Address by Mairead Corrigan Macguire

An Address by Mairead Corrigan Maguire
Nobel Peace Prize winner

Marquette University
Milwaukee, Wisconsin
October 27, 2003

Thank you very much indeed. My dear friends, it's a great joy for me to be with you this evening, and I would like to thank each and every one of you for coming out tonight to do me the honor of listening and sharing with me. I would like to thank Father Wild and Marquette University, and the student government body for inviting me to come to the university. And I would like to thank especially Susan Haarman, because I kept getting these e-mails to my home saying "please come to Marquette," and I felt I would like to do that. So thank you to Susan for writing. Never be afraid when you want to do something. Just get on e-mail and do it.

I'm standing up here and it reminds me in the early days of these people that I went along with to visit a Protestant church. The minister pointed up to his pulpit and he said to me, "Every Sunday, I stand up there in that pulpit, six feet above contradiction." Well, I'm not six feet above contradiction. Like you, I'm just trying to see a way through this maze and find a few answers and do my best. Some things I get right and most things I get wrong.

I'm not an expert on any situation, and I don't have the answers to Northern Ireland's problems. But I would like to share with you some of the things that we have learned along the way that may be of help to you as we altogether struggle to build a human family and a civilization that is worthy of the name of good men and women.

I think Northern Ireland is a fascinating example for anyone to study. There are only one and a half million people in the north of Ireland and I believe that here, in your town as well, there is a similar number in the greater region of your city. So just to have one and a half million people, haven't we created an awful lot of trouble for the world? And isn't it time we got our act together, as you say in America?

If you want, really, Northern Ireland is a deeply complex situation. I remember some young Americans coming one year and thinking that they had read a lot of books and they had an idea of what it might be. After spending some time with us, they realized how complicated the situation was, and they were as confused as we were.

But it is a situation with one and half million people that has experienced in the last 35 years a very deep ethnic political conflict. It has social, economic, historical and religious roots going back centuries. But that mixture of all of these different problems needs a multidimensional approach to solve it. It will not be solved quickly, and it will not be solved easily, but it is solvable. We can actually solve this problem in Northern Ireland, and that is our biggest challenge. Cause if we can do it in Northern Ireland, it can be done anywhere. Why have we got to do it? Because the world has changed so much.

When we had the Cold War going on and the East/West relationships, and when the Berlin Wall came down, we thought, "Right, things are going to be easier for us. And we have this peace dividend that we can start disarming and spending the money on the real issues." But tragically, what we began to see was a growth of ethnic, political conflicts in many, many, many countries of the world. As we go on, these kind of conflicts will grow, there is no doubt about it. See, that's why we have to study places like Northern Ireland and say, "How can it be solved?"

The most recent of our conflicts started in 1969, and I'm not going to go into the history of it all, but I will say to you that from '69 up to '76, we find ourselves in growing violence. We had the violence of the IRA, the violence of the British, we had the violence of the royal paramilitary, and every day in Northern Ireland bombs going off. Nobody knew how to stop this, and we find ourselves tragically in 1976 really on the brink of civil war because we thought the two major communities were actually going to go into a violent conflict and we were going to become a Bosnia, as we so easily we could have become.

And something happened in '76. My sister's three young children were killed along with a young IRA man, Donny Lannon, and we came out. We said to people, "Look we have got to stop this violence. We have problems, but we can solve it nonviolently, we can do it a different way." And that was the start of the Peace People, and in the first six months of the Peace People, indeed we were privileged to see a 70 percent decrease in violence. It was shown that the people of Northern Ireland came altogether and said, "Let's do something and change this." But we were also not naive about it because we realized the root cause of our violence had got to be tackled. Violence is only the flower of the root of injustice. You have got to deal with the injustice.

In the '60s, when the civil rights movement came right to Northern Ireland, it was to call for justice because for 50 years, we had majority rule in Northern Ireland, which meant that you had a minority community, which was the Catholic community, with no basic civil liberties. No "one man, one vote," fair employment, all those civil rights. So the root of what was happening in Northern Ireland was a lack of human rights, a lack of equality, a lack of justice.

