Down among the Women (Nobel Laureates)

In 1977 the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan, the founders of the Northern Irish “Peace People.” Just a year before, in August 1976, three young children had been killed by an IRA getaway car that swerved out of control, its driver fatally shot by police bullets. Williams, a “housewife” (as the prize presentation speech repeatedly calls her) and one of the first on the scene, was horrified into action. Joining forces with Corrigan, the children’s aunt, she started a campaign to bring “the ordinary man and woman” (presentation speech again) onto the streets in protest at the mindless violence of the Troubles and at the devastation of entirely innocent lives. For a few months this movement was enthusiastically greeted as the first step to a lasting peace, the triumph of common sense over terrorism. And it still seemed that way in December 1977, when, at the awards ceremony, the spokesman for the Nobel committee talked of “these two women marching boldly out into the no-man’s land of war, proclaiming their simple, heartening message of reconciliation … a vision which shines like a bright torch into the future.”

Twenty-five years on, the “Peace People” have become just another dead end in the elusive history of peace in Ulster. After an unseemly public squabble about the prize money, exacerbated by a brand new Volvo, in which Williams was reputedly seen driving around Belfast, both women left the movement in 1978: Williams emigrated to the United States, where the once “ordinary Belfast housewife” is now professor of Women’s and Peace Studies at Florida Atlantic University (her Web page logo still proclaiming that “women and men together can make this a beautiful people’s world”); Corrigan married the dead children’s father in 1981, after their mother’s suicide, and has since reestablished links with what remains of the organisation she helped to found. Their much vaunted “torch” has been extinguished to a pale flicker.