Monica McWilliams and Mike Nesbitt came of age in a deeply segregated society where politics were personal and violence was intimate. Like Americans today, our guests and their communities had to navigate living together in an atmosphere of deep mistrust.
“The armchair warriors sit back with their violence of the tongue that leads to the violence of the gun, or the assaults on the streets, or the tearing down of your own community and your businesses. And that can be prevented.” – Monica McWilliams
The Northern Ireland conflict, known by many as the “Troubles,” lasted three decades. Close to four thousand people were killed, and more than 50 thousand were wounded by political violence in a nation of less than 2 million.
The Protestant, or Unionist, community held the majority of power and privileges in Northern Ireland and was strongly allied with the British government. On the other side, the Catholic community faced discrimination in housing, education, and employment. While many Catholics pursued equality through a nonviolent civil rights movement, a violent backlash by Unionist leaders and the British government precipitated a guerilla war, fought by paramilitaries on both sides.
Our guests on this episode are two courageous individuals who challenged their own communities to make peace.
Monica McWilliams is the Co-Founder of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, a women’s political party that bridged the divide in her country. As a negotiator in the peace talks, McWilliams faced misogyny and anti-Catholic bias. She’s since served as an elected representative in Northern Ireland’s government and as Chief Commissioner for Human Rights, and she continues to work on social justice and peacebuilding in Northern Ireland and around the world.
Mike Nesbitt is the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and the current Minister of Health for Northern Ireland. He covered the 1998 Good Friday Agreement and its aftermath as a broadcast journalist.
McWilliams and Nesbitt came of age in a deeply segregated society where politics were personal and violence was intimate. Like Americans today, our guests and their communities had to navigate living together in an atmosphere of deep mistrust. We can learn from their mistakes and their successes in rebuilding trust and constructive communication.
Music in this episode by Gavin Luke, John and the Land of Plenty, August Wilhelmsson, Blue Dot Sessions, Jon Algar, and Martin Landh,
Great Hatred and Little Room: Building Peace in Northern Ireland
This is an AI generated transcript
Tim Phillips: Welcome to How Do We Get Through This, a podcast miniseries from Beyond Conflict. I'm Tim Phillips, and I've been working in the field of conflict resolution for the last three decades. On the show, we're reaching out to leaders who shaped the course of history during tense and divisive times, much like the ones we're living through now in the United States.
The point is to help Americans like you and me navigate the uncertainty and the fear surrounding the election and what comes after in our first episode, we focus on the end of apartheid in South Africa. Now, we're going to look at how Protestants and Catholics brought peace to Northern Ireland,
The Northern Ireland conflict known by many as the troubles lasted 3 decades, close to 4, 000 people were killed, And more than 50, 000 men, women, and children were wounded by political violence.
This is in a nation of less than 2 million people. These statistics do not take into account suicides, a huge increase in domestic violence and drug addiction that still burdens many communities. In the early 20th century after a push for Irish independence The British partitioned Ireland into two parts the republic of Ireland where most people were catholic became an independent country The northeast part of the island where protestants were dominant became northern Ireland and remains part of the United Kingdom today The period of violent conflict known as the Troubles began in the late 1960s.
At its core, this conflict, like many, was about access to power, equality, and identity. On one side, you had a Protestant or Unionist community. They had the majority of power and privileges in Northern Ireland. They identified as British and were keen to maintain and defend that identity at all cost.
On the other side, you had a Catholic community that faced discrimination in housing, education, and employment. They saw themselves as Irish, not British, and wished for unification with the rest of Ireland. Facing discrimination and indifference to their demands for equal treatment, In dignity. activists in the Catholic community organized a civil rights campaign modeled on the US Civil Rights Movement.
They brought attention to the injustices they faced and called for reform. The reaction from the unionist community and the British government was indifference and often violence suppression. Catholic demonstrators were shot, beaten, arrested, and many were detained without trial. As a result, many in the Catholic community took up arms.
And in the midst of this crisis, paramilitary groups emerged on both sides and inflicted large scale violence throughout Northern Ireland and the United Kingdom. Our focus for this episode is on the negotiations to end this conflict, which resulted in a peace deal known as the Good Friday Agreement.
That agreement is viewed around the world as a model for achieving peace and reconciliation in a deeply divided society. With its history of discrimination and intense, intimate violence, it took courageous individuals to try and make peace. Those who did so were challenged by their own communities, often putting their lives on the line.
My guests today are two such individuals. Monica McWilliams was the founder of the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition, a political party made up of women from both sides of the divide. And the first women's political party in the world. A Catholic, Monica was an activist in the civil rights movement. And in the talks to end the conflict, she had to sit at the table next to somebody who had killed a very close friend in university.
