Northern Ireland Teens in America Leaving Their Troubles Back Home

Keelin Mullin was by the pool in suburban Philadelphia when news came that a car bomb had exploded 15 miles from her hometown of Strabane, Northern Ireland.

She phoned her mother. Then the 15-year-old Catholic clasped hands with Heidi Vaughan, a Protestant teenager also from Strabane, and cried.

“I’m so glad I was in America. I’m so glad Heidi was there,” Keelin said four days later. She had just returned to a Northern Ireland stricken by its worst terrorist bombing. