Mairead Corrigan Betty Williams
On August 10, 1976, three children were struck and killed by the getaway car of a nationalist Irish Republican Army gunman in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The children were two nephews and a niece of Mairead Corrigan, an office secretary and a Catholic. Mairead’s sister, Anne, was badly hurt in the crash.
The tragedy was one of the many in the long conflict between the Catholics and Protestants of Northern Ireland. During the period 1969-1998, the conflict worsened because of economic and political problems. Many Catholics wanted Northern Ireland to become part of the Nationalist Republic of Ireland to the south while many Protestants wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom. Catholics and Protestants lived in segregated communities, attended separate schools, and experienced different privileges and rights.
Mairead Corrigan was so devastated by the needless deaths of her young relatives that she decided to do something about it. Mairead joined Betty Williams (who had been a witness to the tragedy) and journalist friend Ciaran McKeown to create the Northern Ireland Peace Movement (later renamed Community of Peace People), a grassroots movement of both Roman Catholic and Protestant citizens dedicated to ending the sectarian strife. They began by organizing weekly peace marches and demonstrations.
Mairead had grown up in a poor family in Belfast. In addition to her office job, she devoted a great deal of time in her youth to charity work in the Catholic organization Legion of Mary. That gave her a good basis on which to develop the nonviolent strategy of the Community of Peace People.
Betty Williams, also an office secretary at that time, had a Protestant father and Catholic mother, a family background from which she derived religious tolerance and a breadth of vision that motivated her to work for peace. Like many families in Northern Ireland, Betty’s family was touched by violence. Her Protestant grandfather was attacked because his son was marrying a Catholic woman. Her cousin Daniel was killed by Protestant extremists. Another cousin was killed by an IRA bomb.
Mairead and Betty organized a peace march to the children’s graves that 10,000 Protestant and Catholic women attended. The Irish Republican Army disrupted the peaceful walk, but 35,000 people marched with the two women the following week to protest violence in their country. The Community of Peace People brought together thousands of people in protest marches and confidence-building measures among the grassroots in 1976 and 1977. More than half a million people from Northern Ireland, Ireland, and England attended these rallies to demand an end to the violence.
Peace People was founded based on the conviction that genuine reconciliation and prevention of future violence were possible, primarily through the integration of schools, residential areas, and athletic clubs. By setting up local peace groups comprising former opponents who undertook confidence-building measures, they hoped to set a peace process in motion from below. The organization published a biweekly paper, Peace by Peace, and provided for families of prisoners a bus service to and from Belfast’s jails.
Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams were jointly awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976, “for their courageous efforts in founding a movement to put an end to the violent conflict in Northern Ireland.”
The peace movement disintegrated in the course of 1978. This was due both to internal disagreements and to the spreading of malicious rumors by Catholic and Protestant extremists. Mairead Corrigan, however, did not give up hope and continued her work with the Community of Peace People, advocating a nonviolent resolution of the Northern Ireland conflict through speaking engagements and writings.
Among other projects, the Peace People organized summer camps in other European countries to provide a setting in which young Catholics and Protestants from Northern Ireland can come to know one another. They also continued the outreach to prisoners and their families. Mairead was a co-founder of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, a non-sectarian organization of Northern Ireland which defends human rights and advocates repeal of the government’s emergency laws.
In pursuit of her mission to promote the establishment of peace and justice by nonviolent means, Mairead travelled to more than twenty-five countries throughout the world. In 1993 she went to Thailand with six other Nobel peace laureates in a vain effort to enter Myanmar (Burma) to protest the detention of laureate Aung San Suu Kyi. Mairead was also active in various Palestinian causes—notably efforts to end the Israeli government’s blockade of the Gaza Strip—and she was deported from Israel on several occasions.
Betty left the Peace People organization in the early 1980s and moved to the US. She resided there for two decades before moving to the Republic of Ireland. She devoted the rest of her life to creating a new way forward, a movement to begin a reversal of thinking on how we deal with the injustices, cruelty and horror perpetrated on the world’s children.
Betty founded the World Centers of Compassion for Children International in 1997 and served as its president. The organization’s mission is to provide a strong political voice for children in areas afflicted by war, hunger, social, economic or political upheaval.
Betty Williams died on 17 March 2020.