Peter Sheridan will share his experiences of the thirty-five years of conflict in Northern Ireland, starting from his time in the police service as a Catholic when only five percent of the police force came from that community. He will discuss his tenure as the police commander in Derry, during which Martin McGuinness served as the IRA commander. Despite several attempts on his life, Sheridan and McGuinness forged an unlikely friendship. Throughout his remarks, Sheridan will reflect on the importance of trust as the glue that holds relationships, societies, and economies together. Violent conflict leads to the erosion of trust, which is why rebuilding trust was a central element of his approach.
MELANI CAMMETT: Thanks for coming, and thanks for your patience. I'm really delighted to welcome you today to this special event hosted by the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard. I'm Melani Cammett. I'm the director of the Weatherhead Center, and I'm also a professor in the government department here. And we're co-sponsoring this event with the Center for European Studies as well. So I want to acknowledge them and thank them for their support.
We are really honored today to host Peter Sheridan, who's going to share his insights based on decades of experience with the conflict in Northern Ireland. It seems like this is a really big week in Boston for Northern Ireland-related events. There's a whole bunch of them, this being a major anniversary year of the Good Friday Agreement.
And we're especially excited to host Peter, who you will see, is a rather unusual figure. If you're not familiar with his background already, he joined the police service in Northern Ireland as a Catholic, at a time when the percent of the political force from that community was only about 5%, I believe, so not very high. And he served as the police commander in Derry, during which Martin McGuinness served as the IRA commander.
And there were multiple-- several, at least attempts, I believe-- on Peter's life. And over the years, subsequently, Peter and Martin McGuinness forged an unlikely friendship. You may hear about some of that today. And now, after retiring from the police force, Peter heads an NGO focused on peace and reconciliation.
So it's been quite a path through multiple exciting careers. And today, first and foremost, Peter is going to speak to us about the importance of trust as the glue that holds together relationships, societies, and economies. Violent conflict leads to the erosion of trust, so rebuilding it is a paramount goal in the wake of conflict and violence.
As an aside, I'm especially pleased that Peter is going to participate in the inaugural conference of the Weatherhead Research Cluster on Identity Politics, which is going to take place here at Harvard on Thursday and Friday. So we took advantage of his presence to enlist him in both events.
That conference is focused on improving intergroup relations after violent conflict and has participants from all around the US and overseas. And if you're interested in learning more about the cluster, please do get in touch with us.
So back to our speaker Peter Sheridan. Joined the peace-building charity Co-operation Ireland, which is an all-island community organization, in 2008 as the chief executive. This organization was established much earlier, in 1979, with the aim of building mutual respect and understanding between the peoples of Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland through practical cooperation.
And over the past 30 years, the organization's role has evolved in line with the changing priorities of peace building on the island. In recent years, the work has increasingly emphasized peace building at the community level, and it's played a central role in implementing cross-border elements of the EU program for communities coming out of conflict.
Co-operation Ireland's aim is a peaceful and stable island, free of sectarianism, where cultural and political differences are respected and where people of all backgrounds can live and work together for a better future.
And as I've already mentioned, Peter is the former assistant chief constable from the Police Service of Northern Ireland, which was formerly known as the Royal Ulster Constabulary. This is not a word that comes naturally to the US native speaker of English.
He retired from the police service in late 2008, having spent 32 years policing in Northern Ireland. And before retiring, he was responsible for the Crime Operations Department, which included serious and organized crime investigations, including terrorist investigations as well. So really quite an unusual trajectory.
Peter is also an honorary professor of the practice at the Senator George Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice at Queen's University in Belfast, where I first had the honor of meeting him. And I also have an affiliation there as well. And if you haven't heard of it, it really is doing a lot of exciting work with practitioners and scholars based at Queen's.
In December, Peter is due to become commissioner of investigations on the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery, which is a newly-created commission that came out of an act of parliament in the UK, a very recent act of parliament in the UK. And this is definitely a topic that we will return to in the course of our discussion.
So let me just briefly say a few words about the format for today. So we're going to open up with Peter speaking for about 20 or 25 minutes. Then he and I will have a brief discussion ourselves. And then we'll open it up to the audience to pose questions. And when we do pose questions, please speak in the mic, because we do have this being recorded, so it would be helpful if you would do that. Please join me in welcoming Peter Sheridan. Thank you.
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PETER SHERIDAN: Thank you, Melani. So good evening, everybody, and good evening to those who are, maybe, watching online, as this is also being streamed. And thank you, Melani, and the Weatherhead Center and Harvard University for the invitation to speak at this.
I did attend the Kennedy School of Government over 20 years ago, here in Cambridge, so it's good to be back and to walk the streets in Cambridge again, particularly with the good weather today.
I met Melani, as she said, back in July in Belfast, when we chatted about this talk and about the conference over the next few days. I did ask her how this might work. And she said, it's easy. You talk, and they listen. So my only plea to you is if you finish before I do, you let me know and that.
And as Melani said, I'm an honorary professor of practice at the Senator George Mitchell Institute for Global Peace and Security and Justice at Queen's University. And so that's the context I'm speaking in. It's about practice as opposed to theory. And my remarks today will be rooted in practice, which I very much hope supports much of the academic theory on peace building.
So I hope by the end of my remarks, you will recognize many of the disciplines that are at the essence of peace building, in particular, the importance of relationships and the building of trust, where we have the capacity to imagine ourselves in an interdependent relationship with people who may see you as their enemy and the capacity to accept people at face value and to look beyond the current narrative about them, even suspending judgment in order to discover, perhaps, new, untold angles, new opportunities, and unexpected potentials, a belief that it is possible to move beyond the parameters of what is commonly accepted about the process or about those individuals, and, finally, a willingness to take risks and to step into the unknown without any guarantee of success or safety in that.
Much of what I have to say is my own story from 1976, when I joined the police service. And some 40 years later, I ended up as chief executive of Co-operation Ireland, facilitating the historic handshake between the former IRA commander and deputy first minister, Martin McGuinness, and the late Queen Elizabeth II in 2012. So it was, as Melani says, a remarkable journey in many ways.
You can, however, rest easy. I'm not going to take you through every day of the last 40 years. You'll be glad to know. Many of you will know that Ireland is famed throughout the world for the art of storytelling. It's undoubtedly and notably aspect of Irish culture. Some of them are myths and legends, but most of them are true. And the one, this evening, I am going to tell, I can assure you is true. And I have the scars to prove that.
So in 1976, I'm at college, and my careers teacher is a Catholic priest. He's an Irish historian. He's from across the border, in the Republic of Ireland. And if I was being at my most benevolent, I would say he probably didn't like most things British. But he persuaded me to consider the police as a career.
I often think back, did I hear him right? Did he mean consider the priesthood or the police as a career? Because back in Ireland, it was almost a given that somebody out of the family had to end up in the priesthood. But I remember not a lot about it, because I was probably naive at the time. I was following George Best, who was a famous Northern Ireland footballer and the girls from the collegiate school up the road. So politics wasn't probably in my vision at the time.
And there was a bit of discussion at home because of the dangers of joining the police at the time and would it not be better going to join The Guards, which is the Irish Police or the Metropolitan Police or the Scottish Police?
But my grandmother, who lived with us at the time-- she was McShay, and there were some McShay's in the audience here. And her father-- and she was born out in Philadelphia. She lived with us at the time, and, typical to Irish form, she said, well, if he's born to be shot, he'll never be drowned. So that's Irish faith or fatalism, whatever's to will be. Whatever's meant to happen will happen.
And on that basis, I ended up joining the police. And as Melani said, when I joined, only 5% of the police service at the time came from the Catholic nationalist community, where the population was of 45% from the Catholic nationalist. And only 8% of the police service at the time were female. Today, as a result of the reforms in policing, Catholics and female representation, both categories represent over 30% of the police service today.
