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Nobel Peace Laureate Betty Williams Lecture: “Peace in the World is Everybody’s Business”
September 20, 2007, at Recreation Center, �������� of America

It could be better than that: Good morning! Now would you do me a favor please, would you all stand up? … Now give each other a hug… . Doesn’t that feel good? My favorite expression in the whole world is: “Arms are for hugging, not for killing.” Now for those of you who know nothing about the work of peace that was carried out in Northern Ireland, it would be very difficult to me to stand here and tell you all the things that we did, to create peace for a land that we all longed for so much, and which we have now. But I think for you to get to know me a little better, and what makes this crazy Irish woman tick, I should tell you a little bit about the beginnings. When I say “crazy Irish woman,” one of my best friends in the world is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and we call him “our little spiritual bubble.” He just goes about […] on people, you know. And he calls me “this crazy Irish woman.” He says I’m “crazy, but a good child.” I hope so! Because in the field of peace, one has to be a little bit crazy. If the rest of the world is not crazy, and wars and destruction are going on, well I would rather be on the other side of that and be the crazy one who believes we can finish this. So, in peace work, one has to have a bit of … craziness.

I was born and brought up in Belfast, Northern Ireland; I’m the daughter of a wonderful father who was a butcher, and my mother, who was a waitress. I was brought up in a very poor area of the city of Belfast called Andersonstown, which is commonly known as Catholic Ghetto. And I know of all of my life being brought up the injustices that were perpetrated upon the Catholic people of Northern Ireland were absolutely gross. We can make similarities between what happens to the Black people of the United States and what happened to the Catholic Irish people. It was really bad. We couldn’t vote, we couldn’t own property, we had to take the most menial of jobs, and we certainly hadn’t got access to education. But my father pushed us: “Education, education, education. The only way forward, is if you’re educated.” And so, I became educated. And when I went to university in Northern Ireland, Queens University of Belfast, in a student body of 4,000, there were 15 Catholics. That was the huge division in our community. And I watched all my life as my people suffered. And I never really got involved in trying to help that situation because I was too busy getting educated. But then, one day, in 1976, although I had been working in many areas of peace before that, the war broke out in 1969. It broke out because Ian Paisley who was now gonna be the First minister of Northern Ireland, Ian Paisley, flanked by the police force in Ireland, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, marched up to the Catholic streets, and burned Catholic people out of their homes. And I remember going though all this, going to pick up Catholic people to take them to safety when I was very young.

And then the IRA were born. Because before the year 1969, there were no provisional IRA, in Ireland. There was the only Irish Republican Army, but there were no guns and nobody was armed, but the police force was armed, and so, born from that, came Provisional IRA. And then when Provisional IRA were born, protestant paramilitary groups were born. We had Provisional IRA on one side, the UDA on the other side, the Ulster Defense Regiment, we had the UPF, the Red-Hand Commandos, we had nine armies on our streets, including the British army, which was the only one which was legalized. And may I say, legalized violence is pretty horrible too. And the British army committed atrocities in Northern Ireland, absolute atrocities.

And so the war was born, this particular war. Because Ireland was invaded 850 years ago by a man called Cromwell. And it never really had peace since that time. And we always had wars coming up every couple of centuries … in the century, about every 20 years in every century, there was an uprising in Ireland to try to free ourselves from the British. And this last uprising was 1969. It was a bloody uprising, absolutely awful. And it resulted in the death of many, many people.

I remember my father coming home from work one night, and there had been bomb blasts—29 bombs were dropped on the city of Belfast in one day. And I kept my father’s shop, to get butchers to help pick people under the bombs, or what was left of people. I myself got caught up with one of these bombs, I’m completely deaf on this side [showing left ear], and I got some pretty serious back injuries. Mind you, my grandbabies love the fact that I am deaf on this side, because they keep asking me for things in this ear, and of course I say: “yes, you can have it–you know!”

But, something happened to me on August 10, 1969, when I was driving home from my mother’s house. And my daughter in the back of the car, in her little car seat, and I heard shots from out. And I suddenly realized how sick I was because I could distinguish gunfire. Imagine being able to distinguish gunfire. And I heard shots from an ArmaLite rifle, which was the rifle of choice used by Provisional IRA. And I heard a return fire from an SLR, which is the “self-loading rifle,” used by the British army. And as I turned off the main road, down onto the avenue where I lived, a car came careening out of control, round the corner, right to the pavement, and slammed into a woman and her children. I was the first one on the scene. I had never seen, and I hope you’ll never witness the carnage like I did. You don’t see my little angels, but I will never leave home without them. Their names are John, Joanne, and Andrew MacGuire. Those of the three children who were killed that day, slaughtered that day, on a Belfast street. And I remember sitting in my car and looking at the scene, thinking, “well, what can I do?” I mean, even when I speak about it now at the leisure as a speaker, I get this tightness in my stomach and this big knot in my throat. And I often think to myself, I wonder what would become about John, Joanne, and Andrew had they not been slaughtered. What kind of human beings they would have been. But they were killed in an insane situation. Little Andrew was only six weeks old. He had been ejected out of his pram and was hanging by the back of his neck on the church railing. Little John had been thrown down the street, and Joanne was the only one I could reach. When the car went to the pavement, when she got sucked under it, her little blond curls were wrapped around the wheel, she was scalped. No cause in the world deserves to treat children like this. None. And I remember holding little Joanne in my arms, in shock. Covered in her blood and whispering in her ear “I love you.” And saying to myself, “I’ve got to do something to make sure that this doesn’t happen to any more children in Northern Ireland.”

