Heroic peace marchers give Irish new hope

Press, 14 September 1976, Page 21

Heroic peace marchers give Irish new hope

The peace march in Londonderry last week was the fourth of its kind in Ulster during the last month. The numbers taking part have grown steadily: 10,006 people the first week in Andersonstown, 20,000 people the next, and last week came the first hint that this time the peace movement might really mean something when 25,000 people, the majority Catholic, were welcomed into the heartland of staunchest Protestantism, the Shank'hill Road. In a country so depressingly devoid of hope, where virtually no new political face has been seen over the last seven years, the two women who started the whole thing off, Betty Williams, 32, and Mairead Corrigan, have become instant media heroines. Last week, as they tried to organise the Derry march from Mrs Wil--liam s ’ s semi-detached home in the suburbs of Belfast, they were going through the kind of razzmatazz reserved for someone like Bernadette Devlin at the peak of her short-lived power. Arriving at the house with a French reporter from Lyons — she was to be disappointed in her hope that Belfast’s mothers for peace would speak French — one was greeted cheerfully by Ralph Williams, who has come home on leave from his job as a ship’s engineer to find he has become his wife’s secretary. “Well, Swedish Television are interviewing her now, German T.V. are next, and then it’s the 8.8. C.” he said. Paddy, their young puppy, starts to pee on the floral-fitted carpet, and is promptly filmed by German television. A reporter from Hamburg arrives with a box of 4000 plastic whistles sent by the women of Hamburg for Belfast mothers to blow when they need help, and apologises because he had to leave another 4000 behind. He then starts to question Mrs Williams on the legend of Lysistrata: “Do you zink Belfast

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vomen, too, might withdraw sex from their husbands until zere is peace?” he asks. And yet, despite all the showbiz trappings, it is impossible at times not to be moved. There are all the telegrams, for example, with messages of hope from all over the world. There is one from Mrs Williams’s husband, who picked up a paper when his ship was in Canada and discovered he had a famous wife. From South India comes a cable: “Praying for women work for peace;”

“Sunday 7 Times,” London.

from Brussels: “I beg all men Catholique and Protestants of Northern Ireland stop killing make peace.” And from New Zealand: “Our prayers are with you in your efforts for peace, God bless you all;” from The Hague simply: “God bless you all, hold on, hold on.” To hear Mrs Williams tell for the umpteenth time how she started the movement, is impressive, too, in its simplicity. She was sitting with her sister and cousin watching television, learning the gruesome details of how the three little Maguire children were killed when a gunman’s getaway car crashed into them, when she decided that she had enough. She drove into Andersonstown where she was born. “I knocked on the first door I came to, and when the woman answered I said to her ‘Do you want peace?’ ’’ Naturally enough, the slightly-bemused Andersonstown housewife said that peace was, indeed, what she wanted. But more than that, all down the street, mothers started to come out and say they would help collect signatures. Within three hours 6000 people had signed a peace petition. “I was just saying aloud what they were all thinking.”

Yet, it must be said that signatures on a petition are no automatic passport to peace. At Christmas last year, for instance, one-third of all the citizens of Derry signed a Christian declaration of peace, and it got them absolutely nowhere. It was in Derry, too, that in 1972 five women of the Bogside grabbed the headlines, with their peace movement. They took tea and biscuits with William Whitelaw, and chicken and chips with Sean MacStiofain. And the fate of Margaret Doherty, one of the

WILL ELSWORTH-JONES,

Derry organisers of the 1972 campaign, provides a cautionary tale for anyone who dares to stand up and be counted. When the glare of publicity is on the peace organisers, the Provisionals leave them well alone — they are too well versed in the benefits of martyrdom to start creating rival martyrs. But when the television cameras left Mrs Doherty, the harassment started. There was a man at the door with an Armalite rifle, a nail bomb on the porch which did not go off, bricks through the front window, her daughter being told: “You’re next for the kneecap:” her sons being told: “Willie Whitelaw bought those clothes for you.” She had to abandon her home in the Creggan and move elsewhere. A letter from the Pope’s Secretariat of State hangs framed on the wall of her new home, a picture of the five women of peace sits on the mantlepiece. She still works for peace at the community level, but her family has suffered much and the killing has not stopped. The women of this new peace movement realise the dangers. So far. they have managed to tread determinedly aown a nonpolitical path It has earned them the satisfaction of being attacked

both by the Provisionals, who call them an instrument of Britain’s campaign to isolate the Republican movement from the people, and by lan Paisley's Protestant “Telegraph,” which calls them an instrument of the Catholic clergy to gam credibility for the Catholic Church. The number of people using the police confidential telephone has increased since the peace marches started. Ana one macabre statistic, which is possibly linked to the peace movement encouraging people to inform on their neighbours, is that of the 70 kneecappings carried out this year, more than half have been done in the last two weeks. The obvious question any cynical journalist asks is: Where does the peace movement go now? The organisers realise that peace rallies don't make news for ever, and they ■die talking of a winter of solid organisation, working at giving the peace movement a foothold in every street in the province. In spite of al! the welldeserved euphoria of the last month, the doubts still remain. Are the gun men’s neighbours real’v going to start turning them in"' Are the kids on the street, whose only thrill in life is a little bit of action, going to pack in the violence and join the youth clubs? is the Army suddenly going to disappear from the streets? How long can a genuine mass movement remain non-political? It is only fair to end on a note of optimism. Mrs Doherty says: “This time they are getting the people out. Before we had the people behind us, whispering their support, but now they are getting them out of their homes to stand up and be counted. “When people discover that their ne,ghbojr is prepared to join them and come out in the open in the fight for peace, then we know we must be on the right road."