Where Protestants and Catholics Are One

Oh, Monica McWilliams recalls with good humor and an Irish lilt, they have been called wenches, whiners and feckless, stupid, silly women.

Also cows, dogs, scum. And then there are the insults that McWilliams, co-founder of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition, would rather not repeat in public.

“Men think we’re not capable of intelligent reasoning,” McWilliams says with a knowing smile.

Intelligent reasoning is just what the Women’s Coalition provided during two years of negotiations to end the sectarian violence between Protestants and Roman Catholics in the British-ruled province. The nonsectarian group offered consensus-building, voices of reason and pragmatic decision-making in crafting the peace accord that will go to a vote in Northern Ireland on Friday.

Now, with pro-British Protestants viciously split over the accord and Catholic nationalists lying low so as not to frighten off the Protestants, the Women’s Coalition is at the forefront of a nonsectarian campaign for a “yes” vote on the power-sharing accord.

Their double-decker bus, swathed in “Yes” banners and Women’s Coalition stickers and packed with cheering women and children, rolls through the emerald countryside on the dual mission of promoting the hard-fought peace agreement and lagging women’s rights.

“One, two, three, vote yes,” they chant. The other message they appear to convey is that while the boys are home bickering, the Women’s Coalition is out doing--showing by example that Protestants who see themselves as British and Catholics who call themselves Irish can work together for peace.

McWilliams, 44, is a Catholic university professor, and co-founder Pearl Sagar, 39, is a Protestant community worker; their coalition members come from both camps.

Northern Ireland is not just a divided society, McWilliams and Sagar say, but an extremely patriarchal one. There are no women among Northern Ireland’s 18 members of the British Parliament, and only about 14% of the members of local councils are women, although 52% of the population is female.

But when it comes to verbal abuse, women get their fair share.

The Rev. Ian Paisley, a leader of the “no” campaign and of hard-line Protestants, lashed out at British Cabinet minister Marjorie “Mo” Mowlam. He described Mowlam, who in effect governs Northern Ireland, as “that Arab in a turban.” Not even the women in the audience protested the racist slur on Mowlam, who has undergone chemotherapy treatment for cancer and sometimes wears a turban to hide the resulting hair loss.

In a meeting of the Northern Ireland Forum for Political Dialogue last year, Paisley’s son, Ian Jr., drowned out McWilliams’ discourse with this enlightening commentary: “Mooo, mooo, mooo.”

That’s par for the course, Sagar said. “Their attitudes are quite antiquated, and some men still think we should be home birthin’. They can’t accept a political position from a woman,” she said.

The 30-year sectarian war over whether Northern Ireland belongs with Britain or the Irish Republic to the south put other political issues such as women’s rights on the back burner, Sagar and McWilliams say. And women in Northern Ireland were so put off by the violent, he-man political climate, by the culture of character assassination, they didn’t want any part of it.

Although women in the province have long shied away from politics, they had taken the peace initiative before. In 1976, two Northern Ireland peace activists--both women--won the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. After winning, however, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan fell out over the division of the award money.

Neither woman is involved in the Women’s Coalition. Williams has moved to Texas, and Corrigan, who lives in Northern Ireland, is still active in peace issues through the group the two founded, which no longer has much influence.

The Women’s Coalition was slapped together in 1996, six weeks before a province-wide election for members to the peace negotiating team, and by attracting 1% of the vote, they won two seats at the table.

They have attracted international support--from First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, among others--and credit for helping keep the talks on track during particularly difficult periods.

“They were a force at the talks,” said Paul Bew, a political scientist at Queens University in Belfast. “They were a constant source of optimism at grim times and kept things moving along.”

McWilliams says that’s because they talked across political and religious borders when men in the room would not speak to each other. “We are used to making pragmatic decisions rather than posturing over principle. We would negotiate needs rather than dreams,” she said.

The power-sharing agreement reached on Good Friday has something for each side, but also costs for both that are turning out to be harder to sell than expected.

The agreement stipulates that Northern Ireland will remain part of Britain unless a majority of the people decides otherwise. It establishes a new provincial assembly with built-in guarantees that the Protestant majority cannot dictate to the Catholic minority, and it creates a North-South body to work with the Irish Republic on cross-border issues such as agriculture.

Although the accord requires Catholics to postpone their dream of a united Ireland, most are expected to back it. But some Protestant unionists are balking at the agreement. They object to the release of Irish Republican Army prisoners within two years, and to the possibility that the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Fein, will join the new government before the IRA gives up its weapons.

The IRA and Protestant paramilitary groups are honoring a cease-fire, although breakaway groups from the IRA have said they will not support the deal.

The Women’s Coalition is trying to reach the estimated 20% of voters who say they are still undecided, venturing into middle-class “mixed” neighborhoods and areas thought to be liberal Protestant. But even that isn’t easy.

On Saturday, the bus traveled from Belfast, the provincial capital, south to seaside Newcastle, where the women got off to hand out leaflets. Some pedestrians welcomed the women and promised to vote “yes,” while others politely accepted the fliers and tucked them away. And many others were having none of it.

“Take it with ya,” snarled an elderly man who was pushing his wife in a wheelchair.

Ann McCann, whose youngest brother was killed by Protestant gunmen in 1972, near the beginning of the sectarian violence, was surprised and disturbed by the level of opposition she encountered.

“Maybe a ‘yes’ won’t bring us peace, but certainly a ‘no’ will bring us more war,” she said, as much to herself as to anyone around her.

“I don’t understand. We always talked about the silent majority who wanted peace. What if they’re not there?” McCann asked. “It’s kind of frightening. When my brother was killed in the tit-for-tat killings, we all thought that would put an end to the violence, but 3,200 [dead] later, people are still telling us ‘no’ to a chance for peace.

“Well, I think it comes from a fear of change. I think they just don’t want to share [power]. I think women especially should see beyond this,” she said.

West of Newcastle, in predominantly Catholic Newry, the campaigners’ spirits were raised by a notable increase in the professed “yes” voters.

“Yes. Definitely yes,” a man on the street told Ann Daly, a 49-year-old homemaker and newcomer to politics.

“I’ve always felt very powerless with all the guns. It’s hard for me to come out in public, but I feel I have to do something,” said Daly, who is from Newry. “I read about the Women’s Coalition in the newspaper and joined it.”

McWilliams also was buoyed by the responses she got at the Buttercrane shopping center. They were good--except for one man in his mid-30s who shouted: “You women, you’re all separatists. Where are the men?”