One of the major challenges for us, as American students writing about Northern Ireland, is to recognize that this conflict is far more complicated than we might imagine. So many acronyms, and so many groups operating with their own varieties of goals; many visions of what Ireland is, or ought to be – envisioned both by people living in Northern Ireland and those outside, even by ourselves.
As this semester has progressed we’ve seen how these issues have developed over time, passed through generations of people: memories of wrongs become hardened and entrenched, and result in a conflict so thorny that the wrong word, the wrong pronunciation, comes with the baggage of hundreds of years of prejudices. Though we spent much of the semester examining how these issues form, exacerbate, and recur, we spent less time imagining how one might undo, or redirect, hundreds of years of conflict.
In our project we examined The Ireland Funds, a non-profit group that funds many organizations in Northern Ireland, including ones focused on peace and reconciliation processes. These organizations range from community centers, to sports teams, to theaters and schools. On this site we hope to examine or ‘read’ these projects to get a better sense of what kinds of moves, both conscious and unconscious, they make in order to ideally develop reconciliatory action and, hopefully, compassion as well.
We hope that our site will be helpful to people intending to design peace-building programs, to those intending to analyze what these programs do, and to anyone interested in the Northern Ireland peace process.
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