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NGO Interaction Belfast






Inter-Action Belfast

Farset Enterprise Park

638 Springfield Road

Belfast BT1 7DY

www.peacewall.org

 

 

The brochure takes a cue from the gate which is opened only once a year to let pass through a Protestant march.

 

Roisin Mc Clone, Director of the NGO Inter-Action Belfast

Boris Tissot, Bernard Conlon, Kevin Cooper and Hatto Fischer visited the office of Inter-Action 22.Sept. 2009. Prospective linkages between Kids' Guernica, Poiein kai Prattein in Athens and the NGO Inter-Aktion were discussed. Bernard Conlon together with Kevin Cooper shall follow-up and stay in contact.

Boris Tissot, Bernard Conlon and Kevin Cooper in the office of NGO Inter-Action.

The NGO does something crucial to the Belfast peace process. It is engaged in what can be called "confidence and trust" building measures. They have established a network of people on both sides of the peace fence and who are all connected per mobile phones. In case something risks getting out of control e.g. some youth provoking across the border the other side, immediately the other side is called up in an effort to descalate a conflict before it can get out of control.

The entire process is monitored. There are regular meetings to follow up such actions. In case someone failed to pick up the phone and therefore did not respond is asked to clarify in the meeting why he failed to do so. In that way accountability is assured.

Working for the NGO is a former prisoner who served a jail sentence of 15 or 18 years. His experiences exemplify what it means to work within a NGO attempting to reach the other side. It is all about an enormous redemption effort. As one woman told the BBC about her journey with a former IRA member who had even laid a bomb which killed her father, they do travel together to conferences and meetings to show how the peace process in Belfast since the Friday agreement is progressing. Still she finds it impossible to let the word 'forgive' cross her lips, and that is ten years afterwards.

There is no measure to such deep human pain. The angle of perceiving the reasons for the conflict in the past vary. What is needed the most can be deduced out of what Bernard Conlon maintained all along when working as journalist in Brussels and reporting back to Belfast: people need structures of communication which they can trust and only then will they begin to inquire about next possible steps leading on to more trust and confidence in finding solutions.

HF 25.5.2010

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