It's too simple to say it's Catholic and Protestant fighting each other in Northern Ireland. The conflict in Northern Ireland is not about theological differences. It's not over religion, though you would take religion and Northern Ireland and you would understand the problem, because that is also there. But it was essentially a lack of basic human rights that brought the civil rights movement into existence, which was started in the universities by the young students. And it was the inability of those in political power to recognize that when a minority community moves into transition and wants a share of political power, that if you do not move quickly to implement those rights, then conflict can start. Violence can break out, and once the genie is out of the bottle is very hard to get it in. So what we had to begin to deal with was how do we move towards implementing justice, and I compliment the university here because I know the emphasis that you put on working for justice, so that you can indeed have peace. And we worked on issues like the repeal of the Emergency Probations Act, and implementation of proper judicial systems.

Another issue we worked on was the whole question of identity. In ethnic, political conflicts, it's very important to understand the dynamics of ethnicity, the dynamics of identity. In the north of Ireland, we have two mutual communities. These communities, one would describe themselves as British, wanting the union, Protestant. The other community would describe itself as Irish, nationalist, Catholic, not British-Protestant. And these two traditions, cultures, religions have grown up alongside each other, but never learned to become friends. And they put so much into this identity that really they could become murderous, and they have murdered over this identity. That's very important to understand no matter where you live, because if people put so much into their identity that their flag and their country and their religion becomes the way in which they define themselves with passion, then if that is challenged in any way it becomes fearful, it can mobilize into tribes, and it can be very easily be manipulated by governments to go to war against someone who happens to think differently than them. We have done it for centuries and we continue to do it. And unless we as the human family began to mellow these murderous identities, began to realize our common humanity, began to raise above these flags and religions and things that make us capable of murder, that is the biggest challenge that we are faced with.

You know, the psychologist tells us that fear is in all of us. That is true. First thing I believe we are afraid of, they say, is fear of embarrassment. You know what that is. Everybody here understands what I'm saying. You know, you are afraid of kind of saying the wrong things, so you don't say anything. You are afraid of expressing your point of view because maybe people will see that the emperor has no clothes, and you don't really know that much. So we have that awful fear that a lot of us carry with us. Fear of ethnic annihilation, where our identity is challenged in any way. We would then overlap fear of death, another great fear.

You know, fear is one of the things that it's very important that we learn to cope with. Perhaps the psychologist and the religious people can help us as individuals and as groups of people to deal with our fear, because as long as we are fearful, we are not going to change the world. We are going to get stuck where we are in our fear.

I want to tell you a little story and I share this for the young students here especially; it's my gift to you if you want. When I was first awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, I was so frightened and nervous about being given a Nobel Peace Prize. I really didn't know what to do with it. I was very frightened not of the IRA and parliamentary groups, I was very frightened of meeting intellectuals and them knowing that I didn't know anything, which I didn't you know. I realized I know nothing. I know nothing in comparison to what has got to be known, but that's a good place to be at because when you admit that you know nothing, then you have the humility to put it at the hand of someone else and allow them to teach you, so we can teach each other. So everybody has a little bit of knowledge, just a little bit in particular fields. When we start share that knowledge that's how we really grow.

But I really was very afraid of having to carry a Nobel Peace Prize and speak to an audience at Marquette, and I'm sure there are questions. And I carried that kind of insecurity, that lack of confidence, nervousness, whatever you want to call it, with me for quite a while. Then one day somebody told me a lovely story about Ghandi. They say that Ghandi was afraid of snakes and growing up in India that must have been quite a problem. But he tried to overcome this and just couldn't. One day, he met a wise woman -- note indeed it was a wise woman -- and she said to him, "Oh yeah, you can overcome this fear. Just say rama, rama, rama, which is Hindu for God, and say it like you a mantra until you become so aware that there's nothing to be afraid of, but fear itself." They say that Ghandi became fearless.

