Fionnuala O Connor

Text of a talk given in June 1997 to the Nonviolent Research Project at Bradford University.. Discusses the development of community level political engagement and the vision of Ciaron McKeown of the Peace People that it could someday provide an alternative to the existing political system. She argues that Community politics up to that time (1997) was more developed in the Catholic/Nationalist community than in that of the Protestant/Unionist one but there too it had emerged in the previous five years or so. Former members of paramilitary groups were frequently involved because they had come to see the futility of the violence or because they wanted their own children to have a different life to the one they had experienced.

Investigation of the convictions and sense of identity of people in the Catholic Community in Northern Ireland based on recorded interviews with fifty-five individuals – not all of them necessarily practising Catholics – about their political allegiances, their relationship with Protestants, and their attitude to the IRA, Britain, Southern Ireland and the Church.