And of course, for policing to be effective, it has to be reflective of the community it serves. You know that here in the United States and in same in every other country in the world. And policing is far too important and too impactive in all our lives to be left to the police alone. So everybody has a responsibility.
And so I was posted to Derry city in 1978. And over the next 30 years, I rose through the ranks of the police service at the same time as Martin McGuinness, who lived in the city, rose through the ranks of the IRA to become the IRA commander.
I didn't know him, but I knew of him through the usual police briefings about his suspected activities. I did, however, get to know him during the peace process. And I'll say more about that in a few minutes.
I did share a platform with him on a number of occasions when we were asked to introduce ourselves. And I often remarked that I had spent longer in his house in the last 30 years than he had, largely because he was on the run. We were looking for him, and we were in the house, searching for him and that. And he often remarked, yes, that's true, innit?
But perhaps just to give you a brief flavor of what it was like to be a police officer at the time, back then, television was daily shootings and bombings. Over 300 of my colleagues lost their lives. And, in many ways, as a Catholic, you were an even bigger target because the message was meant to be to stop Catholics joining the police service.
We moved out of our house on two separate occasions, for periods of six months, when others were planning on me visiting the next world sooner than I wanted to. And in 1978, I recall-- I'm just going to reflect on one incident-- where, at the local university in Derry, Ulster University McGee College, I was out on duty, and there was a call. There was a shooting at the university.
I arrived up at the front of the university, and there's a car parked. And I look into the car, and there's a man slumped over the wheel of the car. He'd been shot dead. And I opened the door of the car and looked in, and I knew he was dead right away. And I remember seeing his briefcase on the seat beside him. And he was a part-time lecturer at the university, but he was also a part-time prison officer.
But then what happened is I called the detectives to come to the murder scene. And we'd sealed off the area, as you do. And one of the detectives asked me for a loan of my torch, and he went to shine it on the car.
And as I walked away, the car exploded. The IRA had replaced the briefcase with their own briefcase, and the bomb exploded and killed the two police officers. And literally, I was 25 from it at the time. I remember seeing other police officers being blew off their feet, but for some reason, I managed to survive it.
And later, a leading journalist who was an Irish Times journalist and a Times journalist claimed that, according to a source of his, who was a former IRA volunteer, Martin McGuinness was present and that he supervised the slaughter of the two police officers who were blown to pieces in that booby trap bomb blast.
In the book, he claimed that everybody was on the other side of the road, watching as the bomb went off. McGuinness was in the house opposite, watching everything. He quite often liked to be close when things went off, to watch and see how they reacted. It was part of his strategy, his way of refining operations.
So how does one move from that and many other similar incidents to a place where you could imagine an interdependent relationship? I recall, in one of my later conversations, when we got to know each other and we were talking about the conflict, and he commented to me, we were all in this together.
And I thought for a moment or two, and I said to him, I disagree, Martin. I said, I never went to bed any night in life wondering who I could shoot, kill, bomb, or maim. Nor did I get up any morning in life thinking of anybody as my enemy. I said, that included you. And I'm not asking you to say the same thing, I said, but I will make a deal with you.
I said, I'm willing to accept that you have an understanding of the last 35 years. I'm not going to say it's right or that I agree with it, but I'm willing to accept it's yours, on one condition, that you accept that I have an understanding of the last 35 years. You don't have to agree with it or say its right, but accept it's mine, and then we can talk about the future.
And that's where he was, because the alternative was, we spent the next 50 years trying to decide who is to blame for what and still not agreeing on it. Much better to spend our time thinking about the future and the next generation.
But our relationship began to develop through a series of unplanned events, events that started with a bowl of soup in the Bogside in Derry. And for those of you who maybe don't know what the Bogside is, it's where the Troubles started in Northern Ireland. And that bowl of soup led to a meeting in Downing Street with Tony Blair and then that handshake with the queen in 2012.
And it began in 2004, when I was in Dublin, at a cross-border security meeting off Grafton Street in Dublin. And your class was in the hotel. You weren't supposed to leave the hotel for security reasons, but at lunchtime, I slipped out and walked up Grafton Street. And there was a bookshop halfway up Grafton Street, and there was one book in the window, and it was in the shape of a triangle. They'd stacked it up.
And the book was called Nell. And it was by an Irish Times journalist called Nell McCafferty, who was also from the Bogside in Derry. She was an iconic figure in Ireland for over 30 years. And the book is a revealing story of a woman behind the image.
It describes her challenging and tender relationship with her mother, Lily, her fears about being gay, war on the streets of her native Derry, the blossoming of feminism in Ireland, the joy of finding a domestic haven with a love of her life, Nuala O'Faolain, and the pain of losing it. In the book, she doesn't spare anyone, least of all herself, in telling the truth of her life. She once told me that she never threw any petrol bombs but that she had made plenty of them.
And I first met Nell when President Clinton became the first American president to visit Ireland in 1986. And at the time, he was coming to Derry and to the Guildhall and had responsibility for the security. And about three hours in advance of his arrival, I got a call that there was an incident in Guildhall Square.
And I arrive up, and there's an old blue Mercedes parked in the square and this wee lady remonstrating with a Secret Service agent. So I go over to her and said, what's the problem? And she says, this big effer is in my town two days, and he's telling me where I can't park. And I said, well, you know the president's coming. You can't leave your car here. Well, hey, there's nothing wrong with it, she says to me.
So I said to her, I'll make a deal with you, Nell. She had her mother and her sister in the back of the car, and they were both elderly. And they both had went to see Kennedy when he came to Dublin in the 1960s. And they were sure as hell going to see the American president when he came to their town.
So I said to her, if you leave your mother and your sister here, not only will they see the president, but I'll get them to meet him. I didn't know whether I could do that or not. But I knew I could get her to move the car, so the two get out of the back of the car, and they've two wee fishing stools with them.
And the way you set up the operation-- so there's a row of barriers that the president was going to walk up and shake hands, but what you don't see in the media is about six feet behind that, there's another row of barriers. And so the only people you put in that channel are people you know aren't going to spit, abuse, punch the president and that. So I put the two ladies in there, and they did get to meet President Clinton at the time.
And so I became the apple of Nell's eye as a result of that. So I had bought that book in Dublin that day. I was on the way home when I rang Nell. And I said to her, I bought your book today, I said, but I refuse to read it unless you sign it for me. And she said, well-- she lived in Dublin at the time. She said, well, I'm at home in the Bogside at the weekend. And she says, come over then.
Again, if you knew the Bogside, it's not somewhere where a police officer would be, particularly not somebody who was a commander in Derry and that everybody would have known. But I thought on a Saturday morning, I'd nip over, ten seconds, get the book signed, and leg it again in the car.
So I parked the car outside the house. It was one of those terraced houses, where the front living room window out on the street. So Nell answers the door, hair out to here, dressing gown, fag in her hand. Come on in and see me mother, she says.
And since I had met the mother in the Guildhall, she had had several strokes. So they had turned the front living room of this house into a bedroom for her mother, because she could no longer climb the stairs. So she brings me in, and she sits me down on a mobile toilet at the side of the bed. And I start to have a conversation with her mother.
And I, in the conversation, discover that her mother's grandfather was an RIC officer, and he was known as the Good Sergeant Duffy. Meantime, Nell had produced this small wee bell push, a front doorbell push that she'd got an electrician to make up for her mother to be able to call for assistance during the night.
But when she was making the bed that morning, Nell had pulled the wires out of it when she was shoving the sheets in underneath the mattress. And she hands me this thing and a two-foot screwdriver. Can you fix that thing, she said to me. Right, so I start to put them together again. And she's shouting in her mother's ear, he's a top cop, Mammy.
And meantime, people are walking past outside. And I thought, I'm not getting out of here. Well, that car mine outside is going to be on fire by the time we get out. So I had spent about an hour and a half with her mother. And then Nell insisted I come in for a bowl of soup in her kitchen. And I'm sitting and having this bowl of soup with two pieces of French bread that she had ready.