Well I don't know if it's possible for anybody to become fearless, but I do know that you can overcome that fear and have the courage to do what you have got to do. And to reach an inner freedom that allows you to be happy. You know, we are bound to be happy. I never cease to be amazed, but if you read the Gospels, what it says in the Gospels over and over again is, "all I want is your happiness." Don't be afraid, don't be anxious, don't be concerned. That's what we are born for. When we talk about freedom, the real freedom is being happy enough to actually live your life with great joy and great confidence, and that is possible. That is why you are born. You are born to be a fully alive, happy human being.

If you are going to make a difference, no matter where we live, we only do it by winning our own inner freedom. Once you receive that inner freedom, you see beyond color and greed, and religion. Those things don't really matter. You see God, and beauty and every single human being in the world all around you, and you lead every minute of your life fully alive, and the great privilege that you are alive. Isn't that wonderful. To be alive.

You know, the real gift in life is that we are given this gift without even asking for it, and that everything is given. You are sitting here and your head is growing, your knees are growing. Life is totally given to you, without you even asking. That's wonderful. So you have that right to life, and when you realize your life is sacred and precious and wonderful and beautiful, you don't anybody to kill you and you don't want anybody to hurt you because your first human right is the right to your life. Then you recognize a natural justice that you must give the right to life to every single person you meet. And that's why you must not kill or hurt another human being. That's a truth for me. That's what I believe.

You know, we may want to change the world, but in essence the best thing that we can do is seek our own truth. What is life about? Why are you here? What is truth? Seek your own truth and live it as fully as you possibly can, and then let life take its course. So be very careful when we live in communities and people try to mobilize groups to be flags and nationalism. And then you have to have an enemy, because you have to somehow identify someone that you are prepared to kill. In this deep ethnic, political conflict, we have got to understand what is working in those conflicts and how fear operates.

In Northern Ireland, identities are changing. Unionism is changing. Nationalism is changing. Something new is growing. The people of Northern Ireland are beginning to recognize that we as the Northern Irish people have shared a lot. We have suffered 35 years of death and destruction in Northern Ireland. So we want something different to grow. For too often the unionists have looked to London and nationalists have looked to Dublin and we have looked in separate ways. Now we want to turn that around, and we want to look to each other, and we want to build something different. That is possible. That is where the hope lies.

You know, we had our Good Friday Agreement in 1998, and the majority of people in the north and the south supported the Good Friday Agreement. This means that we would have a part sharing an executive and an devolved government in Northern Ireland. It also means we have a freedom to build around. We have a human rights agenda, an equality agenda, changes in the police. We have a recognition where people have a right to be British or Irish because in the north of Ireland these are the traditions we have.

We have got to learn to work together as British people and Irish people -- as a diverse people -- and that is difficult for us because we never learned the way to do this. It's not enough when you live with diversity. It's not enough to say we will tolerate each other. That's a very negative attitude. It's not enough to say we will respect each other. If we are to solve the problem, we must be proactive and proclaim peoples right to think differently and to act differently. We must allow each other the space to be different because that's what makes life exciting. We have to learn that art and that skill in Northern Ireland because we are not used to it. So we are learning to live with diversity.

It's very interesting that we are challenged and stretched continuously. I might tell you that last June the Peace People together with 17 other organizations spent a year planning a visit with international peace counselors. These are people from 40 countries, 12 different faith traditions, who worked together on peace issues and development issues, and they came to Northern Ireland. In June, we cut quite a historic meeting because it's in an Anglican cathedral in the heart of Belfast. We had people from 12 different faith traditions praying -- Hindu, Muslim, Buddhists, different Christian denominations and in the congregation we had our local Buddhist, Hindus, Christians and Jewish communities, because in Northern Ireland, we don't just have Catholics and Protestants, we have a multi-faith and growing multi-ethnic communities. But that's a challenge for us. How do we understand each other and work together on an equal basis with no superiority, but equally as people from different faith traditions.

There are many paths to God, and that beautiful saying, "Grace lives in the hearts of all men and women." Isn't that a fantastically beautiful statement to come out of the Vatican. In other words, God and all his beauty and mystery works in the heart of all men and women. So we no longer can have a superior attitude to each other. We are all equal in God's sight and equally loved before God. So we have entered the faith movement going on in Northern Ireland as well, which will help along the process.

