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September 10, 1997
PROSPECTS FOR PEACE: NORTHERN IRELAND Children are usually the first victims of war... ...and as our team from Fast Forward Films begins work in Northern Ireland, a pair of precocious youngsters creep up behind the camera and take us by surprise. Not that they bear physical scars of "the troubles", the 80 year-long struggle between Protestant and Catholic paramilitary groups. These six-year-old boys symbolize the conflict in quite another way: they are dressed in combat fatigues; in textbook marksman's stance, they train their toy pistols on us and fire. Then they run away laughing -- a point-blank hit and a clean getaway. We watch as they are joined by friends wearing T-shirts emblazoned with the bright orange banner of Northern Ireland's British loyalists, the Protestant Orangemen. Elsewhere, we realize, Catholic kids are waving their toy guns with dreams of their Irish Republican Army heroes in their heads. This is the balance of terror that is the target of the current peace process. Almost any conflict-weary citizen of the North will tell you that there will be no peace until the cycle of fear and prejudice and violence handed down from generation to generation is broken. "Perhaps the most single disturbing factor," says Father Frank Mullen, "is to see the young people, the children, and how they are already indoctrinated with the very same attitudes that I had seen as a boy 60 years ago." Father Mullen speaks from bitter experience -- his Catholic church, located in a predominantly Protestant neighbourhood of Ballymena, was picketed week after week by angry demonstrators, some of them children. The protest was launched after Protestant Orangemen in a nearby town were prevented from staging a march to a Presbyterian church. No march, these hard-line loyalists said, no Saturday night mass for Father Mullen's congregation at the Church of Our Lady. For nearly a year, every Saturday evening in Ballymena was marred by the spectacle of up to 250 policemen with armoured vehicles protecting churchgoers from a shouting mob. Then, as the all-party peace process began to make progress again this past summer, there was a breakthrough, a small step toward compromise. Catholics decided to suspend the mass until autumn. "We didn't abdicate our right to worship at that hour," Father Mullen explains, "we chose freely not to use that right for the greater good -- namely peace." The community and its leaders welcomed an opportunity for the situation to calm and for people to rethink their positions. Soon, the Orangemen announced that two of their marches would be postponed. The local press hailed this as evidence of an easing of tensions, of reciprocity, of concession. Thinking back, Father Mullen says there is cause for optimism. Ballymena's Protestant Mayor, twelve Protestant ministers and hundreds of citizens turned out to stand by his side against the protesters and to support the right of his congregation to enjoy freedom of worship. "In the immediate aftermath," he says, "I was getting letters of support from all over the world. They were full of hope because every one of them was from a Protestant." Now, the future. Saturday night mass has resumed at the Church of our Lady. Most townspeople expect the protests to reoccur. The overall political situation is tense: although Sinn Fein, the political wing of the outlawed IRA, has agreed to the principles of non-violence and will take a seat at peace negotiations, their Protestant rivals are warning that Catholic paramilitaries cannot be trusted. It is doubtful that extremists on either side will be willing to turn in their weapons in the foreseeable future. Still, as we pack up the camera and head for home, the same constituency that took us by surprise at the start of our assignment -- the youth of Northern Ireland -- leave us with some measure of optimism. "Everyone's just sick and tired of the gunmen and the troubles," says one teenager we talk to. "We want a future with work and opportunity, just like everyone else. Peace is long overdue. We've all got to make it happen." Share our experiences in Ballymena on the new PBS program "Religion and Ethics Newsweekly" on Sunday, September 21. Check your local listings for stations and times. |
| Next time... | back in the United States: have the values of genuine news reporting been lost, or just misplaced ?
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