Over months and years of negotiations, Monica came to realize that she had more in common with those she has seen as her enemy or adversary. And that together, they could come to better understand each other. And explore the fears and stereotypes that underlie much of the conflict. She's since gone on to serve as a member of the National Assembly, as the Chief Commissioner for Human Rights, and continues to work on social justice and peace building in Northern Ireland and around the world.
Mike Nesbitt is the leader of the Ulster Unionist Party and the current Minister of Health for Northern Ireland. At the time of the Good Friday Agreement and in its aftermath, he was a journalist on national television. Mike's political party was a major roadblock to the peace process for many years.
And when their leaders finally came around to accept the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, several prominent members broke away from the party. Viewing the peace agreement as a sellout to murderers and terrorists. Like many in Northern Ireland, Mike had lost friends and family members to the conflict. He's worked to bring his party and community to share a government and a society with those they once viewed as their bitter enemies.
While peace has held for the past 26 years in Northern Ireland, the conflict left a legacy of loss, pain, and mistrust. That still burdens many today, but instead of fighting in the streets, Catholics and Protestant political leaders work out their disagreements through a democratic process.
So I want to start maybe with you, Monica, and ask a bit about your background. Where did you grow up in Northern Ireland? How did you get involved eventually in politics and what led you to play in the role that you played?
Monica McWilliams: I grew up in a small country village in County Derry, divided down the middle.
Catholic and Protestant, or those who saw themselves as Unionist and those who preferred to see themselves as Nationalist or Irish. We went to different schools, we went to different youth clubs, even though the Orange Hall had great dances on a Saturday night. I never crossed its door because I went to the Parish Hall, which was right next door.
And so it was a shame in many ways. Not to grow up with your neighbours. And the buses, I had to travel an hour, over an hour to school. we sat at the back. We were the convent girls, referred to by the boys as the virgins on the hill. And they sat at the front. And we hardly got to know them. So all those years until I was 18, I never met a Protestant.
which was absolutely ridiculous. I wanted to because I wanted to see how different they were, but I didn't get to know that till I crossed the door of the university in Belfast and discovered that actually they were no different whatsoever. Ideologically, constitutionally, they might have had different desires and interests, but we were all the same.
So it was a very divisive, divided society, and even as children, we didn't cross the aisle. I hear this expression from the United States about crossing the aisle, but that applies to adults in terms of politics and political parties. But imagine from a very early age, children not being encouraged to cross the aisles.
And so little wonder that there was this mythology about the other.
Tim Phillips: And what shaped that in Northern Ireland, that you grew up in a very small town, in a nation of less than 2 million people to live like that?
Monica McWilliams: Well, obviously it goes back in history. When Northern Ireland was partitioned in 1922, there was a bitterness that set in, and I was very conscious of that.
That lasted throughout my childhood and early adulthood to the point where we became active in the civil rights movement as a family. And that's where I cut my political teeth in that movement as a teenager and as a very young woman. And saw some terrible things happen to the peaceful protesters that should not have happened.
CS gas being fired, rubber bullets being fired, and indeed live bullets being fired on those marches. And those are memories that teenagers do not forget. And it leads me to the question, do you become more radicalised as a result? Are you encouraged to take up militant means to resolve your difficulties?
I didn't, nor did my family. There was the understanding of 17 and 18 year olds going into a militant direction. Because we didn't sit down and talk, or dialogue, or even have the very basic rights understood as being legitimate.
Tim Phillips: Do you think if education was integrated at a young age, things would have gone differently?
Monica McWilliams: I'm not sure, Tim, that it could have, because it was bigger than just being integrated. You actually had to give the rights to which people were entitled, the right not to be discriminated against in terms of fair allocation of housing, or the fair allocation of jobs, or indeed the gerrymandering, which you're familiar with in the United States.
And so I carried a placard that said one man, one vote. It should have said one person won't vote, but feminism came much later.
Tim Phillips: Well, that's really powerful. And I want to turn to Mike Nesbitt. Mike, could you maybe just share a bit about your upbringing and actually how it compares or contrasts with Monica described about growing up in Northern Ireland around the same time?
Mike Nesbitt: Well, I was born in the capital city of Belfast, just in time to go up through what we so euphemistically call our troubles, where over a period of about 30 years, around three and a half thousand people lost their lives. Now, I know for an American audience. We lost around 3, 000 people in a single day's terrorism, known as 9/11, 3500 people over three decades maybe doesn't sound like a lot, but if you scale it up pro rata, the equivalent level of violence in the United States would have seen something like 700, 000 Americans killed.