The other area in which we work is the area of nonviolence. You know, in Ireland north and south, we have a beautiful history of nonviolence. The word boycott comes from an island in the west coast of Ireland. The vast majority of people in Northern Ireland refused to join in the armed struggle, but 3, 600 people died in 35 years. How many people died in the streets of Chicago in one year? You know, more people died in your streets, in the so-called normal society, than died in a violent conflict in Northern Ireland. So we are not a fighting people. We have a history of nonviolence.

The people of Northern Ireland have said the war is over. But we want to go beyond merely taking out the guns of our society. We want to create a culture of nonviolence that's built on an absolute respect for human life and for the environment, and now there is a model of people living dignified, happy and holy lives.

And how can we do this in Ireland north and south? I believe the churches have a tremendous role to play in Ireland today. I believe the religions both, the questioned religion and other religions, have a tremendous role to play. I think the church most stop being ambivalent about violence. The church in Ireland and the churches in America must stop being ambivalent about violence. Violence is against the Christian tradition, but we must come to that in our own lives.

Let me share a little story with you. In the height of the troubles in west Belfast, one morning you would have the British army running up our back garden with their guns, yelling to their soldiers out front, and a few hours later you would have the IRA running up our gardens getting into their cars. So we lived in a situation of pretty awful conflict. And I watched how the soldiers and the police operated in our areas with young people. Often searching them, taking them into custody to a police station, detentions, because we lived under some of the most draconian legislation in the world. All our civil liberties and basic rights were put on hold by the government while they tried to deal with the situation. And it was very hard to witness this kind of injustice in your community by the state. And you know, you cannot stand by and do nothing when there's state injustice or paramilitary injustice.

You know, in the old days we had "fight or flight," but now we know the third way of nonviolence. But it is wrong to stand by when there is an evil in your society and not do something. And I felt very, very confused about what I should do to try to stop the violence of the state. And I wondered, "Do you join, do you ever take a gun to work for justice? Is it ever right? Is there such a thing as a just war to use violence?" I studied the just war theory, and I realized there are too many holes in this theory. This theory doesn't work. It never has worked.

And I went to the cross as a Christian. And the message to me from the cross is love your enemy, do not kill. And for me, the cross is the greatest symbol of nonviolent love and action. But also it is the greatest secret in the Catholic Church today: That we have a history of nonviolence. Because nonviolence is not taught in the Catholic seminaries. Nonviolence is not taught to us. The first three centuries, Christians were totally nonviolent. You know, in the earliest Christian writings say, "I am a Christian, I cannot kill." And yet, after the 3rd century, the church sold out to the state. And today the church continues to sell out to the state. The message of Jesus has been lost.

But you know, we can find that message again, in our own personal lives. Read the Sermon on the Mount. You know, Gandhi once said, "everybody but the Christians know that Jesus was nonviolent." And you know,, one of your great American theologians wrote that you cannot read the scriptures and not know that Jesus was totally nonviolent. Isn't that beautiful? You can't not read the scriptures and not know that Jesus was totally nonviolent. We have got, somehow, again, to bring that Jesus spirit of love and compassion and action and justice back in, in order that we can renew and revive institutions that are dying. Or perhaps institutions have got to die, I don't know. But that spirit will always be alive in the world of Jesus and his nonviolence.

And in Ireland today, if we could get the Catholic churches to proclaim and dedicate themselves to Jesus' nonviolence. then we could build a wonderful society. And I feel that in America. I came here when the second war started there in March and did a 30-day fast outside the White House and was privileged to join the American peace activists protesting the war. And it was wonderful to be here and to hear the nonviolent message being talked about by the American peace activists. So I have great hope for the future of America.

