In 2024, “Peace Walls” still separate Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods in Belfast. Built by the British military during “The Troubles,” the decades of killings and bombings in Northern Ireland, they were built to keep the two waring peoples apart. In the following years much of the violence occurred within feet of those walls. The walls have gates, but 25 years after the Peace Accords, the gates are still locked every night.

The Good Friday Peace Accords brought the official end of “The Troubles.” But did it bring peace?

 The Accords themselves were the result of ten years of work by organizations, funded by foreign governments, developing networks of peace groups working locally. That work continues today.

 It may be unfair to compare the violence in the Middle East with the violence in Northern Ireland with the violence in South Africa with the violence in other places, because the lands, the politics, histories, customs, are so different.

But they are the same in this: each place that struggles with violence has a grass-roots network of people who are determined to cross over the walls. While politicians may try to find, willingly or not, political solutions to end murderous war, the work of reconciliation and peace gets done in neighborhoods and small groups of people.

 And it is slow.

Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams began the Peace People of Northern Ireland when Mairead’s nephews and niece were shot in street crossfire. They organized rallies and marches over the country, and in 1976 called out an invitation for a mass rally. Over 10,000 people marched. Paki Wieland and I traveled there for the march, and one thing struck me. People there were unlike the people who made up the peace movement in the U.S. No die-die skirts or flowing hair, the people gathering in the hall were women in housedresses, chatting and knitting as we waited. It seems they had taken time off from cooking and grocery shopping to do the next task of the day: work for peace.

Robi Damelin, an Israeli, joined the Parents Circle-Families Forum  after her son, who was an Israeli Army Reservist, was shot by a Palestinian sniper. The PC-FF are Israeli and Palestinian families who have lost members to the violence. They meet together to get to know one another, send pairs out to schools, and run youth discussion groups, always with equal numbers of Israelis and Palestinians. She describes their work as laying the foundation for reconciliation. 

She says, “Everybody wants instant results, that’s not how reconciliation works. It’s a slow, dogged, brick-by-brick process.”

 In Belfast today, at some of the Peace Walls, people are keeping the gates unlocked a little bit later each night, gradually, so that people will hardly notice. One day, they will no longer be locked.