And I believe that's about 12 times the number, uh, who died in the Vietnam war. So it's no surprise that, uh, we're still at this remove, trying to deal with the legacy and the consequences of it. I remember the civil rights movement, you know, when we partitioned the island in 1922, we guaranteed that in Northern Ireland, you had a built in and very solid unionist stroke Protestant majority.
And then my analysis. There were two byproducts for that. The first was you could have an election to the local government every month if you wanted. Unionists were always going to win. And I think because of that, my forebearers didn't feel the compunction to reach out to our Catholic nationalist neighbors, reach out to people like Monica.
And say, look, come with us on a journey to build this new little country into the best little state it can possibly be. And that, of course, led to a growing sense of frustration and anger, and that exploded in the late 1960s, I think, in two ways. With the civil rights movement Monica referred to, who I think were out to transform the state and how it was governed.
But the second development was the birth of the provisional IRA, who, from my perspective, were out to destroy the state.
Tim Phillips: Well, thank you, Mike. One of the things that I've learned in my time in Northern Ireland in the peace process just observing and trying to help at different moments Was that you had very different realities operating in a very small space not only in terms of that lived experience that you talked about Monica, but also the narrative of Northern Ireland the narrative of its history and the future of the nation And what I mean is, for example, I met many Catholics who would talk about three, four, six centuries of oppression, and that whatever form of resistance was justified, and yet I remember hearing from people on the Unionist side, maybe a bit more to the right of your party, Mike, were saying that what we're looking at is not centuries of oppression, we're looking at an aggravated crime wave that wasn't justified.
And whether it's a civil rights activism or the armed violence of the IRA and the Loyalist paramilitaries, they really sort of tore apart the community even more. So, you know, in the midst of all this were a lot of competing identities. Am I wrong to think that that was happening?
Mike Nesbitt: No, no, that, that was happening.
You've mentioned two concepts that strike a chord with me. And the first is. It's moments. So if you read Charles Dickens, he talks about memorable days in people's lives. And what he means is it's a day that kind of shapes the rest of your life. And he uses the analogy of a chain. So if it's a good memorable day, you'll be wrapped in a chain of roses.
And if it's bad, it's a chain of thorns. So the memorable day for me, the moment was the 25th of January, 1973, when the IRA blew up my father's business. He had a linen business in Belfast. And in the moment of that explosion, every certainty in his life disappeared, but every responsibility remained. He was still married.
He still had three young children. He still had to run a car and a household, but suddenly the income stream had gone. And that's what got me interested in the human cost of conflict and in the politics of Northern Ireland because I was supposed to be the third generation to run that business. But for a variety of reasons, dad was unable to get it up and running again.
And so after university I became a broadcast journalist and my fascination again was with the human cost of the conflict and the politics of the place and I covered it all the way through to and beyond the 1998 agreement. The other thing you said that interested me was conflicting narratives. It doesn't matter whether it's conflict related incidents or civil rights movements or whatever.
If you look at it through the five W's, who, what, when, where, why. We know who, organizationally, uh, we know what, bomb, shooting, denial of rights, we know when and where, so the only bit that's contested is why, and there are conflicting and differing narratives about why certain things happen, and I think the best thing we can do in terms of dealing with that legacy is allow everybody to lay down their narrative, confident enough that future generations can tell us why, will agree with you when they study it.
Tim Phillips: Well, thank you for sharing that, Mike. And I was not aware of what happened to your father and your family. You know, um, it's the intimacy of the violence in Northern Ireland that I think makes this story powerful, not just for the United States, but I think frankly, globally, because everybody thinks their situation is unique, that nobody understands how they're suffering and what they're struggling through.
And as an American, When I started doing this work three decades ago, it just struck me that at the end of the day, people respond to the experience of violence and humiliation or conflict on a human level. And people can learn from the experience of others. And so as an American, hearing both of you right now, just reminds me that there are so many of those connection points to the American story.
And we're in a big country of over 330 million people, 50 states, and yet contested narratives, identities, legacies. People increasingly live apart from each other, um, where we get our information even more so is siloed from each other and we don't know each other.
You know, Monica, a lot of our listeners are probably not aware that the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland was modeled on the U S civil rights movement. What shaped that movement in Northern Ireland?
Monica McWilliams: Well, the three demands were to get the franchise equally universally to all irrespective of political identity or religion. Um, it was fair allocation of housing because housing had been discriminated against. Catholics who had families were not able to get a house when a single Protestant woman, for instance, was allocated a house.
And that became the kind of symbol when one of the politicians then began to squat with other women in a particular area of Northern Ireland and it led to a, the Homeless League and eventually led to the origins of the civil rights movement and likewise for employment. And it was much later that we introduced an act known as the Fair Employment Act and the community from which Mike came from was still resistant and said not an inch and no further.
