A little more than two decades have passed since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement largely ended “the Troubles,” three decades of political and sectarian violence over the status of Northern Ireland. The agreement was an accord to share power among citizens divided between loyalty to the United Kingdom and a desire for Ulster to join the Republic of Ireland.
Because the agreement has been successful, it tends to overshadow the scale of violence that tormented Northern Ireland in that period: Some 3,500 people, more than half of them civilians, were killed. And because the two sides were largely divided along religious lines, loyalist Protestants versus Roman Catholic republicans, the bitterness and cruelty of the violence was exceptional.
Even by those standards, however, the events of Aug. 10, 1976, in west Belfast stand out. An Irish Republican Army guerrilla, driving a getaway car, was shot by a British Army patrol. The car careened out of control, jumped onto a sidewalk in front of a church, and mowed down a local woman and three of her four children, ranging in age from 6 weeks to 8 years. All of the children were killed, and their mother, Anne Maguire, was severely injured.
One of the witnesses to the incident was a 33-year-old housewife, mother, and part-time receptionist named Betty Williams, who, not long before, had witnessed a toddler’s scalp being blown off by IRA gunfire. Williams was a Catholic married to a Protestant, and one of her neighbors in the IRA stronghold of Andersontown, 32-year-old Mairead Corrigan, was Anne Maguire’s sister. At the triple funeral for the Maguire children, Mrs. Williams sought out Miss Corrigan. Their subsequent conversation would have unforeseen consequences.
Soon, both were stopping passersby and knocking on doors, circulating a petition for “Provos out — Peace, please!” which garnered 6,000 signatures. They led a march of 10,000 Catholics and Protestants against violence through Andersontown and other Belfast neighborhoods; spontaneous rallies and marches took place throughout Northern Ireland. Within days, Williams and Corrigan were familiar faces, and, after a television interview, they encountered a local journalist named Ciaran McKeown, who drafted a declaration that was read at a mass rally two weeks after the deaths of the Maguire children.
The birth of the Community of Peace People, as their fledgling organization was called, got mixed reviews. On the one hand, the world caught a glimpse of cooperation among warring factions after a decade of atrocities in Northern Ireland. On the other, those factions were still under arms. Williams and Corrigan were subject to routine death threats from the IRA. Loyalists, including local governments, were suspicious of the motives of two Catholic women. When, in the following year, Williams and Corrigan were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the official reaction in Belfast was muted.
It is fair to say that, as with many grassroots crusades, Betty Williams’s vision for peace in Northern Ireland held more appeal elsewhere: The IRA had no interest in any cessation of violence, and loyalists were equally determined to crush republicans. As a Nobel Peace laureate, however, Williams was taken up by activists worldwide and soon found herself meeting regularly with the likes of Desmond Tutu, Yasser Arafat, Joan Baez, and the Dalai Lama, as well as Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
Over the decades, Williams involved herself in political movements far removed from home and, until 1998, often angrily lamented the lack of progress toward peace in Northern Ireland. By contrast, Mairead Corrigan was more interested in local confidence-building measures and religious reconciliation. As early as 1978, the two had split, and the Peace People were moribund; in 1981, divorced and remarried after recovering from a breakdown, Betty Williams moved to Florida. “I didn’t walk away from Belfast,” she explained later. “I ran.”
Still, when she died of pneumonia earlier this month, at age 76, Williams had returned to Belfast and reconciled with her onetime partner against violence, who remembered her “love and compassion for all children.”
“I felt privileged to know her,” she added.
Philip Terzian, a former writer and editor at the Weekly Standard, is the author of Architects of Power: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, and the American Century.