I remember going home. I remember taking my little girl out of her car seat. I remember my sister coming in and making me a cup of tea, and then there were four hours of my life which I’ve never … I can’t remember. Four hours of my life went completely missing. Until this day, I still don’t know what I did in those four hours. I was in such deep shock at what I had just witnessed. And my next memory was me standing in my garage, and I’m screaming. Now a friend of mine, who’s a psychiatrist in Northern Ireland said that was my way of bringing myself out of shock. But I’m so glad that happened, because it probably would have cost me a fortune to get out of shock any other way. And then I remembered the anger I felt. I remember coming back into my living room with my son sitting, doing his homework. And I lifted the page he was writing on, and I jumped in my car, and I went up into what was Provisional IRA territory and I began banging on doors. And I wasn’t very nice about it, believe me, I was yelling, screaming at the women: “We can’t live like this anymore. We’ve got to do something to change this society.” And I had the piece of paper in my hand, and I said to the woman: “Sign this!” She said “What I am signing?” And I wrote across the top of it, “Petition for Peace.” And that’s how it began. And then, it was rather like being the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

All the women, who had held these feelings that I was feeling, I only gave voice to what they were feeling. And they were coming out in the hundreds, and we started collecting signatures for peace. Within six hours, not two days, six hours, we had 5,000 signatures for peace. The women were magnificent, absolutely magnificent. It was as though they had thrown away their fear, you know, because fear is a very contagious emotion. It cripples societies. When societies live in fear, nobody does anything because everybody’s too frightened to do something. But courage is contagious. Very contagious. And what happened that night was, women found their courage. And I remember going back to my house, and I called Dr. Lockman, and I said: “Look, I’ve got all these signatures, what am I going to do?” You see, none of this was planned. You have to understand, that, this all happened without any kind of planning. It just happened, because, me, as one human being, had had enough. And they could have been my children, or any other mothers who would just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, it could have been her children. And so when I came back to the house, I thought, “I’m going have to do something with these signatures, I can’t just have signature on a piece, I have got to take some sort of action.”

So I picked up the telephone, and I called our local newspaper, the Irish News. And this was like four o’clock in the morning by this time, and I had women all over my house. My house was absolutely packed with these incredibly wonderful, beautiful women, and I—this is something that none of you are ever likely to hear, maybe something you’d see in a movie—but when I picked up the phone and called the local newspaper, I talked to a man called Tom Samways. He was the night editor of the Irish News. And I said: “My name is Betty Williams, and I live in 20 Orstrum Gardens in Belfast, and I have just gone out with the women of this area and we have collected 5,000 signatures for peace.” And he said to me: “Ma’am, have you been drinking?” I said: “No, but I could really use a large brandy.” And he said: “What was your name again? Are you sure you want—” And I heard him say, shout to somebody behind him, “Stop press. We have a new front page.” And the next morning, came out in the Irish News what the women of Andersonstown had done that night.

And then I was asked to go on television and do an interview for BBC. This was the next step, which I didn’t even notice happening. You know, this was evolving, as we went along, and I remember thinking to myself, waiting for the interview, “what can I ask the women of Northern Ireland to do next?” And I was sitting in the green room. I know, I thought, I’ll call a rally. I’ll ask the women, Protestants and Catholics, that if they feel like I feel, would they join me in a rally the following Saturday in the spot where the children had died. Never knowing what was about to happen. It was like Rosa Parks who sat in the bus, refused to give up her seat. Rosa was the catalyst to the Martin Luther King movement. She didn’t know that. All she knew was, she had had enough. She had it up to here. And she wasn’t going to take it anymore. Well that’s exactly how I felt. And so after I did this entry, I went down to … I remember looking at the camera and saying to myself: “Pretend that camera is a friend. Don’t be afraid of it and don’t be nervous,” because I was shaking. I had never done anything public before in my life, except get married and, you know, but nothing really. I did a speech at my sister’s wedding but I’ve never been a public speaker or any of that. And so, I was interviewed by a wonderful man called Peter Snow—beautiful human being. And I said, “I would want to ask you before you do this interview, to ask me the question of what I would like to do next.” And that’s when I had the opportunity to say to the women of Ireland: “Please, if you feel like I, do join me in a rally on Saturday at the church. See, the children were killed outside the Catholic Church, which made it even more horrendous. Join me.”

And then I wondered, “Mother of God, what have I done!” You know! “Maybe nobody will turn up! You don’t know. You just don’t know. But my father came from a family of eight, and my mother came from a family of twelve, so I went home and I got on the phone to my relatives. You know, “Would you please come to the rally!” I knew my cousin Frances would be there and she would bring her five children, you know! And I’m thinking to myself, “But we … maybe we’ll only have 50. That would be great. Please, God, let 50 turn up!” That’s what I said to myself. I didn’t know what was going to happen. I didn’t know the miracle that was about to take place.

As I’m standing on the spot, and my cousin Frances with her five children and a few other of my relatives standing around me, the buses started to draw up, from the Catholic side to here, from the Protestant side to here. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing: buses were in the hundreds drawing up. I didn’t know the women had hired buses, to get themselves this rally! And in one powerful act of love, we wiped out 850 years of bad history. The women didn’t speak. They just ran into each others’ arms. It was an incredible experience. Ten thousand women turned up for that first rally. And across the street, on a garage, a Texaco garage, there were men with guns, pointing down, and I said: “Please God, don’t let me have brought anybody here today to be killed.” But it went off beautifully, peacefully.

And the other day, when I was talking to my class about this, bringing them up to date in my work, there’s a beautiful scene that it still burns in my mind: there was a woman who arrived with her pram, and the