Tim Phillips: I know the two of you have known each other for a long time and not necessarily as friends. Monica, after the Good Friday Agreement was signed you were elected as a representative in the Assembly, which is a regional legislature in Northern Ireland. And I know there was a moment, Monica, after you lost your seat in that assembly, that the political got personal for you and Mike.
Can you talk about what happened and how you worked through it together?
Monica McWilliams: Mike and I had had issues and so Mike, as a broadcaster, interviewed me when I lost my seat. We had formed a political party made up of both sides, all women, but men were supporting us because there were two issues in Northern Ireland, the lack of women in political decision making and also the fact that the lack of diversity amongst the political parties in terms of identities.
So we were Catholic, Protestant, pro British, pro Irish, and neither. And that was important because others felt that there were identities more important. than just their political or religious identity. And so, when I lost my seat, I went into the studio, and Mike said to me, well, you'll have to find another political party.
And I was quite hurt and quite shocked when Mike thought that, you know, it was, um, something that I would run off and do and take the opportunity to jump into another party. And then he said, and the next time I wanted political opinion, and I asked my mother. Now, this program was being broadcast across the whole of Northern Ireland, and I was quite stunned because I thought, okay, I'm sure your mother has lots of wisdom and good political thinking, but she didn't run for office.
She didn't stand in seven elections. She didn't face the misogyny of the people who didn't want to see women in public office. And I was. And so I wrote to the company that Mike was working for and said that I didn't think this was very fair. Especially when a woman loses her seat and she's getting pushed into the ground as a result instead of saying, Well, you had a good run at it and I hope others will come in that direction in the future.
And it took a long time for Mike and I to reconcile. And Mike apologized. And there's the power of the basis of forming a different relationship. Mike acknowledged that it was probably on my end, putting himself in my shoes, not something that was worthy at that moment, and probably a little bit humiliating from my perspective.
I really appreciated that apology, and we've been friends ever since. Despite the fact that we come from very different backgrounds. I also appreciate his contribution to public service because Mike is one of those individuals that has challenged his own side and I worked with people like that during the peace talks.
I always say that you can be clever but you may not be very wise and that wisdom comes from talking to people who think differently and you then begin to rethink and see life through a different lens, that enables you to both the chemistry of having that relationship.
Tim Phillips: Well, thank you for sharing that Monica and Mike as well, because you've done a very good job of sort of illuminating the reality of Northern Ireland as you were growing up.
And I think it's important for the listener to understand both the level of violence, so as not to ignore it, but also these very sort of separated communities. that share so much in common. Monica, you'll appreciate when Roelf Meyer and others came from South Africa in the mid 90s, what shocked them was to see that these were Christians, all white, fighting each other.
And they came from a country where there was different tribal traditions, different races, different ethnicities, and on and on and on. And I remember Mandela was shocked as well to think, you know, just that this level of, not only enmity, but how Identities and the narratives that shape those identities can tear apart communities that others refine, surprisingly.
Monica McWilliams: It tore us so far apart that we ended up an eye for an eye till we were nearly all blind. And it was Mandela when we went to South Africa during the peace talks who said to us, you're all white, you're all supposedly Christian, you all speak English. You really do hate each other, and more importantly, you've brought apartheid back to South Africa because I'm having to do my talk twice because you won't sit in the same room.
That was a year before we signed the peace agreement. I remember the leader of Mike's party, David Trimble, saying, and others eventually saying, It's a pity we didn't actually engage in dialogue earlier because there were too many rumours, too many lies flying around the place about what you were saying about us and what we thought about you.
That it was only when we engaged directly that we began to find the answers through. what we could do together.
Tim Phillips: Mike, Monica and I know a friend from Israel named Naomi Chazan, and she once said, an enemy is an abstract concept, but sitting across from somebody is human. And it just shows that, you know, what, what you just referenced, Monica, is part of this experience.
And we see it here in the United States. And now on top of all this, we have social media and we have all these platforms that give people a voice, but it's very abstract. It's very intangible. So you're now a leader of a political party called the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition. Mike, you're a journalist looking in from the outside, but coming from the unionist community, you eventually become head of one of the largest unionist parties, the Ulster Unionist Party.
But in those negotiations, Monica, I've heard you reference that one of the first days you sat down at the table, To your left was somebody that killed somebody very close to you when you were in college. What was that like?
Monica McWilliams: Well, I had to do a bit of work to find out as he actually was the person, but yes, it was the Ulster Democratic party who had been affiliated to the Loyalist paramilitary group known as the UDA.
My friend was 20. And he didn't turn up one evening and we wondered where he was. And word came through that he had been hitchhiking the same as the rest of us. Um, and the person that gave him the last lift. Took him to a UDA club. He was tortured in it. I had four bullets put through his head and dumped where we used to play sport together at the Queen's University playing fields.
