Author: Seamus Henehan

Community Centers: 

The Correymeela Community is a community center in Ballycastle along the northern coast of County Antrim. Correymeela provides a residential space where a wide variety of groups are encouraged to stay for a period of time to embrace differences and experience open communication. Youth groups from areas of Northern Ireland, especially where violence is commonplace, and school groups of Catholic and Protestant children dealing with sectarian divides are two examples of the many groups Correymeela hosts. You can access their website here, and their page on the Ireland Funds site here.

The Tara Centre was founded in 1996 and is located in Omagh, Northern Ireland. This community center provides professional services, such as counselling and psychotherapy, along with alternative medicinal approaches. In addition to offering these services, the Tara Centre provides an environment for healing and education. You can access their website here, and their page on the Ireland Funds site here.

Like the other kinds of organizations we examined, community centers provide alternate spaces to the outside world. They also involve far more diverse approaches towards peace and reconciliation. One interesting aspect of these programs is that they tend to cater to adults far more than the other areas we focused on. While sports, schools, and arts projects seemed to often target children as their audience of interest, community centers tended to express interest in working with adults too. Further, the community centers seemed far more interested in addressing or confronting memories of the conflict, rather than rendering the conflict more peripheral like the other approaches we examined. Perhaps this strategy is chosen because adults are more likely to have direct memories of conflict which they may desire to confront, whereas arts, sports, and school programs attempt to make their changes through less direct, more subliminal means.

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Arts:

The Derry Playhouse Theatre involves young people in theatrical and educational productions. The Playhouse describes itself as “a self-help, grass roots, bottom-up community development project which is people center with charitable status”. We think The Playhouse provides a vehicle by which to explore relationships without an emphasis on background. Many integrated schools involve art in their curriculum as do community centers, but The Playhouse primarily focuses on art. To learn more about the Derry Playhouse Theatre, you can visit their website here or look at their page on the Ireland Funds website here.

Springboard, established in 1992, is an organization which strives for cross-community unity. One of their projects we focused on was their Art in Diversity Project, and initiative funded by the Ireland Funds.  The Art in Diversity Project involved over 100 children, who attended workshops for the debate and reflection over the subject of peace. The children’s ideas were incorporated into almost 700 images representing peace, conflict and images of parts of Northern Ireland. Then, these images were used in the construction of a 10ft x 50ft peace mural. To learn more about Springboard, you can access their website here or go to their page on the Ireland Funds site here.

Many of the projects we examined utilized art as a primary focus. Though programs such as The Derry Playhouse were centered around theater, dance, and other performance arts, many other programs, including schools and community centers, discuss the presence and importance of art-based activities. Similar to the way in which sports reassign identity in the form of teams and provide artificial goals and rules to focus on, we believe the art projects may make an analogous move. Particularly when they are centered around group activity, these programs require participants to work towards arbitrary goals of design and construction.

In the case of the theater or dance, the idea of playing a part, or being someone else functions in the same manner as becoming part of a ‘team’. ‘Playing’ someone else asks individuals to imagine they are not who they are – in order to do so, individuals may need to encounter the personal biases and viewpoints the characters they play hold, and, in turn, imagine how that person might believe those things. In other words, by playing parts, individuals are asked to confront subjectivity.

 

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School: Traditionally in Northern Ireland, children were educated according to religious denomination, which reinforces boundaries between groups of people. The Integrated Education and Cranmore Integrated Primary School integrate Catholic and Protestant children who would otherwise not experience any interaction with one another.

Integrated Education, known officially as the Northern Ireland Council for Integration Education or NICIE, is an organization comprising of 62 integrated schools attended by over 16,000 students. Integrated Education defines the integration of education in Ireland: ‘Education together in a school of children and young people drawn mainly from the Protestant and Catholic traditions, with the aim of providing for them an excellent education that gives recognition to and promotes the expression of these two main traditions. The integrated school, while essentially Christian in character, welcomes those of all faiths and none, and seeks to promote the worth and self-esteem of pupils, parents, staff, governors and all who are affected by the presence of the school in the community. The core aim is to provide children and young people with a caring and enhanced educational experience thus empowering them as individuals to affect positive change in a shared society.’ Both of these integrated educational institutions bring together children from different backgrounds to learn and play together. You can access the NICIE website here, and their page of the Ireland Funds site here.

The Cranmore Integrated Primary School focuses on integrating students of all religious backgrounds and also students with special needs. This approach encourages the students to not only work in a classroom setting, but also through the informal interactions that schools also foster. You can access Cranmore Intergrated Primary School’s website here, and their page of the Ireland Funds site here.

Like the other kinds of programs we have examined, schools create artificial spaces by having different rules, restrictions, and requirements. By placing children from different backgrounds in a context where they are not only required to share the same space, but also to interact in classroom settings with rules about seating, speaking, homework, etc., these programs create a ‘space’ that does not give preference to one denomination over another, but rather values them equally. In one sense schools feel real in that for kids they are spaces experienced daily where there is both validation and punishment, but in another sense they function as a 3rd space in that they create their own reality. This approach seems to fit our concepts about artificiality and the creation of an alternative space.

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The four major types of programs we found to be supported by The Ireland Funds were sports, arts, integrated schools, and community centers. Click on each image to explore examples of the specific kinds of organizations we examined.

[Home Page][History & Background][The Ireland Funds][Our Project Analysis]

About The Ireland Funds: The Ireland Funds is a non-profit, philanthropic organization founded in 1976. Since that time The Ireland Funds has raised over 480 million dollars on behalf of more than 3,000 organizations. According to the organization’s mission statement, The Ireland Funds supports “programs of peace and reconciliation, arts and culture, education and community development throughout the island of Ireland”. In our project we focused specifically on programs which The Ireland Funds classifies as “Supporting a Shared Future in Northern Ireland.” These programs “address the lack of understanding and respect for varying cultural and religious values.” To examine these specific programs, or to find more information about The Ireland Funds click here.

The Ireland Funds in Our Project: Though the Ireland Funds has undoubtedly made incredibly large contributions in a number of different realms, as we mentioned above, in our project we examined a specific subset of those programs supported by The Ireland Funds. As a result, for our purposes The Ireland Funds webpage functions as an archive and allows us to examine projects demonstrating a variety of strategies all designed to foster peace and reconciliation. By examining the mission statements, strategies, and goals of these programs we identified several themes common to many of these projects and chose to hypothesize what commonalities those differing strategies might have in the way they attempt to create peace and reconciliation.

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