves, our lives at home, at work, and at play to be lives of joy and Peace.

We recognise that to build such a society demands dedication, hard work, and courage.

We recognise that there are many problems in our society which are a source of conflict and violence.

We recognise that every bullet fired and every exploding bomb make that work more difficult.

We reject the use of the bomb and the bullet and all the techniques of violence.

We dedicate ourselves to working with our neighbours, near and far, day in and day out, to build that peaceful society in which the tragedies we have known are a bad memory and a continuing warning.

More than 100,000 people signed copies of the declaration, and antiviolence rallies and protests throughout Ireland and the United Kingdom followed in the six months after the movement’s founding. The rate of violence in Northern Ireland during this period, as measured by number of fatalities, fell by 70 percent, and it continued to diminish over the succeeding decades. After the initial rally phase, the movement’s organizers concentrated at the local level, encouraging individuals to form peace groups, to address issues affecting their neighbourhoods, to engage in cross-community dialogue, and to work with other locales on joint projects.

In subsequent years the Peace People fought for a repeal of the Northern Ireland (Emergency Provisions) Act, which, among other things, had increased the British army’s powers to arrest and question suspects. In 1981 the group helped establish the Committee on the Administration of Justice, a human rights organization, to expose and counter what it saw as the draconian nature of the Emergency Provisions. The Peace People also campaigned for the rights of both loyalist and republican prisoners and arranged a bus service to transport visitors to prisons. (The prison program ceased with the release of political prisoners as part of the Good Friday Agreement of April 10, 1998.) Another program helped members of paramilitary groups to leave their organizations and, in some cases, to emigrate for their own safety. In other areas, the Peace People supported the Integrated Education Movement, which aimed to bridge Northern Ireland’s religious and cultural divisions by establishing interfaith schools. In addition, the group established a youth program that featured annual peace camps held in various countries, which allowed young people of different backgrounds to travel abroad and share their thoughts and ideas in a neutral setting.

The organization ultimately expanded its activities beyond Northern Ireland. It lobbied internationally on behalf of nuclear disarmament and nonviolent approaches to conflict resolution, and it sent peace delegations to a number of countries experiencing conflict—including Iraq, Israel and Palestine, the United States, Australia, India, and assorted countries in Africa—in order to support those who advocated nonviolent solutions. The organization also was an instrumental force behind the United Nations’ declaration of the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Nonviolence for the Children of the World (2001–10).

Williams left the Peace People in 1980 and later founded the World Centers of Compassion for Children International in 1997. Maguire continued to work with the Peace People and served as its honorary president. In 2006 Maguire and Williams, along with fellow Nobel Peace Prize winners Shirin Ebadi, Jody Williams, Wangari Maathai, and Rigoberta Menchú, founded the Nobel Women’s Initiative to promote peace, justice, and women’s rights.