The 30th Anniversary of a Grassroots Dialogue in Northern Ireland
by Simon Lee – [ Journal of Dialogue Studies Vol 11 ]
Abstract
When ‘talks about talks’ between the politicians in Northern Ireland were collapsing in 1992, what we needed was listening about listening. Robin Wilson (then the editor of the political affairs magazine, Fortnight) and I (then the professor of jurisprudence at Queen’s University Belfast) co-founded Initiative 92, supported by a broad alliance of patrons across civic society and funded by Quaker and other charities. In the autumn of 1992, we established an independent commission of inquiry chaired by Torkel Opsahl, the Norwegian human rights lawyer. Submissions were invited from all-comers, including those who were then subject to broadcasting restrictions. The commission held hearings around Northern Ireland in January and February 1993. Their report was published on 9 June 1993, and then a major opinion survey gauged public reactions. This whole process of dialogue made a difference, playing a part in imagining what would happen if ‘they’, ‘the other side’ did this or that and how ‘we’ might react. Meanwhile, leaders of the different strands of nationalism were in their own dialogue, the Hume-Adams talks, the results of which were not made public. I wrote an article in the Irish Times on 14 October 1993 imagining what they might be saying. On 31 August 1994 came the first Irish Republican Army ceasefire, and I wrote in the Belfast Telegraph on 30 September 1994 an article imagining how unionists could respond constructively. Robin Wilson and I were called to give evidence to the New Ireland Forum in Dublin on 12 April 1995, after making a joint submission, ‘Towards a Participatory Democracy’. It took until 1998 for the Good Friday Agreement to emerge from the talks between politicians, chaired by Senator George Mitchell, but this paper explores the lessons for dialogue in other contexts from this experience of grassroots dialogue through Initiative 92.