And Litvinenko-- remember, the Russian guy who was poisoned with the plutonium-- happens to be on the television. He's in the hospital bed in green. And she said to me, now, do you know who made that soup? I said, no. She said, Peggy. I said, Peggy who? Peggy McGinnis, she said, Martin McGuinness' mother.
So I said, are you trying to poison me now? Is that the idea in this? So I took a police business card out of my pocket, and I wrote on it, Peggy, wonderful soup and signed my name to it. And I said to Nell, you give that to Peggy the next time she's in. And she said, oh, she's in every night to see me mother. I'll give it her tonight.
So that evening, about 6 o'clock-- completely unrelated. I didn't know this was happening-- the then-chief constable [INAUDIBLE] called me, and he said, the prime minister has called a meeting in Downing Street on Monday morning. And Sinn Féin were going to meet the police for the first time. And it was on the run up to the [INAUDIBLE] where they were going to decide whether they were going to sign up to policing or not.
So I go to Downing Street with him on the Monday, and we're in the cabinet office. And in came Jerry Adams, Jerry Kelly, and Martin McGuinness. And we sit down around the cabinet table, and Blair chairs this meeting. It goes on for a couple of hours, and it's a pretty robust meeting, as you can imagine.
And towards the end of it, they're breaking up and shaking hands. And the only people that any baggage in the room are myself, as an RIC officer and Jerry Adams, Jerry Kelly, and Martin McGuinness, because Blair had met them umpteen times and Jonathan Powell, so it wasn't new to them.
And the first thing come into my head was that my closest neighbor and friend's father was murdered by the IRA in Derry when she was 12 years of age. He was mistaken as a police officer. He was an ordinary Protestant man, but he was mistaken as a police officer. So this thing comes into your head. How will she feel if I'm shaking hands?
So anyways, Martin came to the door of the cabinet office. I reached out my hand. I shake hands with him, and I said to him, your mother makes good soup. And he looks at me. And what I didn't know that his sister lives in Donegal and grows organic vegetables and brings them into the mother, and she makes soup for half the country out of it. We didn't know that.
So anyway, he said to me, how did you know my mother makes good soup? And I said, I had a bowl of it on Saturday. And he's looking at me quizzically. He said, where did you get a bowl of my mother's soup? I said, well, I'll tell you what, Martin. You make sure you come back to the next meeting. I'll tell you then.
And literally, the first debriefing in Downing Street wasn't about the two-hour meeting we just had. I was telling them the story about the soup, because they thought there was going to be a boxing match at the front door of Downing Street. And I was telling them the story about this soup, so much so that it appeared then in Jonathan Powell's book some years later. He was Blair's chief of staff at the time in it.
So roll on about four or five months later in that year, and I'm at home in Derry. And the morning papers are being reviewed at the end of the news, and this lady who's reviewing the papers starts off with "Death, lesbianism, and soup-supping peelers. What else could it be but Nell McCafferty has relaunched her book with a new chapter in it?"
So she tells the story about the first cop that came to her house on a peace mission since 1969 and about the soup and McGuinness and then the meeting in Downing Street and, of course, the bit I didn't know, that on the way home from Downing Street Martin-- he rang his mother every day.
So he rings his mother on the way home from Downing Street. And his mother said to him, Martin, there was a cop at Nell's house on Saturday. And in the book it says, "Martin said to his mother, 'Mother it's me and Jerry Adams negotiating with the peelers, not you and Nell McCafferty's mother.'"
So later on then, in that year, I had responsibility for what's called the Apprentice Boys Parade in Derry. So this is about 15,000 Protestant apprentice boys who come to the city of Derry, where they walk the city of Derry. They come from all over Northern Ireland. It's the biggest parade. People think the 12th of July is the biggest parade. The biggest parade, single parade is the 15th of August Parade-- or 12th of August Parade in Derry.
So that year, there was all sorts of Armageddon forecasts for it. And I had about 1,500 police and soldiers on the streets for it. The secretary of state had signed an order closing off a section of the walls to prevent them marching on it.
And whilst that parade passed off relatively peacefully-- there was a lot of rioting at the end of it-- but in a small Catholic nationalist village in County Antrim, about an hour's drive away, the Parades Commission at the time had given permission for the apprentice boys to march out of their hall, to walk up the Main Street in this village, turn 200 yards, come back down again, get on their bus, and go to the field.
But meantime, the street had been blocked. Sinn Féin had blocked the street and had an 86-year-old woman that had kids in it. And this standoff was starting to happen because the apprentice boys refused to leave their hall. By law, they had every right to march up.
And as police officers, we had every right to remove people, but sometimes in law, no matter how right you are, big burly cops shifting people off the street can either escalate the thing. And it's a no-win for you around the world on the television cameras anyway, innit?
So a rallying cry had went out around all of the 15,000 people who were parading in Derry, as they finished, that they should leave Derry and go back via Dunloy so there's this potential build up of a big standoff happening in this small village. So I lifted the phone, and I rang somebody in the Bogside who I knew. And I said, do you know anybody who can intervene in this? And he hands his phone over to somebody.
And this voice says, hello. Who's this? And I said, hello. Who's this? He said, this is Martin McGuinness. So I had a conversation with him about the parade and the [INAUDIBLE] coming down. I didn't get any sense that things were going to be resolved in it. And so the call ended, but about 20 minutes later, the person who I rang rings me back again. And he said to me, what happens if I get caught for speeding through Greysteel?
And if you knew the geography, to get to Dunloy from Derry, you have to go through this village of Greysteel. So he was saying to me, we're on our way. And I said to him, well, don't knock anybody down. Don't kill anybody. And if it's about speeding, I'll resolve that, innit?
So then Martin McGuinness rang me from Dunloy, and we both agreed a strategy how we would de-escalate the thing and take the heat out of it. And that was, I would ask a number of police officers I knew if they would remove their body armor and their [INAUDIBLE]. And they had to do it voluntarily. I couldn't insist that they do it.
And Martin assured me that whilst there might be some struggling, there would be no violence against the police officers. And that's a big trust element on both sides. Would the police officers do what I asked them to do? Would the people he asked to do, would they do what they would do?
And that's the risk taking, and no guarantee that these things were going to happen. But the matter was resolved, and the whole thing de-escalated, innit? So I often wonder how much of that had to do with the bowl of soup at Nell McCafferty's house.
So then in 2012, through an event that we organized at Co-operation Ireland, the queen and Martin McGuinness met. And the handshake, it lasted mere seconds, but it was a moment of historic significance. And I don't think a gesture such as that, between the former IRA commander and Her Majesty, would ever have been imaginable.
I was in that five-person lineup along with Martin. And I remember saying to myself that I was going to watch it in slow motion to remember it I knew it was a moment of significant history. But to this day, I don't remember who reached out their hand first. Maybe they did it simultaneously. But what did happen is that one person had the courage to reach out their hand, and the other person had the courage to take it.
I'm looking at Melani, and I think my time is probably coming up. But just in finishing, so peace is more than just an absence of conflict. Peace is the presence of mutually respectful relationships among individuals and groups and even enemies. Those relationships enable conflict to be handled with tact, understanding, and a recognition that everyone shares some common interests.
And at the heart of those relationships is trust. Trust cannot be forced or compelled, delivered or manufactured. It develops through a process of collective engagement and through human relationships. But it does not come easily, and it requires hard work.
And so finally, finally, in that year of that handshake in 2012, I got a Christmas present that Christmas morning, and it was 200 Super Soups. And the inside of it is, "If you like my ma's soup, you'll like these. Signed, Martin McGuinness, Christmas 2012." Thank you very much.
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MELANI CAMMETT: Thank you so much. It's, I think, rare to have such experience from so many different vantage points in approaching the question of conflict and peace building and so forth. So I'm sure we have a million questions. I want to kick it off with a few questions.