So it had a huge impact on me at that very formative second year of my student life. So when I sat down at the table, yes, Tim, I looked around, but it wasn't just me. I looked around at the table and members of Mike's party had, one of them, John Taylor, had 12 bullets. put in his face and body by the official IRA and survived. One man had run a pub and watched someone being killed in front of him.
And Peter Robinson, another member of a party, had someone, a friend, a good friend, aged 23, shot dead. So there was hardly anybody at the table that didn't know somebody. So you put all of that in your head. And what I thought was, this is the reason why I'm here. I don't ever want this to go on again, and if we can make some headway and find our way to a peace agreement, perhaps we will stop the violence.
We might not stop all the sectarian hatred, but at least we will put the guns down, and the bombs. It was a, a powerful moment, really, and I thought, it's incredible that you sit, have to sit at the table with people who have killed your loved ones. But that's what you do when you're trying to enter a process.
It's not an endorsement. It's not an appeasement. It is about getting the issues out there. And indeed there was a lot of venting as a result of that terrible hurt and harm that had been done. to most of the people around the table. But eventually we got to where we needed to go, which was what can actually get us out of this quagmire.
Tim Phillips: Monica, in a deeply polarized environment like the one you faced, similar to the one we're facing in the U. S. today, compromise can seem like a dirty word. I remember you saying that compromise was alien to the political culture in Northern Ireland. How did you reframe that concept of compromise?
Monica McWilliams: Yeah, it was actually Mike's party that challenged me one day when I went out to speak to the media. And everyone knew that at some stage we were going to have to compromise on the huge demands especially.
The Ulster Unionist Party and Sinn Féin, who had the opposite ends of a continuum, in terms of their desires for the future. And compromise was a language that we were accustomed to using. And so I said it to the media. And when I came back into the room, everyone, kind of, well, Mike's party in particular, but so did others, challenged me and said, it's easy for you.
your party. You don't have to compromise very much. It's us who are going to have to give so much away. And I said, you're probably right on both counts, but we are going to have to accommodate each other. And there are things that we want to, as women in this process, that you probably You don't want us to have, but you're going to have to accommodate us too.
And so from that day on, I started using the word accommodation because it wasn't just that you were ideologically opposed on a couple of points, but it was, there was pretty much every party had different demands. Some wanted prisoners released, some wanted the police reformed, some wanted the constitution of Ireland changed.
Some wanted, like us, more women in future political decision making and civil society to be more involved. So you do have to accommodate and that's not easy because, you know, there are priorities. Yes, the word accommodation became much more relevant than the word compromise.
Tim Phillips: And Mike, can I just turn to you because at that moment you were a leading broadcaster in the Unionist community looking in at this process and having a different perspective.
What, what surprised you? Also more, I guess, more importantly, as I think of the United States, what evolved as people got to know each other in that, I guess, several year process of the Good Friday Agreement?
Mike Nesbitt: The most surprising thing was that they found a way to reach an agreement. And I don't think there were many people in Northern Ireland, including the cadre of journalists who were covering the talks, who felt that that was really going to be possible.
But, uh, I have an outstanding memory of the last day, the 10th of April, Good Friday of 1998. At about, say, two o'clock in the morning, I remember getting in my car, driving home. I wanted to have a shower, change my suit, freshen up for the next day's coverage, which was to be the last. I have two sons, and at that time, PJ was three and a half, Chris was 10 months old.
And when I arrived home, I found them in bed, sleeping with their mom. And I just had this surge of emotion, thinking, if this is going to work, into a deal. You guys are going to grow up in the same city I grew up in, but in an entirely different environment and atmosphere. You're going to be safe. You're going to have access to the whole city because during the troubles, of course, the city was kind of segregated.
You had, you know, areas that were loyalist areas that were nationalist areas that were Irish areas that were British. And you didn't really cross the line for fear of mortal danger. What Monica and everybody else at the talks did. Was inject hope, hope into the people of Northern Ireland. And after 30 years of violence at the scale I'm talking about, that was such a welcome development.
Suddenly there was hope that it wasn't going to be that way. It didn't have to be that way. That actually it could be better. And if you read the agreement, the first, the first commitment is to building relationships. Relationships based on reconciliation, on tolerance of each other, building trust, offering each other mutual respect.
And to me, that is the only solid foundation on which to build a way forward. Those are the concepts, uh, that I think you, you have to look at if you're in that sort of situation or indeed the situation America. It finds itself in today,
Tim Phillips: * short music break*
obviously one of the most important drivers of our politics in the United States today is the fear of the demographic and cultural change that we see happening and also the increasing economic inequality.
