Ways of Change Reconsidered

Peace women hit Ulster streets despite threats

BELFAST, Northern Ireland (AP)- The Peace Women of this turbulent British province take to the streets of violence-scarred Belfast Saturday, defying terrorist death threats in their campaign to end seven years of sectarian bloodshed.

"There's no way we're going to give up now," declared Mrs. Betty Williams, the Roman Catholic housewife launched the burgeoning movement 10 days ago after three children were killed by Irish Republican Army gunmen fleeing British troops.

Thousands of Catholic and Protestant women, setting aside the centuries-old hatreds that have separated Northern freland's feuding communities, were expected to gather for a rally in Ormeau park in Protestant East Belfast.

The attendance at the rally will be a crucial test of the strength of the campaign, the latest in a long string of peace movements in Ulster. All the earlier campaigns fizzled out.

Last Saturday, more than 10,000 women and a handful of men attended a peace rally organized by Mrs. Williams in Belfast's staunchly Catholic Andersonstown suburb at the spot where the three children were slain.

Mrs. Williams, 32, and many other Catholic women at that rally were branded "touts terrorist parlance for informers and pro-British collaborators - by the IRA's "Provisional" wing.

Young IRA supporters last week tried to burn Mrs. Williams' house down. She and other women received death threats from the mainly Catholic "provos" who are fighting to end British rule and Protestant domination in Ulster.

Despite the threats, the peace movement has spread. Mrs. Williams said groups in other parts of the province have voiced support and local peace committees have sprung up in both Catholic and Protestant quarters.

But the violence has continued unabated. At least six persons have been killed since the peace campaign began and dozens have been wounded by gunfire and bombings.

Government officials, community leaders experienced observers who have seen earlier movements fail are still sceptical that Mrs. Williams campaign will change anything.

"The sad truth is," said Catholic community leader Tom Conaty, a onetime adviser to the British administration in the province, "that the IRA and the Protestant paramilitary groups do not depend on popular support for their survival "They have shown this in the past and, despite courageous display by women, I believe they will be around for a long time."

However, IRA sources said the guerrillas' leaders are taking the emotion-charged campaign "seriously." The provisionals have cracked up their well-oiled propaganda machine in a bid to counter the movement's growing support.

The Republican news, the provisionals' mouthpiece in Ulster, Friday vowed: "the struggle goes on." The headline was printed over a big photo of a hooded gunman brandishing a U.S. made armalite automatic rifle.

The Andersonstown news, a flourishing newssheet that has supported the provisionals in the past, stridently attacked the "peace-at-any-price brigade."

Both papers published articles and letters denouncing the peace campaign as pro-British. However, Mrs. Williams stressed that her movement is not just opposed to the IRA, but Protestant terrorist organizations as well as Ulster police officers and British troops who "commit cowardly acts."

Provisional sympathizers have organized a counter-demonstration in south Armagh, an IRA stronghold, at the spot where a 12-year-old Catholic girl was killed, apparently by army fire, last Saturday.2. Daily American (Rome, Aug. 22, 1976).

Section 1.

In August 1976, there emerged in Belfast, Northern Ireland, apparently quite "spontaneously," a movement, which although it was later to be dubbed "The People for Peace" movement, was quite without a doubt a women's movement, initiated, supported and sustained primarily by women. From the perspective of classic political forms, it was and is both extremely traditional and profoundly radical, and it is particularly within the context o Irish politics that it becomes so.

My initial interest in the peace movement grew out of a feel ing of solidarity and empathy with both the frustration and the positive vision these women revealed. As I followed its progress my interest began to turn increasingly to its larger political and social implications, not simply in relation to the situation of Northern Ireland, but also in regard to basic issues posed by feminism in relation to traditional patriarchal political analysis and practice. What became increasingly apparent as I continued my research was the fact that the peace movement could not be understood and evaluated either on the basis of the primary social-political traditions of Northern Ireland or from the perspective of an abstract marxist or feminist analysis. These model must themselves be continually measured against the social realities which they presume to appraise.

The peace movement, to the extent to which it can be called a "women's movement," is interesting precisely because it is not in any sense "sophisticated." Its values and the forms of its organization are a direct manifestation of the attitudes of women historically isolated from one another within a social structure over which they exercise minimal control. Within the context of American feminism, the questions posed by the peace movement are relevant to the extent to which they underline and elaborate some of the more complex issues pertaining to the gender bias inherent in the very "logic" of commonly accepted political norms. As Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo points out:

Since women must work within a social system that obscures their goals and interests, they are apt to develop ways of seeing, feeling, and acting that seem to be "intuitive" and "unsystematic"—with a sensitivity to other people that permits them to survive. They may, then, be "expressive." But it is important to realize that cultural stereotypes order the observer's own perceptions. It is because men enter the world of articulated social relations that they appear to us as intellectual, rational, or instrumental; and the fact that women are excluded from that world makes them seem to think and behave in another mode.3. Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo, Woman, Culture, and Society, ed. Michelle Z. Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974).

Section 2.

The Province of Ulster was born in conflict. The partition of Ireland was a highly artificial solution to an age-old problem. The question of whether the current crisis is a religious war, a class war, or a war of national liberation is in many ways a false one. It is all of these at once. The peculiar complexity of the situation stems from the fact that the political and religious identity of each community is coincident in broad terms, and it is with these political and religious groups that individuals have from birth learned to define themselves.

The sources of bigotry in Ireland as well as the mechanisms of its maintenance are ancient. In the Protestant community, patriotic songs and yearly festivals celebrate the siege of Londonderry and the assent of Protestant rule. These are matched in Catholic culture by a heritage which stresses the heroism and glory of national revolt as well as an almost mystical alliance with the church. According to the Irish Republican tradition to which the modern Provisionals are heir, "Ireland unfree shall never be at peace."

The Catholic population in general has tended traditionally to identify with a united and independent Ireland and was in fact instrumental in winning support for the Home Rule Bill by which the Republic of Ireland was established in 1922. The Protestants, who form a minority within Ireland as a whole, had been success ful in their violent opposition to what they termed "the papist state," which led to Britain's partition of Ireland in an attempt to pacify loyalist Protestants in the North. The long-term and blatant suprematism of the Protestants concentrated in Northern Ireland, their overt domination of political and civil institutions, is countered by a Republican commitment to "victory through physical force" — a form of patriotism which finds its most extreme manifestation in the IRA tradition of blood sacrifice, in which each death only serves further to legitimize the unquestioned heroism and "justice" of the nationalist cause.

With the outbreak of widespread and violent sectarian rioting in 1969, the collapse of the repressive Protestant-controlled Stormont Government was achieved only through the further intervention of the British, "justified" at the time by continuing paramilitary violence and the threat of civil war. This was to mark the beginning of a period of intense segregation and economic disintegration in Northern Ireland, during which a climate of hostility, combined with a complete lack of dialogue and a military standoff, has made the possibility of further political and social development virtually impossible.

When the IRA split in 1969, the Official IRA (increasingly concerned with developing economic and class consciousness) apparently dwindled in effectiveness. The "Provisionals," on the other hand, with their more traditional focus on militarism and nationalism, were able to take advantage of the already tense political climate, playing into and further aggravating sectarian hostilities. They became self-appointed "people's protectors," like the Protestant paramilitaries in their own districts. The British policy of internment and torture of IRA militants only served to further escalate guerrilla activities. The vicious circle was complete.

During the last seven years, continued paramilitary and military violence have all but wrecked large sections of both the residential and commercial areas of Belfast, Derry and Armagh. Industry has declined and unemployment is soaring. Meanwhile, among the general population, apathy, fear, frustration and poverty have begun to flourish. Amid invariably righteous claims to the representation of "justice, hatred and despair have increasingly come to dominate "political" life in the Northern State.

While numerous "brave and valiant" soldiers have lost their lives, countless ordinary citizens, often women and children, have also been the victims of this ancient and unending cycle of fear, recrimination and violence. The deaths of the three McGuire children, killed on August 10 by an IRA getaway car in Belfast's Andersontown district, were just another "accident." It was, however, to have a resounding effect. Betty Williams, an Andersontown resident who had witnessed the incident, and Mairead Corrigan, the children's aunt, "had had enough." Within hours they began organizing their neighbors to protest the senseless violence of a war which had long since become a way of life.

Section 3.

The peace movement was from the start fueled by an emotional commitment which was not without its own particular rationality. To the skeptics who denied the possibility of a peaceful resolution to a feud stemming from deeply ingrained attitudes and opposing loyalties, the women replied that three hundred years of warfare had likewise accomplished nothing, that the Northern Irish people had been for too long divided against themselves.

