The people of Northern Ireland have been urged to give each other’s traditions space and time to “flourish side by side” by the man who helped broker the Good Friday Agreement.
Addressing young people in Belfast, former US Senator George Mitchell, 91, urged them to take the future seriously, and never take peace for granted.
Around 600 young people from the age of 15 gathered at the Whitla Hall at Queen’s University to hear a key note speech by the man who chaired the historic negotiations to a successful conclusion in April 1998.
In his speech, Passing The Torch, Mr Mitchell said he had seen “almost a full century of change, much of it turbulent, but a great deal of it transformative”, and paid tribute to a “handful of hopefuls”.
He said peace in Northern Ireland had not seemed possible in 1968, 1974, 1981, or even in 1998 when just four months after the agreement, a dissident republican bomb in Omagh killed 29 people, including a woman pregnant with twins.
He said while the bombing “shook us to the core”, and left them unsure whether they could recover, they did, he emphasised: “Together”.
However he urged caution against complacency almost three decades after the agreement, and said many problems remain to be solved, drawing attention to the remaining peace walls which continue to separate a number of communities across Northern Ireland.
Mr Mitchell said some politicians are “still choosing the rhetoric of division”, and disputes over flags, language, faith, passports and citizenship remain ongoing.
“The peace we have created and enjoyed since 1998 must evolve. The work is constantly unfinished,” he said.
“This is not a call for a tally, or a vote, or a referendum. It is not my place to suggest these things… but this is a call for us to continue thinking carefully in the direction of where change can bring us… a shared space, a place of pluralities, where we can recognise the power of inter-dependence.”
He acknowledged the “difficulty that Brexit over the past decade”, and observed a “shakiness in our post-Brexit lives”.
He said the future in Northern Ireland will “rely on the embrace of difference”.
“I am talking of Unionists and Nationalists, north and south, learning to give each other’s traditions space and time in order that we can flourish side by side,” he said.
“No domination. No dynamite. And I am also talking about a society that must create spaces that keep its’ best young people from going to distant shores.
“You, the young people of this island, are needed here in order to sustain this ongoing peace. Do not let your truths and your dreams leave when there is so much to be done at home.
“Within this framework, everyone must have a sense of participation. We must invoke a shared purpose.”
Mr Mitchell highlighted “moments of grace and leadership”, including the historic visit of the late Queen Elizabeth to Ireland in 2011 where she laid a wreath at the Garden of Remembrance in Dublin.
“It was one of the greatest moments of cross-cultural diplomacy that I have ever experienced. And it would have been unthinkable years before,” he said.
He urged the young people in the audience to continue to build consensus, share, listen across the divide, tune out disinformation and shoulder burdens together.
“In many ways the people of this island have become advance scouts for the journeys of the rest of the world,” he said.
“I am here today to ask you to take the job of the future seriously. Do not let us down.
“I make this call to teachers, to artists, to leaders, to workers, to businesses, to non-profits, to community organisations, to civil servants, but most of all to our young people: you are the leaders and the lightning rods of tomorrow.
“I am well aware that there are other concerns that your generation, and the following generations, will encounter – not least the problems of climate change, global migration and issues of identity.
“But these issues will be easier to confront when there is peace on the ground. Do not allow the bomb dust to obscure the winds of change.”