And I don't think it's being partisan, but being accurate to say that one party over the last several decades. Has sort of weaponized that fear and that change, and we're sort of at a moment of, one would argue, an existential threat in the United States. And, um, President Clinton, who played a key role in Europe's peace process a couple of years ago, said that when he was running for governor of Arkansas in the early 1980s, He always asked himself, how do I get on the right side of fear?
How do I have somebody feel like they're being heard and move them in a healthy direction? When we have not just the United States around the world, people who see fear, see opportunity. And so this is where I think there's so much similarity between what you're describing in Northern Ireland and the ongoing change that you face, right?
I remember when I started going there three decades ago, if I got the numbers right, the population was closer to 60 percent Protestant, 40 percent Catholic. 25 years later, we now see slightly more Catholics. You have Brexit, and you may have a referendum on unification somewhere in the coming decade or more.
And so the change that people feared has come along. And not only that, the political party of what used to be the IRA is now the dominant party in Northern Ireland. And yet, Northern Ireland remains peaceful, and when I think of the United States today, not only do we have a changing nation, but we're also in the midst of an election.
That, depending on the outcome, one side or the other will view the result as representing an existential threat to their identity. to their futures and how they see themselves as Americans. And this is where I'd really love from both of you to say, what would you say to the American people?
Monica McWilliams: Well, first, I think you've got to get your institutions in a place where people trust them.
For us, we did reform the courts and the criminal justice system as part of the agreement. And as you know, the executive, the courts, um, and the parliament, in your case, the Congress, all have to be respected. in terms of decision making. And where that doesn't happen, you need to have oversight. That's why I hope you have your regulators who are in the electoral system absolutely in place before, during, and after to make sure that it is done right and seen to be done right, that it's transparent and legitimate.
Because oversight, as we've discovered, after we made the peace agreement, it needed to be monitored. It needed to be implemented. And it needed to be seen by the people that it was working. And that's how you build trust. I have concerns about the United States because you have a factor there that we didn't, which is access to guns.
It was the case, and I did the studies here, that we were awash with illegal guns. As well as having more legal guns than elsewhere in the United Kingdom because of the conflict, our police were armed, where they're not armed, in either Ireland or the UK. And still are, which shows you that we still haven't got through that one yet.
But it was the extent of guns that was a worry for me because I was working on violence against women and girls. And I was able to show that femicide, the killing of women, was much higher here. Now your situation. Multiply that by 50 in terms of access to weapons, probably more, but also the number who believe in their right to carry those arms to destroy a process if they don't think it's working for them.
So that's a concern and I am already seeing the rise of militias. We actually had Channel 4 or Sky News here had a broadcaster interviewing a person in Illinois at a village fair. So And that gentleman stood forward and said, if I don't get the results I want, the guns will come out. And he said it to camera.
So there's another issue. He believed in the freedom of speech. The freedom of speech to the point where you can kill someone, or say you're going to kill someone, and not be prosecuted for that as hate crime? So, again, our situation is slightly different in that we do have regulations. And there is now new regulations being brought in around social media.
So, you are facing difficult times, but I do believe that if you put your systems in place, particularly those for oversight, and we had to do it by bringing in international people because people did not even believe that the people in their own country could be trusted.
Tim Phillips: Well, thank you, Monica. I want to go to you, Mike, because you, again, had the perspective of being a journalist looking in and looking for the story, but also being a political leader As Monica raised, we have to be very attuned to the rule of law and the election integrity, protecting citizens, protecting those involved in, in the voting.
And in the United States, it's, there's not a national electoral system. It's not only state by state, but it's county by county. And so the potential for manipulation, uh, is real. And I want to go back to one of the themes that's come up, and that is the building of relationships that gets sustained.
through profoundly difficult times. And what would you say about the need here in this country? Because, you know, whatever the outcome, you're going to have half the population, at least half the voting population outraged and seeing it as a threat on existential levels. And if former president Trump wins, I think you're going to see mass demonstrations in a way we haven't seen in the United States.
If Kamala Harris wins, you're going to see not only demonstrations, you're going to see other activity. And what I have seen in Northern Ireland and elsewhere is necessity to building credible relationships across these divides when things are really, really bad. What would you say about that? Because, That is so key at this moment.
Mike Nesbitt: Yeah. A couple of points. I think trust is absolutely key. It's incredibly precious, but it's very easily lost. And if you don't have trust, you can't have trust without developing your relationships. Uh, one thing that has fascinated me since, uh, we marked the 25th anniversary of our agreement was, If we were trying to do it today in 2024, could it be done with the advent of social media?
And, and some of the architects of the agreement have said publicly, well that would have made it much, much, much more difficult. But privately they say, not a chance. We couldn't have done it because it is too easy to put out all. An alternative truth to put out your own truth, which bears no resemblance to what is actually happening or what has actually happened.
