Ireland's Peace Women

The average current events buff may claim to be well-informed about world affairs, but he will never talk to you about the story that regularly appears on about page six and that he six and that he just as regularly skims over. Guiltily glancing at the headline, he sights at the sight of another article about terrorist bombings in Londonderry, pauses for a moment, flinches, and then hurriedly moves on to the more attractive news of Jimmy Carter's latest goof or Edward Kennedy's latest coup. People just seem to keep killing each other senselessly, he may say, and sometimes he may even get the eerje feeling that cynical editors might be reprinting the articles on a rotating basis.

I must confess that Northern Ireland was one of those places I never read about until I met a fey, green-eyed lady from Belfast atacocktail party in New York City. We spoke only briefly amidst a throng of minglers and I asked why she had come to the United States. In reply, she dug around in her purse, and proudly produced a small box. Mystified, I held out my hand and she placed a heavy gold medal in it. Upon closer inspection I realized I was holding a Nobel Peace Prize, and the the lady I was speaking with was none other than Mairead Corrigan, one of the founders of the Peace People movement in Ireland. She laughingly told me that she had once unsuccessfully tried to get out of a parking ticket by showing it to a policeman, and then answered my embarrassingly witless, though wellintentioned, questions about Ireland.

Why was she so committed to peace in Ireland? She bravely told how her sister's three children, eight years, two years and six weeks old, had been killed when the car of a member of the provisional Irish Republican Army--Who moments before had been killed at the wheel by British gunfire-ran over the children.

As I stood there aghast, a loudmouthed woman with a reporter's notebook shoved me out of the way, and buzzard-like, bore down on her prey. "what is the name of this group in Ireland? Are you working with them? How can they hope to change anything?"

And Mairead Corrigan just smiled patiently, and explained a story she must have told thousands of times before.

What Mairead Corrigan was doing at that party is what the author of Mairead Corrigan, Betty Williams tried, but failed to do in his book. She was explaining the Irish peace movement, but, more importantly, she was trying to dissolve the international apathy about the "Irish question." Richard Deutsch, a Northern Ireland correspondent for Le Figaro, has lived in Belfast for the past five years, which might imply an understanding of the situation. Unfortunately, his book reads like a shallow but prolonged newspaper article; it is informative, but not particularly insightful.

On the contrary, the book perpetuates worn-out stereotypes and leaves the reader wondering why some of the Irish have turned from hating to loving. He asserts that the British see the Irish as "drunkards, parasites and incompetents." And he claims that the Northen Irish "are in no mood to examine their consciences. It is easier for them to live within a traditional framework that has been imposed on them and that they have accepted, even though they know it is false and unhealthy." He does not qualify these generalizations by quoting the people he categorizes, nor does he attempt to make their bitterness understandable with even a thumbnail sketch of the age-old conflict between Irish Catholics and British Protestants. The book's narrative begins in August 1976 with the founding of the Peace People movement, but Deutsch gives only passing, superficial treatment to the history of bloodshed and tragedy.

He strains to evoke the magic of mass marches of 30,000 people with phrases like "very moving" which only call attention to his prosaic writing. Normally, a simple stylistic flaw in a journalistic account would be relatively unimportant, but when writing about Northern Ireland, style is paramount. A chronology of events tied together with trite homilies contributes of the Irish conflict. You might just as well read another newspeper story.

The transcriptions of his interviews with the movement's three founders, Mairead Corrigan, Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeon, are the best part of the book, but even they are inadequate, merely recording what each has said to hundreds of other journalists.

Though the book sees the movement almost solely through the eyes of its leaders, the interviews are the sum total of the biographical information included. Deutsch apparently did no independent searching into the lives that shape his book.

The peace movement in Ireland is bigger than its three gifted, Iuminous leaders. The constitution of the Peace People sets up an elaborately decentralized in the movement. The marches are over now, and the hard work of peace has just begun.