And I think you're uniquely positioned to answer some of these questions, because on the one hand, you've worked at the top level, on the elite level. And on the other hand, in your current position at Co-operation Ireland, you work on community-level initiatives. So you've seen it from different angles.
And I'm wondering-- I mean, I think you would not disagree that 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement, everything is not resolved, right? There's still a long way to go. Peace is more than the absence of violence. And despite the fact that there is a good rising number of people in Northern Ireland who report to be neither's and don't consider themselves either committed nationalists or unionists, there's still a lot of tensions.
And I've been there repeatedly in the past year. And one thing that people that run peace-building NGOs have told me is that we've had a lot of money poured into the peace-building sector from the EU, from the government of Ireland, from the UK, from all kinds of donors.
And you would think with this much money poured in, we'd be much farther along. So even people working in this sector are expressing some frustrations with that. So I'm wondering, from your perspective, what needs to be done?
I mean, on the one hand, it's very important to have these kinds of personal interactions among key figures that command organizations and are in leadership roles. But how do you generalize that and make it come down and spread so that the kind of trust you're talking about can spread more generally?
PETER SHERIDAN: A lot of questions in that, Melani. I know there has been a huge amount of money pumped into it, but I often wonder, so if we didn't put that money into it, where would we be today? A lot of that money has meant that people has broken down barriers.
I have been in events where people who see themselves as former combatants, either from the IRA side or the UVF side, and they now can have conversations. And despite that not all of the issues are resolved, by any stretch of the imagination and our politics is in a mess, but what you haven't seen in the last 25 years is any sense that the violence is coming back.
And I often wonder how much of that is because of those efforts and the efforts to help people understand more from the other side in this. And I'm sure that if we hadn't had that effort, either from the European Union or the Department of Foreign Affairs or the Northern Ireland Executive and efforts about building relationships, that we would be much further back and the conflict may have reignited when Stormont fell.
I mean, I think the statistics are 42% at the time, Stormont has been down as opposed to up. And in most conflicts around the world, violence starts up again, but it hasn't started up. There are some pockets of distant republicanism or distant loyalism, but they are few and far between. And they won't get anywhere in it. I'm not saying they can't still kill people. Of course they can, but it won't take them anywhere in this.
So I think there can be a tendency to look at, what's the negative sides of all this? But at the top end of it, stopping the violence. And it may take a lot longer, because the conflict in Ireland is an 800-year-old conflict with British. It's not just the last 35 or 40 years. So partition, all of that still plays a lot of people's mind.
And of course, you have people who come largely from the Protestant community who see themselves as British, and they watch what happens in Buckingham Palace. And there are people who see themselves as Irish, who watch what's happened at Áras an Uachtaráin, and they watch RTE, and they watch Irish sports.
And so you have this division at that level. So we're probably going to find it incredibly difficult to ever come to a one conclusion. I mean, I've constantly argued that the first thing we need to do is learn to live together, first of all in Northern Ireland before we think about united Ireland or other things. We need to find a way that we can learn to live together, first of all, in it.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. So as head of Co-operation Ireland, your organization does a lot of projects to promote all-island exchanges and community-level programs. So I wonder if you could give us some examples of those programs and tell us which ones you think have been more effective and, maybe, less effective.
PETER SHERIDAN: Yeah, so you said yourself there, Melani, that there's a new generation coming through that don't seem to have the same allegiances as the past generation. So a lot of our focus has been on that generation. So we have focused about trying to get young people from Coleraine to Cork, so that's one end of the island to the other, together in conversation with themselves, to explore things that they may have in common, without always talking about the conflict in it.
And so I think most of our successful events have been with young people. It's much harder when you come to my generation, or even the generation of people who were in prison, to let go of some of the things of the past, innit? It's much easier for younger people to do it. I mean, I often reflect that I was born in 1960, which was 15 years after the end of the Second World War.
I have no memory about anything about the Second World War. I mean, as far as I was concerned, it was a history lesson that I got in school. We are 25 years beyond the Good Friday Agreement, so why would we expect that young people have this knowledge? But I think when you live through it, it's like people who lived through the war. They probably didn't talk about it, but they weren't able to let go of it either.
And I think just as a generation of people who grew up in the conflict haven't been able to let go of it. And I think it becomes even more difficult if you lost a loved one or were deeply involved or emerged from the conflict, either as a combatant or in the police or the army or in towns and villages that were scarred, mostly, by it. And I think that becomes harder and more difficult for people to let go.
Now, I've often found that some of the most magnanimous people are the people have been hurt most. And I often think of a close neighbor of ours at home, Gordon Wilson, who spoke with forgiveness about the death of his daughter, Marie, on Remembrance Sunday, when he held her hand as she died as a bomb exploded at the Remembrance Day cenotaph. But he spoke with forgiveness.
And yet, there'd be other people who didn't experience that but would still have much more hatred in their hearts. And there's no doubt that sectarianism is alive and well in Northern Ireland. The orange and the green, that is still very much part of the politics of Northern Ireland. And it may be that it will take a number of generations of young people who don't have those that baggage before we are able to clear that ground.
I'm sure some of the stories still get told around the breakfast table in places that were affected most by the Troubles, which was largely working-class communities who were affected most by it. And I'm sure those stories happen. And we still have, in Northern Ireland, a very divided society. 95% of our social housing is segregated. And there's no sign that that'll change anytime soon, even with the next generation.
Only 7% of kids go to an integrated school, so it's either a state school or Catholic school until you get to university level, and then schools are mixed. Now, some schools are mixed in that they take young people in from the other region.
But in terms of full mixed schooling, we still have-- so if you live in a separate housing estate among your own community, if you get on the same school bus with your own community, and you go to your own school or the same community, it's easy to see how you can be suspicious of the other community or them over there who go to that school or who live in that estate. And those are some of the structural changes that I think are going to require time to get through.
MELANI CAMMETT: I think that's a great point. Actually, that's one thing I wanted to ask is, these kinds of trust building relationships that may develop with leadership can only go so far if they operate in an environment of these structural barriers. So I'm wondering if you have any thoughts-- maybe this is beyond what you focus on in the day to day, but how do you get past those? How do you move past the schooling setup or the social housing? Or what would this take?
PETER SHERIDAN: What changed policing is that we had what was called a Patten for policing. We had Chris Patten on the International Commission, who sat because they couldn't resolve the issue of policing at the Good Friday Agreement. It was just too big a job for them. So they handed it to that international commission. And I've often said that maybe what we need is a Patten for housing, a Patten for education and schooling.
I do think some of those things, and particularly in education, are changing because parents are making choices now that aren't based on religious choices but based on where's the best school? Which is the closest school? So some of that is changing.
The housing issue is much more difficult, because it's going to be difficult to see how people move in, because in some of those housing estates, there's still a lot of intimidation. So if there was somebody moved in from a different community, they were likely to be intimidated out of it very quickly. So that makes it incredibly difficult.
And I suppose that what will resolve it in the end is that next generation making the choices that they're not going to settle for that, and they start to mix. And even in terms of mixed marriages, nowadays there's much more of that happening, and that could take another couple of generations before we get from that.
But those structural changes are not going to be easily mended, particularly where our politicians champion their own side's cause all the time. Even though they're supposed to be in government together, they're not even in government together. But when they're in, they seem to champion their own side's cause rather than champion society's cause in it. And that continues to keep people in separate communities as well.
MELANI CAMMETT: Yeah. I mean, in the broader social science literature on ethnic conflict, broadly defined, one of the biggest findings is that the vested elites like to keep the divisions going because it serves their interests. So I think it's very hard to dismantle these kinds of structural changes.
PETER SHERIDAN: I don't know whether-- people often say that they do it deliberately. I'm not sure they do it deliberately, that they go out of their way to say, no, we want to keep them out, but it's a function of how they operate, because they need votes.
MELANI CAMMETT: Yeah.