And in terms of the dangers, I think it was best summarized last March when we marked the 25th anniversary of the agreement. When the talks chairman, Senator George Mitchell returned to Belfast, he made an amazing speech. At Queen's University, and I would encourage anybody to, to look it up on the internet.
It is the best speech I've ever heard. And what I warned about was that beware the 100 percenters. Because if you're a 100 percenter, there is no room for compromise. And that's where I fear America may be going, particularly on the Trump side. And that, to me, is the road to nowhere. So, there is an area where you can maintain your values and your principles.
With no threat to them, but you can understand what you can do and say to somebody who's taking a different view that allows you to move forward together. So, you know, to go back to our circumstances, when I first became leader of the Ulster Unionist party, the late Martin McGuinness was leading Sinn Féin, and it was a proud former commander of the IRA, the organization that blew up my father's business.
So I had to find a way to of working with him. And what we did was we went for a very long walk one day, just ourselves, no officials, no note takers, no special advisors. And we disagreed particularly on the past because he felt that my forebearers left him no choice but to turn to violence to achieve a more equitable society.
And my view was, well, if you pick up a gun, Martin, that is to make a choice. If you detonate a bomb, you choose to press the button. And then he said, well, I didn't grow up in the same circumstances that he did. in Derry. And I said, no, I didn't. But John Hume did. And he chose a non violent way to get to where he wanted to be.
So my fear is we are becoming just divided. You're either this or you are that. And the biggest problem we've had here is Brexit. I think that more than the demographic changes, more than any other development is the greatest threat long term to Northern Ireland's place in the United Kingdom, because it has been so divisive and unsettling.
And I think a lot of People who would describe themselves as nationalists and who would say, I would love to see United Ireland one day, aspirationally, previously would not have been activists because they were too busy earning good money and having their children well educated. But because of Brexit, they feel they've been denied their sense of Europeanness, which was a link.
with the people in the Republic. And I think some of them have now said, not only do I aspire to United Ireland, I'm going to be actively working
Tim Phillips: to achieve it. Wow. Thank you. I mean, that conversation with Martin, I would have loved to hear that whole conversation because that captures a lot of history right there.
Monica McWilliams: But the point about that is what Mike has just illustrated, and I think Ralph Meyer illustrates when he talks about his relationship with Sir Ramaphosa on opposite sides, was how do we learn from the other side? What are they thinking? What is it, not just in terms of what led you to do what you did, but how are we going to work together in the future?
Pick up the phone at the moment of crisis and talk to the person. Find out. What's going on? I said, and it was enormously important for me, was to invite people here to my home at the start of the talks. We were strangers. I needed to get to know them, sit down and have dinner with them. You reach out. You reach out and you find someone that you can link with, engage with, knowing that they won't want the same outcome, but that you need to figure this out before it becomes violent.
Before you go back to violence, in our case, and luckily we have never since we signed the agreement, it has worked, but equally now in the United States, is a question of prevention, it's a question of sustaining whatever piece you've got, and getting through it, and then setting down some really strong codes, whether that comes from your election, county, districts, states, right up to the federal level.
that this is how we are going to protect our society, our nation.
Mike Nesbitt: You know, Monica, you're, you're reminding me of going to New York last March for an event for the 25th anniversary, and it was the National Committee on American Foreign Policy. And around one big conference table, all the main Northern Ireland parties were represented.
And we talked for about an hour and a half. And yes, there were moments of tension, but more regularly, there were moments of agreement. And afterwards, I asked the host, how did you think that went? I said, My goodness, we couldn't even get all our political parties and viewpoints to sit at the same table the way you people are doing it, never mind reach the sort of level of agreement.
Tim Phillips: I think what you had to say, both of you, was profoundly important. And I remember about two years ago, I was in Belfast. Monica was part of a film crew that was looking at lessons learned from Northern Ireland. And when I was checking out of the hotel in Belfast, there was a man who, I could tell by his tattoos and his accent, was probably from the Loyalist community.
And he was a doorman. And he said to me, what were you doing here with these cameras? And I said, we were interviewing people across the divide for lessons learned in the United States. And I said to him, it's coming up on your 25th anniversary since the signing of the peace agreement. What do you think about it now?
And he leaned in and he said, you know, I was a member of one of the paramilitary units. I killed people. But when I look back, he said, I regret what I stood for, what I believed in, who I listened to and what I said. And he said, if there's a message to the American people, don't go in the direction that we went.
And I think for, for this conversation, as an American, what you shared has been really powerful and it's only touching upon in this episode, the profound experience and so many other lessons. That can be taken from Northern Ireland and shared with the American people at this stage. And in closing, Mike, I don't know if you want to say anything or Monica, but I certainly appreciate this time together.