But Northern Ireland has great hope, because yes, we will get our executive, we will get our assembly. But essentially, we the people of Northern Ireland and the people of south of Ireland, we have got to build the trust, build the friendships. We have got to build the beloved communities which Martin Luther King spoke of. And we do that by empowering people where they live. People live in small communities in Northern Ireland. We need to financially and politically empower people where they live so that they can be the politicians. So that from the bottom of the communities we change society at the top. You can't build a house from the top, down. You have got to do it from the bottom up. So if we leave it to the politicians it won't work.

We, the people, need to build citizenship, active citizenship. So that we change our society from the bottom up. We also need to work on an international level. It's a lot of hard work doing it both down and doing it across the world, but we have to do it. You see, there's a new consciousness in the world today that we are the human family, and people do care. And when our television screen shows us children dying from malnutrition and diseases, we care. And we say why are those children dying in a rich world, because there's enough for everybody in our world today. And what we don't want to see is a few people making a lot of money out of the world economies now, the globalization, the big corporations moving around the world, making a lot of money at the expense of crucifying the poor, be it in Bangladesh, Bangkok, wherever they are. We as the human family know our responsibility to stand up and say no, we will not accept this. This is not acceptable.

And that's a change in the world, because when I was a little girl, Bangladesh seemed a long way off. Now is only an airplane flight. And that world is interconnected and that new consciousness will change our world today. We are seeing it in the mass movements around the world of anti-globalization movements, environmental movements, feminist movements. We are seeing a huge movement of people saying, "We want to live a different way." And that movement once it percolates up to the top to the decision makers, to our politicians, it will change the direction that the world is going in.

Now, you in America have a huge task. Your foreign policies are hurting the world big time. You have got somehow to communicate with your political leaders the feeling that out there in the world that we are annoyed and angry about what American foreign policies are doing to our brothers and sisters in many countries. One example: I went to Iraq...And on the first day in Baghdad, we went to a place called (that was) a shelter. During the first Gulf War, two bombs were dropped on this shelter in Baghdad. And this woman showed us around the shelter, and she had been in the shelter with her family and had gone out to hang up her washing. When she came back her, whole family and 11 of her relatives were all killed. And over 500 people, mostly women and children, were incinerated in this shelter by two American bombs that were accidentally dropped into this shelter. Over 500 women and children.

We went to the hospital and the children were slowly dying of malnutrition and diseases that have all come back caused by the implementation of the economic treaty sanctions that were put on by the United Kingdom, the United States and United Nations against the Iraqi people. And between the dual policy of the first Gulf War, which took all the infrastructure, the lighting, the sewage systems, and the economic sanctions, which never allowed the Iraqi people to get enough money to rebuild their roads, and get their electric going, left the Iraqi people to slowly be destroyed. Their very drinking water was poisoned through uranium that was dropped during the bombing of the first Gulf War, and people were slowly dying. Over a half million Iraqi children under the age of 5 years of age, died because of United States policies kept on knowing that this Iraqi children were dying. So you and me, and those of us who don't do enough to tell your government, and the United Kingdom government, and the United Nations, that these policies were wrong, are responsible, cause somebody has to take responsibility for what happens.

So that is why we opposed the second strike against Iraq. And that is why the invasion of Iraq was immoral, illegal and cruel in the extreme against the Iraqi people, because it was known by your government that there were no weapons of mass destruction left in Iraq. Because our delegation was told in Baghdad, in 1999 at the United Nations office, that the bomb squad had done his job so well that Iraq was not a military threat to anybody outside of its own borders, and that was known. And yet that war took place unnecessarily and it is a great tragedy that today in Iraq, young American soldiers are being killed, cause they are the ones who will pay the price of a war that didn't need to be fought.

So you need to ask the question as Americans, and I say this as somebody who loves America. I've been coming here for many years. You need to ask the question, "Where is your government going?" And you need to say, "Are you going to uphold international laws as part of the human family? Or are the whole body of laws, Nuremberg laws, the Geneva Convention, the U.N. Human Rights Declaration, are these laws no longer relevant to the American people? Do they not matter anymore? Are you opting out of the entire world to say you don't need laws?" Your government, the Bush administration, is acting as if there are absolutely no laws.