PETER SHERIDAN: And, therefore, they'll talk to their own side to make sure the vote comes back to them, innit? I know a lot of our politicians, and I genuinely don't believe that they set out to want to do that and that they find it hard to find a way out of it.
MELANI CAMMETT: Mm-hmm. Well, that kind of implies that there's a demand for this, that, actually, the voters want to keep the situation--
PETER SHERIDAN: I think there's an element of that in it, absolutely, in some communities and some areas that people want to keep it that way. We have now more peace walls in Northern Ireland than we had during the conflict. And these are walls that, some of them are a mile long and up longer than the Berlin Wall.
But when you talk to people on either side of them, they're happy to keep them there, because they feel safe and secure. And so it's very hard to argue about taking them down when they feel safe and secure on either side of them. But what that does, of course, is it embeds that, innit? But yet, you can't just take it down without their consent.
MELANI CAMMETT: I love that phrase, "peace walls." This is one of those euphemisms--
PETER SHERIDAN: Misnomers.
MELANI CAMMETT: --that I learned. I'm sure everyone here in the audience is familiar with the term, but a particular Northern Ireland phrase of "peace walls" that separate communities.
PETER SHERIDAN: Walls of division, we call them in Co-operation Ireland. I do call them peace walls ordinarily, but people know what a peace wall is. They're almost that nice you'd want one in your own back garden. They sound that good, but, unfortunately, that's not what they are. And as I say, some of them are up longer than the Berlin Wall was up.
MELANI CAMMETT: Wow. Well, before we open it up, I can't resist. I have to ask you about something that's in the news right now, about the Legacy Act, which I mentioned in my opening remarks, but I'm not sure if everyone here is familiar with what's going on. So maybe I'll give two seconds. You can tell me what I got wrong and fill in the gaps here.
But basically, this is an act that was recently adopted by the UK Parliament, and it established the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery. And the commission is charged with investigating more than 1,000 unsolved killings that took place during the Troubles.
It's been very controversial. People opposed to it claim that it will put an end to civic investigations and inquests about killings and disappearances and that it gives, really, an almost blanket immunity to perpetrators of violence. And it's been really widely opposed, actually, I understand, by the Irish government, by the UK opposition parties, by victims rights groups, by the European Commission for Human Rights, by human rights organizations, and, remarkably, by the five major parties in Northern Ireland.
So it's achieved this unbelievable feat of pointing to a rare moment of political consensus in Northern Ireland. And even some of your own colleagues at the Mitchell Institute at Queen's have been quite vocal in expressing their critiques of this.
So I'm wondering if you could give us your-- oh, and I should also mention that Peter is now appointed the head of investigations of this commission, which I believe I mentioned in my introductory remarks. So I wonder if you could share with us what your perspective is on this, whether you think it has any hope of achieving things, how would you respond to the criticisms that I'm sure you are more than aware of about this commission.
PETER SHERIDAN: So there's a long answer to that one. So the reason why there's so much opposition to it is the British government decided on this because they want to protect the veterans. So there was a view in the British government, particularly in the Conservative Party, that there was a focus on soldiers who had been involved in the conflict in Northern Ireland. And that's where the police investigations were following the soldiers.
So you were starting to see soldiers appearing in court for offenses that happened 30 and 40 years ago. So there was a big lobby group, pressure group in the UK. And Boris Johnson, when he was prime minister, said they were going to bring in this Legacy Act.
And the focus was-- everybody knew it-- even though the government didn't say it that way, but everybody knew it was about the veterans, the soldiers. And they also had an eye on prosecutions against soldiers, British soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan and other places around the world, innit?
So the act took about 18 months, which is unusual to go through parliament, and it was back and forth because the opposition parties and all in all, the Ireland parties, the Irish government were against it. I give evidence to the Council of Europe, the ministers on the Council of Europe, about we felt that it breached Article 2 on the Human Rights Convention about the need for a thorough investigation and so on, in it.
And so that's where a lot of the opposition has been. So what this Legacy Act does, it calls a halt to any further investigations by the police, by the police ombudsman. It stops inquests. It stops civil litigation. And this new body, of which myself and the former Lord Chief Justice, Sir Declan Morgan, who's a chief commissioner, and myself, who is the commissioner for investigations, have been appointed.
I had to apply for the post, and I didn't apply when it came out first, because I wasn't sure about the independence of it. But once Sir Declan Morgan was appointed, I became a bit more confident in it. And so it was a fair and open process to get there, and the panel that selected you, they put the name forward to the secretary of state. And he said he would take whatever name was given, and that's what he's done, innit?
Interestingly, none of the political parties, to this minute, have complained about my appointment in it. Some individuals have, but, in some ways, what I find strange in people who are opposing me being the chief commissioner, because they say, how can a former police officer investigate these things?
And I keep pointing back, well, under the Good Friday Agreement, we had this thing called parity of esteem. So parity of esteem meant that I was willing to embrace Jerry Kelly, who was in Downing Street at that time with me, who was convicted of the bombing at the Old Bailey in London and the attempted murder of a prison officer in Belfast.
I've been able to sit on the policing board and pick the next chief constable. I was willing to embrace that Martin McGuinness, whatever his background, could sit as a deputy first minister or, before that, the minister of education and make decisions.
But somehow, it's not OK for an ex-police officer to set and be appointed as a commissioner. And I don't get it. To say the parity of esteem for everybody and not for one section or other, and I don't think people have thought this through enough yet.
Why I came to it, Melani, and what convinced me around was about three years ago, I arrived up at my office one morning, at quarter to 8:00 in the morning. And sitting at the door was a guy who I recognized, who was a former IRA man, senior IRA man. And he was senior in Sinn Féin, and he wanted to see me.
So I brought him in. And he wanted to meet the widow of a police officer that he had murdered. And the murder had happened before I was even in the police, and I was sat chatting for about two hours, trying to work out, what did he want? Was this about, I want to go down on one knee and apologize to her? He didn't say any of that, innit?
And eventually, I thought to myself, well, it's actually not my call to decide whether he meets her or not. It's hers. So I got her details from police headquarters, and I wrote to her on a Friday afternoon. And on the Saturday morning, at 8:00 AM, she rings me and. She says, I'd like to meet him. I said, well, let me come down and talk to you.
So I went down to see her. And she was obviously a woman of deep faith, because she said to me, I don't want my children to know. When I say her children, they were in their 40s and married and so on. But she didn't want them to know, she says, because they'll try to stop me. And they won't, she says, and that'll be a row. And she was smiling as she said it.
And she was willing to meet him in her house. And I said, well, let's not meet in your house. Let me find somewhere else. So there was a Baptist church down the road, and I made arrangements a few weeks later to get a room in it. And I drove him down from Belfast.
And as we were walking into the room, she's there, and there's tea and coffee and cups and saucers on the table. And I said to him, look, I feel as if I'm intruding on a private conversation. And she says, no, I would like you to stay.
So I stayed for the conversation between the two of them, and it was a respectful conversation. He was explaining as a 16-year-old how he had got involved and so on. And he did say that the deaths of people was pointless in all of the conflict, innit? But the question she was asking weren't questions that I would have thought she would be asking, those investigator-type questions.
She was asking questions like, were you looking through our windows? Were you following the kids to the swimming pool on Saturday? And these were the questions that, obviously, had been on her mind for 40 years. So he answered all of those questions and a lot more.
And I wouldn't breach the confidence of what happened in the room, but a lot more on this. And coming to the end of two hours or two and a half hours, she said, would you mind if I had a couple of minutes on my own with so and so? And I said, no. That's fine. And as I head to the door, I see the two of them hugging in the room.
And I kept touch with the lady. She was moved into a home recently with dementia, but I kept touch with her. And I know that she got an enormous amount of healing in it. But so did he. And on the way back to Belfast that day, when I was talking to him, he said to me that he had went to the senior leadership in Sinn Féin to say what he was going to do, and he was told he wasn't to do it, that there was a corporate narrative and not an individual narrative around it.
But anyway, he went ahead and done it anyway. So that said to me, we are not going to prosecute our way out of this. The notion that there will be lots of prosecutions in the past is a fantasy. There may be a small number of them, but even then, I'm not sure what we're going to achieve in them, because under the Good Friday Agreement, the most that anybody can do in jail is two years.
So even if you're convicted of 20 murders-- you will get a life sentence if you're convicted, but the most you will do is two years in jail. So the first question is, how much of that is justice if you were the person sitting in court?
The second thing is that under the Good Friday Agreement, when I was in the police, we weren't allowed to examine the decommissioned weapons that were handed in by all the terrorist organizations. So we weren't allowed to forensically examine them, so you couldn't link them to the various murders that happened. So that evidence is not available.
And the bodies of the disappeared-- these were people who were disappeared by the IRA because they were believed to be informants, and so their bodies were secretly hidden for years. And then there was the commission set up, and the IRA then assisted in the recovery of a number of those bodies.
But again, there was no disclosure of any of the information to the police or examination of those bodies to help resolve those. And the British and Irish governments also agreed that there would be no more extradition requests, innit?
So all of those things have already been happening. And this is now another iteration of it. I am not sure-- you said immunity. The way the immunity works in this is-- and unfortunately, I think what's happening is that people haven't got past that bit in the act, about the conditional immunity bit to see beyond that, because there's a lot of flexibility in the act around reconciliation and information retrieval.
But that will require us being able to get access to information from MI5, from the police, from the police ombudsman, but also from paramilitary organizations. So our people who are in the IRA, are they going to offer up information? People in the UVF or the UDA, are they going to offer up information?
So this isn't just one-- if we want to solve a murder or want to bring people a fuller story about the murder, then people are going to have to and those organizations are going to have to pony up with the information.
And when I was head of crime at the time, one of the early legacy investigations we did was the murder of a police officer who, at 24 years of age, he went into a local hospital to see his wife, who had just given birth. She was 22. The baby was born. He spent an hour, an hour and a half in the hospital. And he goes out into the car park. He was shot dead.
And nobody was ever convicted of the murder for 40-odd years. But in one of the reviews, we discovered that the gunman, who was waiting in the car park, was smoking. And he was throwing his cigarette butts on the ground. And they were collected at the time and forensically properly kept.
And there was no such thing as DNA back then, but 40 years later, when we did the DNA testing, we identified the gunman. So long story short, he was convicted recently in court, gets a life sentence, but he only does two years in jail. So the widow was there. And so she hears that.
But two other things happened that I think, to some extent, we just retraumatized her. One was that she believed that her husband had died right away. But in the court, she heard from, I think it was an ambulance driver who had heard the shooting and ran into the car park and went down and found the officer. And he said he was alive for a number of minutes and kept calling her name. That's the first time she heard that, 40 years later.
The second thing she discovered was that the signal to the gunman that the police officer was leaving the hospital was the switching on and off of the ward lights three times. And so naturally, she wants to know, was that the doctor? The nurse? The porter? The janitor? Was it somebody who held our baby at the time or helped give birth? Almost that Judas Iscariot type thinking, innit?
And so there was no answer. So we haven't got answers. So one wonders, would it have been better if we'd have got the story and been able to tell her the story more so than the prosecution case in it? I don't know. And I think it'll be different for lots of people.
But I am sure of one thing in this, Melani, it will work if people want it to work and they make it their business to work. And I keep saying to people, it is the responsibility of our generation to resolve this. If we don't, we're going to leave it to the next generation, children and grandchildren, to continue to fight these battles in years to come.
If people think that's a good idea and they're not prepared to tell the story, well, then they need to know. Because these things don't go away. You saw it with Franco in Spain, and you see it the conflicts around the world. These things do not go away.
But if we're big enough and brave enough to make decisions-- and maybe the best we can do is tell the story to the loved one of the person who lost-- because, to be honest with you, despite the best of things that happened around the Good Friday Agreement, the people who are forgot about were the victims and survivors, because it was, again, too difficult to deal with.
And this whole fragmented approach has happened over the last 25 years in how they've been approached in this. And they haven't been properly that, even to the extent that when the UK government passed a legacy bill, 16 families have taken an action in the court in Belfast to challenge that. The fact that even the families still have to do that suggests, why is it nobody else can take this action? Why is it families, innit?
And so the law may change in this. The court may make decisions around the immunity, whether it meets the convention rights. The European Court may have something to say on this, but we won't know that for a number of years, probably.
But in the meantime, is there information recovery and retrieval we can get? Because under the legislation, there's an obligation on me, as the commissioner for investigations, to answer or find answers to the question that the people asked. So you can ask for the examination, the review of the case of your loved one, and you want these 50 questions answered. And it's my responsibility to find it.
And whilst we wait and see whether there will be an immunity, because I don't see us, as a commission, at the minute progressing conditional immunity until the courts have made a decision, because what you will end up doing is if we took that to the stage and the courts found that it breached the Convention Of Human Rights, then we have already let some people have access to that. And so I don't foresee that we will be able to have those cases, where there's conditional immunity, until the courts decide, innit?
MELANI CAMMETT: Mm-hmm. I see, yeah. I know that some of the critics have asked, why is it-- there were arrangements in the Good Friday Agreement, like the police ombudsman unit, that were charged with investigating deaths during the Troubles. And some of the questions that have been, why not activate that? Why not resort to that?
And that had a policy of any case that involved an allegation of RUC collusion with one of the paramilitary groups not having a member of the police involved in the investigation. So I think that's been one of the criticisms.
PETER SHERIDAN: So let me answer that one, particularly, about the ombudsman. So when the patent report happened, there was the reform of policing, innit? We set up these bodies of accountability, the police ombudsman and the policing board. And they were to be about the future. They were about modern policing and the policing of the future.
And what happened is, through no fault of the ombudsman's office, but they started, then, to get all of these cases from the past. And so it wasn't about the accountability of the policing and the current day, but there then became a huge focus on the past investigations.
And they could only investigate police officers. Then it was the allegations against the army. And so then the police had to investigate the army cases. And so this thing became fragmented in how it's happening, innit?
And I understand and fully acknowledge that, for some people, the fact that me, as a former police officer, but that's what party esteem was about, first. And secondly, I wasn't involved in any of those cases. And to stigmatize a whole organization is, in my mind, unfair in any walk of life, and that everybody has said. And there will be accountability mechanisms put in place as part of our commission.
There's not just me and Declan Morgan. There will be four other commissioners appointed. There will be investigative assurance groups. There will be a whole lot of other accountability mechanisms around that and in it as well.
MELANI CAMMETT: OK.
PETER SHERIDAN: And if we don't do this, what is it, then? Are we going to do more of the fragmented approach for victims and survivors? So if not this, what?
MELANI CAMMETT: Mm-hmm. OK. Well, let me open it up. I've been monopolizing the conversation here. So we have some mics, I believe, floating around. I'd invite anyone to come up and pose a question.
PETER SHERIDAN: And if you had a question, what would it be?
MELANI CAMMETT: OK.
PETER SHERIDAN: There's one.
MELANI CAMMETT: Ciaran and then Danielle.
PETER SHERIDAN: There's two here.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much, Peter. I really enjoyed your presentation. Living in the Republic, you mentioned about the new generation coming through. And there is an emergence in the last few years of support for Republican songs. And you may be aware of, there's a very famous one from the Wolfe Tones at the moment.
There seems to be a sizeable amount of support among young people for the Republican activities. What's your sense of that? And where is that going? And how does it make you feel?
MELANI CAMMETT: I think what Ciaran got, there's been recently, as well, the chanting of, Ooh Ah, Up the Ra at events and things, and the Ra being the IRA, innit? Some of that I think, Ciaran, is young people. It's almost a lilt to the song that the can-- they probably have no idea why they're saying it or where we're coming. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe they have no idea what it even means, because I suspect if you sat down and explained to them what that means for some other people.