Thank God I'm still angry enough to do this, because I'd march anywhere in Northern Ireland. I don't give a darn what the fellow's beliefs are. Everybody has got a right to believe in exactly what they want to believe in, but there is no one in this whole wide world has any right to kill for it. So, when l'd seen the children die or the awful accident—my daughter also witnessed this —she has screamed about it since, my five-year-old daughter who was unfortunately in the car with me at the time—I went home and sat down. Did you ever get sick inside, so sick that you didn't even know what was wrong with you? I couldn't cook a dinner. I couldn't think straight. I couldn't even cry, and as the night went on I got angrier and angrier. And my sister came up. She lives quite close to where I live, and I had a cousin in the house at the time. And I just said—and I don't mean to swear, I'm very sorry—I said, "Damn it, we have got to do something." And my husband was at sea, and I an air-mail writing pad, and I went right up into the heart of provisional IRA territory in Andersontown and I didn't knock at that door very nicely, by the way, I didn't say, "Excuse me. Would you like to sign this? We all want peace." I was spitting angry, and I banged the woman's door and she came. I frightened the life out of her. I really did.

When she came out, I said, "Do you want peace?" She said "Yes!"

"Yes, then sign that." It sort of started off like that, and it went on...further down the street, every door you knocked. All the women felt that way. I just lifted the lid. They all poured out. I mean, I ended up rather like the Pied Piper of Hamlin because I had a hundred women in provie territory collecting signatures for peace.

We had 3,000 or 6,000 signatures in three hours. We went back to my home. They were in the lounge. They were in the living room. They were in the kitchen. They were in the hall. They were lined up the stairs. They were in the bathroom, the two bedrooms. There just wasn't enough room to hold them all, and they were all just as angry as I was...that we had let this go on for so long.

[Betty Williams4. Betty Williams on Woman program, moderator Sandra Elkin (Buffalo: WNEDTV, Oct. 1976).]

You see, unfortunately, in a long time in Northern Irish society and, indeed, in the world we have glorified the man with the guns. Do you know we sit in our clubs and we sing about the brave man who took life? Now, we're going to say in Northern Ireland, we want a complete new change of society. The hero in Northern Ireland is going to be the guy who stands up against the man with a gun in his hand and said, "You're not speak ing for me. I haven't got a gun. l'm not prepared to take your life, but you're most certainly not speaking for me.

The guy who gets involved with the man next door, with the old-age pensioner; the guy who recognizes the Protestant and the Shankhill to be his brother or the black man across the road to be his brother. The man, who, in society, acknowledges his brother. ..the man next door to be his brother. This is the kind of whole new society that we want to create in Northern Ireland, Indeed, we want to say that we have led the world in guerrilla warfare for years; we are going to lead the war in peace and we say to the people of the world, "Watch us." Because we are going to do it, and not only watch us but imitate us because the whole world is led by violence and it doesn't pay. One thousand six hundred people dead in Northern Ireland.

My sister was lying in a hospital after losing three babies, and do you know her major concern? There was a bomb the previous week in a bar where a guy had gone out to have a drink—and he was lying across the ward from her—one of those open plan wards, and he had no legs, seventeen years of age—he had no legs and he kept squealing all day, "Please take my hands off. My hands hurt so much." That is only one awful incident of what's going on in Northern Ireland with guns coming into Northern Ireland. That's got to stop. That's no answer, but to the gunman we say, "We acknowledge that the gunman in Northern Ireland has taken guns perhaps because of their political ideals, perhaps because they were never offered a way, but there's a new way. There's another way, and we say to them, "Put up your guns, and if you really care for the people, come into society. Let's talk about it." We're not telling them to "get lost or go under the carpet because it'Il fester in thirty years, but let's talk about it. Let's hear what you are saying, but not by the gun.

[Mairead Corrigan] 5. Mairead Corrigan on Woman program (Buffalo: WNED TV, Oct. 1976).

During the weeks that followed the initial demonstration at the site of the McGuire children's death, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan continued to publicize the incident and organize for an all-out assault on violence. This took the form of massive demonstrations for peace. The first demonstration (August 14)lic Andersontown district. Provo supporters jeered the rally and denounced Williams as a traitor, but she was not dissuaded and the following week brought 20,000 people together in one of Belfast's few remaining "mixed" neighborhoods. The third weekend the peace movement returned to the hard-core Protestant Shankill Road area where close to 30,000 demonstrators showed up. The fourth rally was held in Derry, Ulster's second largest city, on Craigavon Bridge, which connects the Protestant and Catholic sections of town. Again approximately 30,000 people turned out. By this time the Provos were saying that they did not oppose the peace movement, but supported "Peace with justice." Meanwhile, in Dublin, the capital of the Irish Republic, a march by 20,000 was organized in support and smaller marches were held in Corm, Galway, Carlon and Castlebar.