Monica McWilliams: Well, those words were very profound of the security person and I'm very glad that he managed to get a job. Because many of them didn't because they had criminal convictions for the rest of their lives, which prevent them from getting posts because I'm still working on that. So my point would be that that was then and this is now.
And so you can look back and reflect and learn from it. Um, and I think taking responsibility for not leading people down a path that leads them into jail or leads them, as young people, with a conviction. And the armchair warriors sit back with their violence of the tongue that leads to the violence of the gun.
Or the assaults on the streets or the tearing down of your own community and your businesses, and that can be prevented. So I think that's a lesson from that story that you told that it is really important is some will show remorse, others won't. Some will say that was then and this is now. And some will say, I will not be strangled by what has happened in the past, but I am going to do things differently in the future.
Mike Nesbitt: I would say, think about when you open the last chapter of your life. Think about when your own mortality starts to weigh heavily. When you get to that position and you look back, can you say, no regrets? Can you say, I did the right thing? Can you say, I tried my best to reach an accommodation and celebrate diversity?
And if you can't, you're probably in trouble.
Tim Phillips: Okay, so what can we take away from this conversation? Some of Monica and Mike's suggestions are long term solutions. Like election monitoring or regulating social media, but for now Here are three lessons that we as everyday Americans can apply to help us get through the election and the transfer of power that will come after.
Take away Number one: Apologies matter and forgiveness can transform relationships When mike interviewed Monica after she was voted out of office He asked her if she was going to leave the party. She helped start he also told her That the next time he wanted a political opinion, he'd ask his mother.
Monica felt that he insulted her by questioning her loyalty, and implied that as a woman, her opinions and contributions weren't very important. You might say, by going on a news program hosted by someone from the opposite party, Monica was walking into the lion's den. News commentators used that phrase recently, when Kamala Harris sat down for an interview on the Fox News Network, and when Donald Trump appeared in a Univision.Town hall, If you think of your opponent's home turf as a hostile environment, then maybe insults are par for the course. But insults don't promote real understanding. And they deepen the political divide. In Monica's case, she believes she deserved an apology.
And eventually Mike did sincerely apologize to her, acknowledging that the words he said made her feel humiliated. Out of that apology came a real friendship and mutual respect, even while they continue to disagree on big political issues. You don't have to be a politician or a public figure to benefit from the power of forgiveness.
Acknowledging the dignity of someone who's different from you, And admitting when you're wrong, rather than sitting in resentment, has ripple effects across communities and society.
Takeaway number two: language matters and how you say it can shift mindsets. As Monica told us in Northern Ireland, the word compromise represented loss and humiliation.
For example, leaders of Sinn Féin, The political party associated with the IRA risked being seen as traitors within their community if they got too far out in front of their group when it came to negotiating peace. So Monica tried replacing the word compromise with the word accommodate, and it shifted the energy in the room.
Suddenly, leaders across the divides are a space for themselves in their communities. In their country's future take away. Number three. Peace is worth fighting for because the alternative is unbearable As a protestant in Belfast Mike was born with advantages, but he also grew up around violence Like when his father's shop was bombed.
He lived in an atmosphere of fear, knowing that there were Catholic controlled parts of the city where it wasn't safe for him to visit. When he came home on the eve of the Good Friday Agreement and looked at his young children sleeping, he felt a surge of emotion knowing that they would grow up in the same city But safe from the violence and divisions that colored his life.
As difficult as it was for his community to surrender some of their power and privileges. And and despite the criticism from some. that they were giving into terrorism, a life free from everyday violence was worth it. In this country, there are those who seek to hold on to power by violent means, or to use force to take back the control they feel has been taken from them.
But if political violence becomes normalized, like it was in Northern Ireland, Generations of both sides will face horrific consequences.
Thanks so much for joining me for the second episode of How Do We Get Through This. If you haven't heard the first episode, go back and listen. It will give you a greater appreciation for Monica's comments about learning from people like Roelf Meyer and Nelson Mandela.
Let us know what you thought or how you've applied these principles in your life. Get in touch through our website at beyondconflictint.org You can also leave us a rating and a review in apple podcast or leave a comment on spotify and please tell a friend how do we get through this is produced and edited by Andrea Muraskin with additional editing by Ashley Milne-Tyte. We had marketing help from Summer Heidish.
And I'm Tim Phillips. Our third episode in this series will come out about two weeks after the election. We would, we will be joined by a global panel of guests to help us figure out where we go from here. Make sure to subscribe or follow the show so you don't miss it. In the meantime, you can find more resources on countering polarization, understanding the other, and strengthening the democracy on Beyond Conflict's YouTube page and website.
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