Only a few letters differentiate Michael Doherty and Brian Dougherty’s last names, but in Northern Ireland the political connotations of these spellings and pronunciations speak volumes.
Doherty is Catholic and Dougherty is Protestant. This is significant in their hometown of Derry, where the two have served as peacemakers in resolving a more than 30-year embittered conflict between Catholics and Protestants called “The Troubles.”
“My grandfather thought my last name sounded too Catholic and changed the spelling,” said Dougherty, who grew up amid the Civil Rights era and the onset of The Troubles. “I went to secondary school at the time of the hunger strikes in Northern Ireland, when Protestants were unwelcome. I felt very vulnerable.”
Doherty, director of the Peace and Reconciliation Group, and Dougherty, director of St. Columb’s Reconciliation Center, spoke to an audience of more than 150 University students, instructors and community members Wednesday night in 282 Lillis about grassroots mediation, negotiation, education and cross-community bridge building during “The Pragmatics of Peacemaking: Lessons from the Streets of Northern Ireland.” Earlier in the day, the two men spoke in classroom meetings.
The University’s Savage Endowment for International Relations and Peace, the geography department, Clark Honors College and the School of Law’s Conflict and Dispute Resolution program sponsored the presentation.
According to Doherty, The Troubles date back to the Reformation, when Britain started taking over land in part of Ireland. In 1921, the Republican party – made up of nationalist Roman Catholics – objected to this land take-over but were “put down” by the British Protestants. Subsequently, Northern Ireland developed a separate identity from the rest of Ireland and a divide between Republicans and Loyalist Protestants emerged, he said.
“The heart of the dispute has marked the place with violence for many hundreds of years,” said Shaul Cohen, the associate professor of geography who introduced Doherty and Dougherty. “It’s a place with many divisions … some are really profound and some are growing pronounced. (Doherty and Dougherty) have been the ones who put out fires and facilitate bridge building.”
Cohen has taught an honors college course about Northern Ireland’s history that involves students role-playing major figures from The Troubles and conducting mock peace negotiations. His former students returned for a class luncheon with Doherty and Dougherty on Wednesday.
“I didn’t really know anything about the conflict until I took the class,” said Alexandra Marcus, a geography student who helped to organize the event and plans to travel to Northern Ireland this summer. “It just predated the political awareness of people in our generation. I was 12 during the Belfast Agreement and was too young to remember anything.”
Marcus will work with a program this summer that brings together Protestant and Catholic students to learn about their shared history.
“It’s important to learn about the behind-the-scenes aspects of peacemaking,” said Marcus.
Doherty and Dougherty spoke about the significance of education to their peacemaking processes and how young people in Northern Ireland romanticize The Troubles. They also explained that flags, police units and parades are important cultural symbols and considerations in their work to unify disparate groups.
“The stark reality is that schools are segregated – state and Catholic,” said Dougherty. “Education is a proper key to community relations but there’s a huge difficulty in developing attitudes.”
Cohen showed a photo of a statue in which two people either grasp or let go of each others’ hands. He explained the statue as a metaphor for Doherty and Dougherty’s work. Despite the history of violence, the town of Derry has come to represent some of the best peacemaking without violence and through political means, said Cohen.
“It’s going to take at least a generation before we work things through,” said Dougherty. “There’s still a lot of closure that has to happen. Lots of victims still feel pretty raw.”