The unexpected popularity and energetic style of these initial marches contributed to their dramatic impact. Both support and criticism abounded. Within weeks of the first rally, smaller community "peace" groups began to spring up throughout the province, with no apparent orientation other than a commitment to peace, to furthering dialogue within the community and to constructive non-sectarian local action.

Provisional "support," however, was to prove short-lived. The weekly marches were disrupted on October 2 by small IRA counter-marches in which several of the peace marchers were assaulted. Death threats against Betty and Mairead were occasionally found scrawled on Belfast walls. The Provos, claiming that there had been an increase in British army raids, arrests and harassment, issued a statement warning that if any women from the peace movement cooperated with security forces, they would be treated as informers and shot.

From the onset there has been confusion in the press about the attitude of the peace marchers toward the British and the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary — the "legitimate" police who have been theoretically neutral but effectively on the side of the Protestants). While the peace leaders have been extremely outspoken in their criticism of the Provisionals and of the UDA and the UVF (Ulster Defense Association and Ulster Volunteer Force, the Protestant paramilitary equivalents of the Provisional IRA), they have been less direct in their denunciation of the British and of the legitimate" Ulster security forces. Though they have consistently condemned all "men of violence, their position on "legal" military forces is more ambiguous. While this is a crucial issue and one on which the peace leaders are perhaps most vulnerable to criticism, IRA supporters have consistently twisted its significance to imply that they are pro-British — unlikely, as the movement is both Catholic-led and strongly backed by non-violent Catholic Nationalists. There is in fact a simple and rational explanation for their hedging on the question of British intervention. Since one of the main thrusts of the movement is its anti-sectarian character, and since it is the first major popular grass roots movement uniting both Catholics and Protestants, its very existence is dependent on widespread support from both camps.

The vast majority of Protestants (two-thirds of the population in Northern Ireland) for the most part do not favor British withdrawal, and many Catholics, including the Official IRA Sinn Fein 6. Sinn Fein (means "we ourselves"), founded in 1916, has functioned since the 1930s mainly as the political wing of the IRA. In the 1960s it swung to the left as did the IRA and became involved in social and economic agitation and in 1970 split along the same lines as the IRA into Sinn Fein, Kevin Street (Provisional) and Sinn Fein, Gardiner Street (Official). The names come from the streets in Dublin where they have their headquarters. Both groups use the name Sinn Fein, however, in spite of the fact that their views are widely divergent. The Provisionals are more militant and nationalist while the Officials are marxist and not militant. do not advocate an immediate withdrawal, so that any public position in regard to either imperialism or British "security" forces is indeed difficult and problematic. Due to this fact, as well as to the general diversity of political sentiment within the movement, the leaders have confined themselves to taking general positions against violence, encouraging local initiative toward peace and speaking in very broad terms about the need for the "Northern Irish" people to resolve their own differences "from the bottom up.

Although heavy criticism from both the Provisionals and extremist Protestant groups may have slightly affected the movement's popularity, demonstrations, rallies and meetings throughout the fall of 1976 continued to draw wide support. Several supportive demonstrations were organized by feminist groups in Germany and the Netherlands; a rally in London on November 28 drew a crowd of approximately 15,000.

The movement now has a magazine (Peace by Peace), a small office in Belfast, and over 125 local groups "organizing for peace" in Northern Ireland. "Support," however, is not what the movement is all about. In terms of opening up effective channels of discourse and creating a climate in which constructive non-sectarian political development can occur, there is no way at present to estimate its success.

Section 4.

The current peace movement is not the first of its kind in Ireland. Two others in the recent past have attempted to dispel sec tarian violence by non-violent and non-sectarian means. Both times they were eclipsed by British military escalations which rallied Catholics to the IRA. In 1971, an organization called "Women Together" gained considerable support, but lost ground when the British introduced internment. Another movement sprang up in Derry in 1972. After a British soldier had killed a Catholic youth, the IRA "executed" a young man from Derry who had joined the British army. That was the last straw for Margaret Doherty, who organized her neighbors to demonstrate their anger. This was effective to the extent that the Official IRA declared a cease-fire which they maintain to this day. The 1972 movement collapsed however, when the British invaded the Catholic no-go areas in what was known as "Operation Motor man." Once again the Provisionals were vindicated by British actions. With the rebirth of the peace forces this year, Margaret Doherty, who had been viciously harassed for her peace activities in 1972, again came forward and has participated in the organization of the present campaign.

