My Work as Insider Mediator in Northern Ireland
By Gary Mason
Let me tell you a true story of three boys, growing up in the 1960s and 1970s in the sectarian hotbed of Northern Irish society. They were normal kids whose lives were to be shaped by a conflict not of their making. Two of these boys attended religious Sunday school together. One boy’s mother was a faithful teacher in that religious Sunday school. Two of the boys also attended the same primary school from the ages of four to eleven. They shared their education and dreams together. They were best friends, accompanying each other on the walk to school and back home. One of the boys is now dead. He was shot during the height of the conflict. The second boy was sentenced to life imprisonment and served 18 years for murder. The third boy is writing this essay.
I have told this story across the world and have reflected on it from a variety of perspectives – theological, political, psychological and sociological. I still cannot explain why I did not join a paramilitary group to defend my community against “the enemy” and thus share the same fate as my boyhood friends. I still recall quite clearly one evening outside a building when several of my childhood friends in their mid-teens went inside the building and made the fateful decision to become a “terrorist”, a “paramilitary”, a “freedom fighter”. It would have been so easy for me to make the same choices and to operate under the ethos that violence was the only way to defend my community. I did not choose to participate in violence as a boy, but I have chosen to remain a critical friend and an insider mediator to the men of violence ever since.
Legacy of the conflict
On Good Friday, 10 April 1998, after thirty years of bloody civil war, in which more than 3,600 people were killed, more than 35,000 injured and 16,000 charged with terrorist-related offences, and which involved 34,000 shootings and 14,000 bombings (all this in a relatively small population of 1.7 million people), and after almost two long years of political talks, the negotiations that resulted in the Belfast or “Good Friday” Agreement finally concluded. The Agreement was approved by Northern Ireland’s main nationalist political parties and most of the unionist parties.
Eighteen years after the signing of the Good Friday agreement, the legacy of the conflict still looms large on the political landscape of Northern Ireland. This post-conflict landscape is characterized by fear, uncertainty, lack of trust and alienation. Many people in the loyalist, unionist Protestant community feel insecure and uncertain about the future. The republican, nationalist Catholic community has displayed positive demographic, civic, cultural and political developments in recent years that have not been mirrored in Protestant working-class areas. Many of these communities continue to struggle with internecine feuding and conflict, deindustrialization, cultural unease and ambiguity, and a continuing decline in educational standards. Too frequently I find myself mediating between factions who cannot settle their differences through dialogue, resorting instead to community expulsions or death threats.
While the violent conflict was primarily between republicans and loyalists, feuding also occurred internally within the individual camps. Just a year and a half after the Good Friday Agreement, simmering tensions between loyalist paramilitary groups boiled over when Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF) supporters were severely beaten by Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) leader Richard Jameson and his men at the Portadown Football Club’s social club in December 1999. LVF members swore revenge and assassinated Jamestown, initiating a string of further killings that came to a head when the UVF used its sister organization the Red Hand Commando (RHC) to kill two of the LVF’s leading figures, Adrian Porter and Stephen Warnock. I had the responsibility of conducting the funeral of Stephen Warnock and intense inside mediation was needed to ensure it passed off peacefully. The feud was not over, however, until five years and at least four deaths later. In February 2006, the Independent Monitoring Commission reported that it had ceased. I along with a colleague was one of the main insider mediators working to bring this bloodletting to an end.
Critical friend
I have now spent 28 years of my working life in the inner city of Belfast, never more than 200 metres from a “peace line,” the massive security barriers that separate Protestant and Catholic communities. A sizeable proportion of my work and ministry has been devoted to acting as a critical friend to those who have used violence to pursue their political ends. I work with Action for Community Transformation (the ACT Initiative), through which members of the UVF and the RHC can demonstrate transformation and positive citizenship.
The ACT Initiative is a voluntary conflict transformation programme supporting former UVF and RHC personnel on their journey from peace to conflict. It involves three phases. The transitional phase provides the volunteers with a training environment that is safe, comfortable and conducive to learning. Workshops focus on their lived experiences and emphasize listening, communication and accountability. Participants discuss what needs to or what has changed in their lives as individuals, as a group, in our communities and in society. The deeper understanding and critical awareness this generates prepares them to engage their communities more constructively.
Phase two, the operational phase, connects the volunteers with organizations and networks for community development. Distributed leadership is a core concept here. This principle recognizes the diversity of skills and expertise and encourages shared accountability and commitment to community development.
The third phase moves volunteers more deeply into civic engagement, emphasizing positive, active citizenship. They are encouraged to be more representative and collaborative within their respective communities – to become politically engaged, to join residents’ groups, forums, cultural and historic societies, or whatever is relevant in their communities.
Through its three phases, the ACT Initiative demonstrates transformation and citizenship, and promotes collaboration with all elements of civic society. In sum, it is a model of politicization, which supports the reintegration of former combatants in partnership with critical friends and the wider community.
In the tense and fragile context of post-conflict Northern Ireland, the positive contribution of former paramilitaries may seem to go unnoticed. In their thorough coverage of their participation in violence, the media has left us with a stereotype that leaves little place for the kind of journey to peace that many of these men have taken. Moreover, given that what they do may be considered politically covert, their involvement has not been included as part of the official story. And yet, through the ACT Initiative, UVF and RHC members are experiencing transformation from former combatants into active citizens and making a positive contribution to sustaining peace in Protestant working-class communities.
My role as an insider mediator is an unusual one for a clergy person, and I am often asked whether the church should talk to these men of violence. I firmly believe that serving as a critical friend to my community, being a mediator when violence threatens to overwhelm, is my life's work. That has been my role: engagement but not endorsement. My life has been shaped by a conflict I did not create and by forms of violence I do not endorse. But my life has also been transformed by a ministry that keeps me connected to the community that shaped me and engaged with the men I might have been.
Rev. Dr. Gary Mason, a prominent Northern Irish inside mediator, serves on the board of the ACT Initiative, chairs Northern Ireland Alternatives, a leading Restorative Justice programme and is the director of Rethinking Conflict, a Belfast based NGO.
Read more:
“Disarming Militant Groups from Within: Building Support for Peace amongst Combatants in Northern Ireland” by Benedetta Berti, Ariel Heifetz Knobel and Gary Mason, in: Negotiations in Times of Conflict (Tel Aviv: Institute for National Security Studies, 2015).
Action for Community Transformation (ACT Initiative): http://www.act-ni.co.uk