So you must take the task through your legal systems, the fact that these international laws were broken, and ignored and set aside, because America and the U.K. went to war against the wishes of the United Nations. And we must also oppose strongly the preemptive strike policy of the Bush administration. If we go down this road, where any government can strike against another country, then we are building a desperately, desperately dangerous world for our children, because who next is going to strike against a government. Will it be the nuclear powers of India and Pakistan? Will India decide that they have every right to bomb Pakistan over Kashmir and break international laws and do it because America has set a precedent? We must oppose this policy of pre-emptive strike.

We must also oppose the policy of unilaterialism, where one country can do what it wants because we are the human family. It is of the utmost important that you continue the great work you deserve to be doing and call for the international laws to be upheld. To strengthen the United Nations, because it is the only body we have that represents the human family. Now it may well be that the United Nations needs to reform. It might even need replaced if its not going to be strong enough to stand up to governments who are going to do what they want. I don't know, but these are questions which you young men and women living in a super power -- cause America has made itself the world super, super, superpower -- you young people have to look at these questions.

America now has bases in 80 countries around the world, military bases. Over a million men and women are now armed in the arm forces around the world. America went to Iraq because of oil and power and control. You must understand what your government is doing because people around the world are suffering because of these foreign policies, and you are the people who can change it.

America is a brilliant country. It was your leaders who set up things like the Geneva Convention and insisted on Nuremberg trials. America took the world to the starts. You are great people. You have great potential, and people around the world, you know, they love America. And they expect better of you, and they want better. You are capable of better, because we can change the world, and we need America to enter as part of the human family, helping us to change the world.

So in Northern Ireland as we struggle to build and demilitarize nonviolent Ireland, and oh my God, if we can't demilitarize four million people and have a nonviolent Ireland, where can it be done? But as we struggle to demilitarize Ireland, then I hope that you will struggle to demilitarize America, because there is hardly any use in us doing it if we are going to have a nuclear war. And you know, we are now in the second nuclear age. We thought we were getting agreements where we could stop the nuclear arms, but America has remained out on a lot of those international agreements...

And I just want to pay tribute to the American peace activist. When I was a young girl in the streets of Belfast, I remember being inspired by the life of Dorothy Day. She was my hero, Dorothy Day. And I was privileged today to come and to visit the archives, and to listen to a tape. When she came to Dublin, she did and interview, and its up in your archives. You go and listen to Dorothy Day, cause there's a message that is relevant today as it ever was.

You have your own heroes. You don't need to look to the outside world for heroes. You have your own nonviolent heroes here. Look at their lives and take them as great models.

To the women I have to say, Dorothy Day was a wonderful model. She was way before our time. She was talking about social justice and disarming all those issues way before our time. Look to people like that to get your inspiration. And you know, to the women in the audience, we have a long way to go. Tragically, we have for history been looked on as second-class citizens and our rights have not being given to us. It is sad today that we can see from the Vatican that it won't uphold the rights of women to be treated through baptism as equal citizens and allow them to be ordained if God calls them to ordination. The Vatican is not upholding international laws and human rights when it doesn't allow that. We need changes in the church. We need the church to be renewed. We need it to open up and allow the spirit in. We need a third Vatican counsel.

And above all, we need people of courage. We need prophets in the world today. We need people to take a stand for right, a stand for human dignity. A stand for equality. There's great hope for our future as a human feeling because the new consciousness is opening up so many wonderful opportunities to us.

I said to the young people here, never be afraid to go into the world. Go to North Korea. Go to Iran. Go to all the places you said you can't go because they told us we couldn't go. And we went. They told us nonviolence will never be able to work in Northern Ireland, and it's working. Northern Ireland is a perfect example that militarism doesn't work. Paramilitarism doesn't work. The only thing that really works is love. To be prepared. To love. To trust. To believe in the other, the beauty in every individual. To be prepared to pay the price of working day in and day out wherever you live. To bring about a world which we can all be proud of to hand on to our children.

Thank you for all you do for peace. You are an inspiration to myself and so many others. God bless you all.

MAIREAD CORRIGAN MAGUIRE

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