Even these recent interventions on the part of women are not unique in Irish history. In 1921, during the struggle for Home Rule, the British section of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, headed by Jane Addams, sent their own commission to study Irish self-rule, clearly opposing the interests of their own government. The Irish section of the WILPF, led by Louie Bennett, was active in organizing women to employ passive-resistance techniques in a struggle against the British. Their view as women was that human life was precious and that war was an outmoded way of dealing with imperialist rivalries. While the women supporters of the 1921 struggle were largely middle-class suffragettes organized internationally behind a pacifist ideology, the current peace campaign is indigenous, widely supported by both middle- and working-class people, and relatively "unorganized."

The peace movement, as Bernadette Devlin has pointed out, is not a feminist movement. There is in fact virtually no feminism in Ireland in the sense in which we as Americans understand it. While there have been several notable female political activists in the Republican movement (Bernadette Devlin, now associated with the Irish Republican Socialist Party, Marin de Burca, joint general secretary of Sinn Fein, and Maire Drumm, the recently assassinated Provisional IRA spokeswoman), the vast majority of Irish women, oppressed as they are by poverty, war, extremely discriminatory employment and pay practices, and perhaps most importantly, by a strong religious and patriarchal family structure, have, by and large, remained unorganized as women.

For Catholic women, a very intense religious indoctrination which places a strict taboo on birth control, abortion and divorce is still a major obstacle. While as citizens of a Commonwealth nation, Northern Irish women are technically entitled to equal pay, and according to an anti-discrimination law passed at Westminster in December 1976, they are protected against job discrimination, the fact is that women's employment opportunities lag far behind not only those of men, but behind those of most European women as well. While the legal status of Ulster women is superior to that of women in the Catholic Republic of Ireland where women still have almost no independent legal rights, a very strong patriarchal ideology still prevails throughout Ireland, and Northern Irish women are for the most part still politically subservient to their husbands as well as being educationally and economically disadvantaged. While these conditions can ultimately be traced to the relatively low level of industrial and economic development of Ireland as a whole, and to the powerful religious infrastructure, they do underline some of the reasons why feminism has failed to develop, as well as the crucial importance of independent women's organizations.

How then can we evaluate the effectiveness of the peace movement from a feminist perspective? While its prevailing attitudes are traditional, in that they are not activist from a feminist or socialist perspective, the movement does potentially represent an important step forward in both of these directions. The self-initiated emergence into the political sphere of a large sector of the female population which has heretofore remained inactive, or at best has existed in an exclusively supportive role in relation to those very male modes of political activity which they are now so explicitly criticizing, is not without significance to the development of either.

The rallies do help to get rid of a certain amount of fear. You are going to such-and-such a place and at one time you would have been frightened to go there. But at the rally you're a bit frightened but you just go on. Each time you come back from a rally, you have more courage to keep going. It's because you're meeting with people.

Let's face it, for seven years we went about the city and sat in our homes, all the time wrapped up in our own family and our own home and our own constant worry that something would happen to them. You felt it was just yourself had all this worry. Going out to the rallies is making people realize that other people have the same fears and the same worries. We are able to talk to each other about it. It's bringing a new closeness.

[June Campion, member of a local peace group in Knoknagoney] 7. June Campion, quoted in Peace by Peace (Belfast, Oct. 16, 1976).

Section 5.

It is also important to remember that the current peace movement is at present not a political organization; it is perhaps misleading to consider it as such. While plans for the future include meetings designed to develop a more explicit form of organization, the movement as yet has no formal structure and no official platform. It is a phenomenon that can accurately be termed "spontaneous" in that it has not been planned and the form it has taken to date can be regarded primarily as a demonstration of solidarity around a commitment to peace.

The three most visible leaders at present are Betty Williams, Mairead Corrigan and Ciaran McKeown, a journalist who has given up his newspaper position to support the women in their struggle. The organizational network as a whole, however, is neither centralized nor highly controlled by those who are apparently most prominent. Indeed, there has been a consistent effort by all concerned to systematically locate the basis for participation and direction within the numerous communities where peace groups have been emerging.

