Welcome to Intercomms Blog

   Welcome, we hope to use this blog as a means to promote, and generate discussion, on a range of issues affecting peace building, economic regeneration and community development across and within North Belfast. While we may be geographically based, our comments will not be limited to North Belfast because we believe that unless people start communicating effectively across local, regional and international divides, our problems today; will be yours tomorrow, and vice versa. So there is a need for peace builders to develop a bigger picture, of where our work fits in to the local, regional, national and international process of peace building. For example, how can the lessons of sectarian conflict in North Belfast inform or influence the reduction of sectarian violence in Iraq? What learning from Los Angeles on ‘gang culture’ can be applied here, to ensure that as new immigrant communities arrive we don’t end up substituting sectarian violence for ethnic or gang violence.

   Here, in North Belfast, as political discussions move towards the November 24^th deadline, many peace builders wonder what the implications will be for local governance, statutory accountability and grassroots peace building if, as expected, it ‘all ends in tears’? With international goodwill all but expended how will grassroots peace builders rise to the new challenge of sustaining peace in the face of yet another failed political initiative? Within such a political stalemate, how will grassroots community groups give leadership in the introduction of new policies, on Neighbourhood Renewal and Shared Future? What role is there for the business community to contribute to addressing such issues? How can the health sector begin to play a more active role in addressing endemic inequalities in health? With a potential absence of local government, how will our civil servants implement such policies and who will hold them to account in the absence of a local assembly?

   And ultimately, the question needs to be asked, when international and EU funding for peace building ends how will the British and Irish government’s sustain the peace? As John Paul Lederach, the American peace scholar points out, for every year of conflict we need ten years of peace investment. So we all must start asking our Governments, and elected representatives, what plans are you developing to ensure that we never have to experience such conflict again? In classical Conflict Resolution theory, fear and ignorance have been identified as the root causes of all conflict. One of the central ideas for this blog is to examine such causes, and by encouraging and promoting discussion and debate, identify possible solutions, to transform our conflicts into peace. Over the coming months we hope to use this blog to encourage discussions and new thinking, as Seámus Heaney would say, ‘to set the darkness echoing’ with the sound of our enquiries into peace. We know this is no easy task and are mindful of Pastor Dietrich Bonhoffer’s observation that ‘great battles are easier to fight than daily skirmishes’ but we are committed, to ensure that peace, like a river, flows through our cities, interfaces and divides.