Reflections On The Peace People – By Ciaran Mc Keown
Historians, like the media on which they often rely, tend to record what happened in terms of conventional categories – the struggles between violent forces, legal and illegal, and the party-political jockeying of adversarial politics. But history is changed by other, deeper forces – fear, hope, a sense of belonging or identity, a sense of meaning in the great mystery of being alive in the first place and ultimately a sense of the sacred without any orthodox codification. It was to these deeper forces that the vision and energy of the Peace People were applied. I make no claim for what was achieved although I know in my own mind and heart that it was vital and has gone on echoing. What is vital today, as the past is honoured,…