While direct support for the movement is clearly widespread (estimates range from 170,000 to 250,000 people in Northern Ireland alone), it is extremely hard to gauge its size or class composition on the basis of mass rallies and demonstrations. When I criticized the somewhat naive character of some of the statements by movement leaders, an American woman who had gone to Northern Ireland to participate in one of their rallies told me that it was precisely this tone that contributed to the movement's popularity among working-class women. It is certainly true that there has been a very deliberate attempt by the peace people to avoid direct affiliation with any specific political groups, and certain of the more politically "sophisticated" women supporters have deliberately remained in the background, not wishing to "take over' or divert the movement from its primary focus, that is, bringing an end to violence and encouraging local initiative toward non-sectarian community development.

Marin de Burca, a socialist and leader of Sinn Fein (Official IRA) spoke of the peace movement in an interview during a recent tour of the U.S.: "We go to the marches as individuals. It would be the kiss of death if we openly supported them. We have issued statements supporting them, but I don't agree with trying to move in and take them over."

8. Marin de Burca, quoted by David Moberg, In These Times (Jan. 1977).

De Burca believes that if the British withdrew the Provos would be politically undermined. She argues that unification of the country is still the solution but that it can be achieved only through unification of the various factions around initially modest reforms.

The demand for peace is not Marxist, but in the context of Northern Ireland it is very revolutionary at the mo ment... The reason we're looking for peace is to allow us to operate openly and intensively in a political way to unite Protestants and Catholics. If we have to look for something that sounds as reactionary as peace, then we look for it. If people can't see behind the facade to the reality then it's their problem.

9. Ibid.

When Marin de Burca speaks of working in a political way to unite Catholics and Protestants, she is speaking as a marxist attempting to organize working people to assume greater economic control. While, as a member of the Official IRA, de Burca definitely supports an anti-imperialist struggle, she feels that in the long run the sectarian disputes dividing the Catholic and Protestant working populations are perhaps an even greater obstacle to the struggle for self-determination. As the situation exists now, separate Catholic and Protestant labor unions render the labor movement as a whole relatively ineffectual, and continued economic disintegration due to sectarian violence has left large sections of the Catholic and Protestant population unemployed.

It is interesting to note the difference between de Burca's marxist analysis, which views the entire Irish working class as the oppressed class and the type of marxist analysis supported by other Republicans, which views the Catholic minority in the North as the oppressed class. The Provisionals, who are not necessarily socialists but prefer to think of themselves as consistently on the left, persist in opposing both the British and the Protestant paramilitary and are engaged in a constant struggle for unification with the Catholic South. Bernadette Devlin, a socialist and an aggressive Republican, generally supports this form of analysis where class—purely in economic terms—is secondary to anti-imperialism and a class analysis stressing the political and economic discrimination that the Catholic population as a whole has suffered at the hands of a Protestant-controlled government and industry.

The complexity of the situation and the relative inadequacy of this approach is apparent when one considers, even in crude terms, the economic composition of the Catholic and Protestant population. While it is definitely true that the Protestant majority, as a group, has greater economic control, and that the highest levels of unemployment in the North are in Catholic districts, the large majority of the Protestant population is also working class. It is, in fact, the youths of these two communities who are fighting one another, while the small minority of Protestants who are wealthy maintain an economic advantage and have an interest in continuing sectarian hostilities for precisely this reason.

Section 6.

It would be a mistake, however, to attempt to evaluate the significance of the peace movement on the basis of its potential effectiveness in furthering the cause of other political movements. It is perhaps more useful to consider the way in which the peace movement is indicative of an entirely different struggle for self-determination, as well as a profoundly different approach to these issues. It is significant that what is being questioned by the peace people is not the ends of political struggle so much as the means by which ideas, opinions and interests are both culturally reinforced and socially imposed.

The critical issue which is the historical source of internal Irish conflict is that of the relationship between Ireland and the British Empire. This has not only kept Catholics and Protestants feuding for generations, but has also led to innumerable splits within both camps. It is paradoxical that within this context British imperialism is the one issue on which the peace campaign has most consistently refused to take a stand. This is not because individual participants have no opinions on this question, but rather because the movement locates the "solution" in people, in a process of interaction and definition rather than in abstract "positions."

