Post-Nobel decline

...Still more cash was spent on salaried staff and on producing a newspaper for the organization—largely McKeown's brainchild...

...A significant falling-off in support for the leaders came in 1977 after Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan won the Nobel Peace Prize of $170,000...

...Most of that money has now gone...

...Money had seemed the least of the Peace People's worries shortly after its inception...

...He pioneered the movement's stand on special "emergency status" for convicted terrorists in Ulster's jails—drawing criticism from the Protestant community, and most moderates, and winning the movement only very minimal support in the communities the prisoners came from...

...MICHAEL H.C...

...The leaders were faced with the problem of harnessing and holding onto the significant support they had attracted...

...build new friendships among Catholics and Protestants through the rallies and marches...

...The Peace People may have passed on, but there are dozens of similar groups working quietly on reconciliation work both North and South...

...The deaths of the three Maguire children were tragedy enough...

...His role was to allocate peace funds to selected local firms for job creation but the sums involved were small and produced few new jobs...

...the rest is tied up in the movement's headquarters, in loans they gave to small businesses, and in a youth club in West Belfast...

...Williams has resigned...

...There has been no major rally since 1977 and the movement has deep financial problems...

...It is useful to name some—Glencree, Corrymeela, Protestant and Catholic Encounter, Women.Together, Peace Point, Witness for Peace, the Southern Movement for Peace, Cooperation North...

...Now, active support for the Peace People is probably under two hundred, and limited essentially to Belfast...

...The culmination of McKeown's position came at a recent pro-IRA rally in Dublin where he appeared on the platform...

...Now, the ' 'Peace People'' movement is in its death throes, destroyed by internal dissent and external criticism...

...Commonweal: 164 The huge joyous crowds were a challenge to both the IRA and Protestant extremists in the heydays of 1976 and 1977...

...Now the new leader of the movement is Mairead Corrigan...

...The more pragmatic wing wanted to concentrate instead on building up branches of the movement in local communities, arranging holidays abroad or at home for ghetto children and organizing football games between Protestant and Catholic teenagers...

...The children's aunt, Mairead Corrigan, a secretary, became a leader of that movement with her friend, Betty Williams, together with a journalist-adviser, Ciaran McKeown...

...McDOWELL (Michael H.C...

...The three children's death brought such an outcry from the housewives of their Belfast district, that soon they were to be joined by hundreds, then thousands of Catholics and Protestants who wanted to show the world that Ulster's community as a whole despised violence...

...By mid- to late 1977, membership had fallen dramatically...

...Its circulation is under 2,000...

...McKeown remains a close adviser...

...Only a month ago, their mother, Anne, the victim of a cumulative despair, took her own life in an especially ghastly way...

...A few weeks after that the life blood of the Peace People was ebbing...

...Loans were given, too—many still unpaid...

...McDowell, aNorthern Ireland journalist, is a Senior Associate with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace...

...We, got organized, which is maybe the worst thing we could have done...

...The policy and personality arguments which tore the movement apart centered increasingly around McKeown...

...As winter in 1976-77 set in—discouraging further outdoor meetings—the momentum of growing numbers began to slow down...

...International travel by the leaders to raise more funds attracted further criticism—despite the benefits for the movement as a whole...

...This damaged their credibility badly in Northern Ireland...

...As support declined and finances diminished, internal squabbling increased, and alongside this, the movement took—or was persuaded by McKeown to take—stands on controversial issues...

...They died when a car, driven by a wounded IRA man, plowed into them, following a shoot-out with British troops...

...The philosopher-king was Ciaran McKeown, who devised schemes of personal government for the movement which could be applied and perhaps extended eventually to change Northern Ireland society's structure, he said—a tall order indeed, since the political parties and churches had failed to achieve that...

...The early days of the Peace People echoed with simple appeals—show support for peace by marching for it...

...Norway alone that year (1976) gave $400,000...

...The future conflict was to be between the pragmatists and the philosophers in the movement...

...28 March 1980: 165...

...McKeown's own stand may have been taken, in some senses, to compensate for an earlier call to ghetto-dwellers to give information on terrorism to the police...

...recently...

...In the middle of last month the people of Northern Ireland saw the internal squabbling acted out on television with McLachlan saying he had been accused by McKeown and others of incompetence in administering the movement's funds—probably an unfair charge...

...McLachlan, too...

...To conclude, however, that people in Ireland have given up the struggle for peace is wrong...

...Other money was given to community groups but much of this effort was a duplication of government or voluntary agencies' efforts, which were on a far wider scale anyway...

...Somewhere along the line, we lost sight of the basic simplicity of our message," said Betty Williams in the U.S...

...There was still more to come...

...Shortly after that, to widen the movement's already dwindling religious base, a former moderate Protestant politician, Peter McLachlan, was brought into the leadership...

...The participants suffered verbal and physical abuse from the bigots, and the carping censure of the cynics...

...An executive member of the Peace People said: "There was a basic disagreement over whether to start with visible political problems such as emergency status for prisoners or reform of repressive security legislation which were seen as fundamental sources of division and violence or, to search primarily for issues which Catholics and Protestants had in common...

...Their early rallies and marches, attended by thousands of Catholics and Protestants—perhaps truly communicating with each other for the first time—dominated the sectarian atmosphere of Belfast and elsewhere...

...The world focused on the clearly spontaneous actions of those women and their supporters...

...More than $75,000 went on buying a headquarters for the movement and about the same amount was spent on the foreign trips...

...His appearance outraged McLachlan, Betty Williams, and others...

...There are still peace workers in Ireland, even if they don't appear regularly on our television screens in the way the Nobel Laureates did, and hope has not died in Ulster—even if its morale has been shaken...

...They each kept $50,000 in lieu of salary and expenses...

...Williams, Corrigan and McKeown were accused of being away from Ulster too much on "pleasure jaunts...

...Northern Ireland POST-NOBEL DECLINE PEACE PEOPLE FALL ON HARD TIMES THE tragic deaths of three children, one a baby, spawned a Peace Movement in Ulster which produced two Nobel prizewinners, renewed confidence and selfrespect among the Northern Irish people and won for the peace workers international recognition and support...

...The Peace People were rightly acknowledged abroad at their beginning and even now, and their work lives on...

...That required more organized, sophisticated methods, some argued—but organization and sophistication were the antithesis of the spontaneity from which the movement sprang...