And now, of course it's dangerous. I remember I watched Patty Kielty. He was being interviewed on RTE. And the interviewer talked about Ooh Ah, Up the Ra. And he said, and my father was murdered by the UVF, he said. If people started to sing Ooh Ah, Up the UVF, he said, how would I feel about that, innit?
I think some of it, if we overplay it, Ciaran, that we run the risk of making it an issue. I suspect, with a lot of young people, they have no idea what they're even singing about or what it means, other than it was a tune with a lilt in it, and there was plenty of beer on the go and wine on the go, and they were jumping up and down and singing and got caught up in the moment.
Now, you could argue that that's no excuse to people who lost loved ones to the IRA, it's completely disrespectful, and I get that, innit? But I don't think we should overplay it, because I don't think the level of knowledge is there, as young people, of what they're talking about.
As I said, for some young people, this is 35 years ago, 30 years. It's a conflict that happened away in the past. It's a history lesson, and they have no idea of what it meant for the people who lived through it. I wish it didn't happen. But I'm not going to get overly excited about it for those reasons.
AUDIENCE: Thank you very much for this very heartfelt and serious presentation. I guess I wanted to ask a question about the views of the police at the time you were involved. And I'm very much compelled and totally agree with your focus on trust. And you gave a lot of personal anecdotes about how you generated that yourself. You may be exceptional. Maybe you're not. So I guess the question-- it's kind of a set of related questions. And hopefully, it makes sense to you.
But I'm just wondering whether you think in the movement towards the agreements, what was the relative contribution of the activities of the police to that being able to generate trust, if that was part of it, as opposed to the political negotiation process, with the political leaders in the communities that were struggling?
Because even your example-- I mean, you're in a constant dialogue as a policeman, in constant dialogue with people who are representing these communities in the political struggle. So that's the general question.
And maybe a sub-question of that, again, thinking about trust and then even this new commission that you're running now, the question of whether folks saw the police as serious about social order, crime as opposed to political order. So I mean, I really want to know a little bit more. I mean It was an intractable situation to be a policeman within, right?
PETER SHERIDAN: Yeah.
AUDIENCE: You, fortunately, represented the minority position in the police department, but can you say a little bit more about the presence and the way in which, hopefully, it had a bearing on the ability to come to an agreement. It wasn't just about the political negotiation. That's my question.
PETER SHERIDAN: Yeah, no. That's a good question, innit? And I suppose-- you said about exception. It wasn't that I was exceptional, but I happened to come from a particular community, a particular background that gave me a different understanding that maybe 95% of the organization didn't have, because we'd come from culturally different backgrounds.
And whilst I met some rogues and scoundrels in the police, the vast majority of police officers I worked with honorable, decent people who wanted the same as I did, that you would meet in any organization. Whether that's the BBC or any other organization, you meet decent people.
And people used to always say to me, it must have been difficult, a Catholic to be in the police. Well, not really, because when you're in an organization, you get on with people because you like them. You have the same values, you have same interests. And religion wasn't the day-to-day issue of it.
Now, you would have known at times like the 12th of July that there was a difference, because, culturally, inside the organization, that's where people grew up from. And police officers are drawn from the community. So they will bring with them the community backgrounds and the culture that they come from in the communities. They don't somehow get that taken out of them when they come into the training college, that somehow that's removed from them.
So those views are there what, I think, happened, innit, that because, if I was in the back of a police Land Rover because of where I came from, my background, I probably moderated other behaviors that may not have been moderated if I wasn't in the vehicle. And that was why the importance of being reflective of society, innit?
But I also think that the police are a part of government. I don't always say we were on the same side, but you'd like to think most times that you're on the same side in terms of wanting to do the right thing. I'm not sure in government, they always did the right thing, innit, but because you become part of government, you seem to be the institution of states. So if government is unstable the way ours is at the minute, guess what? That reflects on policing.
When the Northern Ireland executive was up and running and was at its best in the early years and we had some of the policing board, when Desmond Ray and Dennis Bradley were the chair and vice chair, some of the best policing boards, then policing was at its best and got most of the support.
But as soon as that starts to fragment the way it has currently, then it reflects on policing. And then things seem to somehow go wrong quicker, innit? So I don't think you can isolate policing out from the politics of it.
I think the nature of policing in Northern Ireland was, it was political, because it was seen to be part of the state and a state where a large percentage of the population didn't have the same allegiance to that state and so, therefore, any arms of that state.
Now, it was interesting. That probably didn't reflect as much in terms of the health service or the education service, even though there aren't-- but the police are a different part of the state, almost that front-facing part of the state, innit? And I would have always argued, when I was in the police, it's not my job to uphold the state as a police officer. That might be the rule of the army, to uphold the state.
It's my job, as a police officer, to uphold citizens' rights and protect citizens' rights. And I think somehow, in the politics of Northern Ireland and the policing, that became blurred with people to the extent that police officers didn't make that distinction in their own mind. And I think that became part of the problem, innit?
One of the things about the Patten report was about the taking of politics out of policing. And the way they were to take politics out of policing was to set up those accountability bodies of the police ombudsman, the policing board.
And I'll just give you an example of one that has caused the current fracas, which is this incident that happened on the Armor Road, where there was a memorial at the bookie shop, innit?
And whatever happened at that event, the issue was, instead of the police commander getting involved or the chief constable making decisions, and instead of Michelle O'Neill coming out and making a statement about it and Arlene Foster coming out and making a statement about it, they should have left it up to the police ombudsman. That was the role of the ombudsman.
And I'd said to the chief Constable at the time that process was his friend. He should have left it to the police ombudsman to make a decision on it. And, of course, they didn't do that. And that's why politics got back into policing, and our politicians have a responsibility around that.
All of them, collectively, should have said, we set up an accountability body called the police ombudsman. Let the police ombudsman decide whether the officers behave properly or didn't. And, as it turns out, now the court has decided that the police officers did behave.
So the chief constable ends up resigning on it, the policing board are split on it, and all of that came because they didn't work the institutions they set up under the Good Friday Agreement. There's lady up here. The lady here first, I think, and then this gentleman over here.
AUDIENCE: Thank you. This was fascinating, and I want to ask you a hard question, if I may. So you said that you think you still need to learn to live together. It's important. And also, you were wondering what would have been Northern Ireland today if you didn't put the money in that was put-- the amount of money.
So I just want to push a little bit, if I may, on these two points by asking you this. Could it be that the money was actually teaching you how to learn to live segregated respectfully? Because one of the things that-- it's very striking when you come to Northern Ireland is to see how respectful people are personally to each other. There is no problem there in terms of the respect.
Yet, a sectarianism permeates everything, every social structure in the North, but there's one big difference over these 25 years, and that is the Alliance Party.
So I do want to ask-- I want to point my question and ask you this specifically. When you see political parties that are actually not trying to reach beyond their base, even though they're suffering politically-- especially the SDLP and the UULP, you are really suffering-- do they really think that they have not exhausted their core communities? Why are they still not doing much to try to cross communally, especially those small parties that have really suffered?
And of course, we know that the Sinn Féin has its own agenda now, with the United Ireland. So how do you explain this? This is kind of an oxymoron or a paradox that is really hard to understand.
PETER SHERIDAN: Yeah, no. I mean, that's a really good, insightful question, innit? And I think that some of that is to do with the fact that over 40% of the time that the executive hasn't been sitting in government together. And even when they were in government together, as I said earlier, they fought to champion their own side's rights instead of collective government.
I don't think we've matured as a government. And I think the early stages of government, when Ian Paisley and Seamus Mallon and people like that, actually performed better, because I think they were invested in the agreement, to the extent that they were, that they made it.
But where our politicians are continually at loggerheads with each other and they'll only agree if it's what the alliance called shared out. If you get something, we get something. That's not good government. And we haven't been able to agree on a program for government, even, yet.