For the peace people, the question of the relative legitimacy of opposing traditions is momentarily suspended. What is revealed instead is the logical perfection of institutionalized conflict. Military, political and even religious leaders are themselves to blame, claim the peace organizers, not because of this or that 'position" in relation to government, but because they have kept the Irish people divided among themselves. "Rationality" is for them not merely a question of "right" and "wrong," but rather begins with the realization of how two non-dialectical visions of "right" are sustained by a culture which is imperialist and authoritarian in its very mode of thought.

Problems arise, claim the peace workers, because we have "lost sight of a basic respect for the individual." "Solutions," they assert, cannot be artificially constructed and then imposed but must arise through a process of creative interaction in which government does not exist to control people, to violently suppress dissent, but rather as an extension of the more or less clearly articulated needs and desires of all the people.

These concepts, while they may reveal an element of political naiveté which translates as liberalism, are not rhetorical. The practical orientation of the movement to date, with its emphasis on open and careful discussion and a decentralized approach to developing democratic forms, is indicative of this fact.

From this perspective we might examine Bernadette Devlin's claim that the peace movement is "dangerous" because it "dulls consciousness." "We were stupid," she claims, "never to have organized the women." 10. Bernadette Devlin, quoted by Lucinda Franks, "We Want Peace, Just Peace," New York Times Magazine (Dec. 19, 1975). Both the truth and the potential fallacy of this statement are apparent. From the standpoint of almost any traditional political perspective, assertions of the sanctity of life, of respect for the individual and of a genuine "creative form of democracy" must appear naive without a "program" or a definition of the specific conditions under which such values can be realized. The peace people, however, do not qualify these conditions; the values themselves must define the very process of political interaction. If this is the case, how then can we interpret Bernadette's regret at not having "organized" the women? Is it conceivable that the women supporting the peace movement are not in fact organizing themselves, organizing in such a way as to deny the legitimacy of those very political forms into which others seek to recruit them?

A supportive statement by the Provisionals, in which the peace movement is described as a "spontaneous overreaction led by the photogenic Mrs. Betty Williams" reveals both the condescension and lack of reflexivity which typify those attitudes the women are most directly challenging.

We are not necessarily in opposition to the peace people. But we want to explain to the people that there cannot be peace without justice. We just want to explain to the people turning out to these marches what the true position is and show them the road to real peace.

11. Irish Republican Information Service (Dublin, Oct. 14, 1976). Italics the author's.

This raises the most subtle and yet critical issue of the peace movement's significance. The whole notion of a "true position" is what the peace movement calls into question—it is not the political views of the opposing factions that are being attacked; even the "violence" the movement condemns is but a manifestation of something far more profoundly significant. The peace people are, in my opinion, not reacting simply to a specific incident of violence, nor even to violence in the abstract. They are (perhaps naively but nevertheless insightfully) challenging a whole tradition. What is fundamentally being questioned is the legitimacy of the imposition of the will of one group upon another. "Justice" is not being challenged so much as how justice is socially defined. imperialism, in this context, is not simply a question of national or international conquest. Imperialism is the imposition of a social order, whether through military force or political manipulation, by those with power on those without. The very question of how Northern Ireland can be governed, says Ciaran McKeown, "is an imperialist question" because it implies the imposition of political forms by politicians on people who are for the most part excluded from the process of a creative democracy. Thus all extant political solutions are inevitably violent, whether the violence is "legal"12. Ciaran McKeown, "The Price of Peace" (Belfast, 1976). or "illegal," because they require military force to secure them.

From this perspective, British colonialism, Protestant political suprematism and IRA military violence can be seen as identical in their implicit attitudes toward the imposition of social order. In every case, whether justified or not, "justice" is an extension of self-interest and democracy is a rhetorical, not a methodo logical phenomenon. While it would be absurd to consider the peace movement as a feminist or a socialist movement, it expresses values that are fundamentally in accordance with both socialist and feminist thought, in that it addresses the whole issue of power and questions the way the right of self-determination has been eclipsed, not only by those in power, but by those who conceive of power alone—economic, military or political—as the just determinant of social order.

Perhaps it's been our fault, you see, because we have sat back—as ordinary people—which is the fault everywhere—where the ordinary people sat back and let a few extremists say, "We are speaking and we are working for the people." We should have long ago stood up and said, "They're not speaking for us." I mean, people have been coming out from Ireland representing the people—the ordinary people, perhaps people like our selves, who never had the nerve. I mean, just to be here takes all the courage one has got, you know.

[Mairead Corrigan] 13. Mairead Corrigan on Woman program (Buffalo: WNED TV, Oct. 1976).