The politicians haven't been able to agree on a program for government. I can't imagine that in the UK or the Republic of Ireland how the place would function if you can't even agree on a program of government. So there is a huge responsibility on that top-down example, innit?
I think some of the best of times was when the queen went to Dublin, president of Ireland first visit to the UK. In all that time, I was in Dublin when the queen talked about all of us wish we had done things differently or not at all, the importance of forbearance and conciliation. And, actually, if our politicians would get up and read it every morning they might think differently.
But I don't think we've matured enough in politics yet. And that was exacerbated then by the 2016 referendum, which caused further division. And it makes it even harder for them to collectively come to common purpose decisions in it. It started to impact on all of the aspects of government at the minute.
And sadly, I think until our politics gets to a place where you can have mature government and they start to recognize the importance of the citizen and working for the citizens, I think we're going to continue to have those challenges, as you set out.
AUDIENCE: Thanks, Peter. Thanks for coming and talking. Do I have to call you top cop?
PETER SHERIDAN: Top cop.
AUDIENCE: I have a two-part question. First is what flavor was the soup? The second part was, I'm from Dublin, and I took your point very well about the violence hasn't resurfaced, and it hasn't come back, and that's a wonderful thing. And I wondered if you had any thoughts whether had anything to do with the 9/11 terrorist attacks here and whether that cast the various campaigns and that perspective, just wondering. And also the soup. Don't forget about the soup.
PETER SHERIDAN: So it was vegetable soup.
AUDIENCE: It was vegetable.
PETER SHERIDAN: Because Martin's sister grew organic vegetables in Donegal and brought them into the mother. So there was a whole mixture of vegetables in it. It used to be called a bowl of benefit. That's what she told me it was.
I mean, I'm sure at the time, 9/11 had something to do with, particularly in the psyche in the United States and terrorism and so on. But I don't think that's the reason why the conflict hasn't resurfaced. I think people have recognized that the conflict wasn't going anywhere in Ireland on all sides, innit, except for the small number of people who still think Irish people killing the other Irish people is a good idea.
But I don't think that was-- I think we came to the conclusion that there has to be a better way. And the Good Friday Agreement, particularly in the early days, started to show people that there was a better way, innit, and sadly, we wasted some of that and have continued to waste it, innit?
But despite that, I get no sense that violence is going to come back again. So I think if we cling on to at least that, we will eventually get to some stage where the next generation of politicians or something can raise there above the way we're doing business at the minute.
MELANI CAMMETT: I saw two questions over here. Is there one over here?
AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE].
MELANI CAMMETT: Ah, OK. So maybe let's take all three questions together really quickly, because we're almost out of time. And then you can choose whether you want to answer any of them, none of them, or all of them.
PETER SHERIDAN: Well, if I'm asked a question, I have to answer it.
MELANI CAMMETT: [LAUGHS] OK. Quickly.
AUDIENCE: So my question would be long, actually. So if you want, I can--
MELANI CAMMETT: No, no.
AUDIENCE: So you mentioned the varying roles of different generations and the importance of generational memory and whatnot. And I wanted to ask, in many active ethnoreligious conflicts, the next generation is growing up deprived of any model for peace to build upon, any education, any, I mean, civil engagement.
So what's left? And many times, this generation is referred to as the lost generation, even. But what remains for this generation, societally or individually, to build peace after these really difficult periods?
MELANI CAMMETT: And do you mind if we group a few together? So please.
AUDIENCE: My question-- obviously, you've talked quite a lot about the Stormont executive. And my question was whether you genuinely think Northern Ireland will have a functioning governing body at some stage. And what active steps could be taken within the political structure to resolve those issues that we currently have?
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. And there's one more question right behind you.
AUDIENCE: I actually have two questions, the first about the ramifications of Brexit. Is it still an elephant in the room impacting your work? And then I have a question of where do you search for inspiration in your past work and your current work? What is coming to mind is the process in South Africa and the reconciliation there. So what kind of lessons do you draw from other places that you're using in the past and in your current work? Thank you.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great, thank you.
PETER SHERIDAN: OK, so on the first question about [INAUDIBLE], what I think is interesting. When you talk to a lot of young people, they're quite happy to tell you that this wasn't their conflict. And whilst they're happy to have some knowledge of it, but they don't see it as their conflict. And that's why they said 25 years ago, when they weren't even born and they don't see it as theirs.
But in terms of a model of conflict resolution, I mean, we constantly hold up Northern Ireland as a model for peace building, not least because the conflict is one of the most successful peace negotiations, because the conflict ended. The violence ended. We haven't built the next bit of it. And that might take longer. And maybe there is 25-year cycles in these things.
But we were able to get to a place where the violence ended, and it hasn't came back, and there's no sign of it coming back. So there has to be some sense of peace. Because of that, there are tens of thousands of people alive today and tens of thousands of people uninjured today. And so it has to be successful from that point of view.
And I wish it were different in terms of the politics and that we hadn't squandered some of the opportunities that we should have had in it, and, maybe, in terms of a model, maybe, that's the bit that, maybe, focus needs to be put on, not just ending the violence but building the peace, then, in the next part of the conflict, innit?
The executive, whew. That's a big question. I think you'll know in the next few weeks, innit? I mean, strangely, what I find difficult to understand, particularly from a union's perspective, I fully understand that from the likes of Jeffrey Donaldson, the big issue for him is the union. That's the union with the United Kingdom.
But if you don't make Northern Ireland work, good jobs, good health, good education, good prospects, and protect people's identity-- because the union is not going to be protected in Westminster. The union is secured by the people of Northern Ireland.
So if you have good jobs and good prospects and, even, you come from an Irish background-- provided your Irish is protected, the likelihood of wanting to stay with the status quo is probably what most people will do, because it's like Irish people who live in London or live in Liverpool or Manchester, their Irishness can be celebrated, but they're happy to be there because, economically, they're better off.
Well, why would you not want to make Northern Ireland economically better off, to ensure that your Catholic nationalist neighbor wants to stay in the place? But if you don't have a good functioning government, then what you're doing is you're forcing a choice between two unions, a union with the United Kingdom or a union with the rest of Europe through the Republic of Ireland.
And that will form part of the debate in the future, if that's the only choice in it, particularly where young people sit. And the opportunity to be in a union that gives them the opportunities around Brexit or around Europe, particularly given that the majority of people in Northern Ireland voted to remain in the European Union.
So I don't understand the rationale of not wanting to make Northern Ireland-- not having a government that's working at this minute in time. But I think you'll know in the next few weeks whether it's going to happen or not, innit? Fingers crossed, is right.
And the last question was about inspiration. What was the first bit of it? Oh, Brexit. Undoubtedly, it has polarized the place, because, again, it has forced people into these choices of united Ireland because it gets access to Europe or United Kingdom, because that's where my allegiance lies.
So it has undoubtedly polarized things over the last five years or seven years. And, in fact, it has been that constant point of conflict over the last few years. And I don't mean violent conflict but political conflict, innit?
And the fact that for unionism, they now see a border down the Irish Sea, and they see that they are now somewhat different than the rest of the United Kingdom and that even for trade, that you can't move freight from one part of the United Kingdom seamlessly into another part of the United Kingdom.
You can understand from people why that might affect their constitutional thinking around this, but I'm not sure how we resolve that, other than the UK government sticks much closer to what's happening in Europe. But if it continues to diverge, then the likelihood was the split will get wider.
Inspiration, I mean, I genuinely believe in the goodness of people and that I think there's all have a responsibility to try and make this place better, and we have to do a bit-- when I applied to be the commissioner for investigations, I could have decided that I was going to walk the beaches and enjoy reading stories and books and so on.
But if you say that you can't leave this to the next generation, it's our generation's responsibility to resolve this, well then, you have to do something about it. You can't just say this and leave it up to somebody else, innit? So that's my inspiration, that hopefully, I will make my contribution to finally bring this to an end, naive though that may be.
MELANI CAMMETT: Great. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining us.
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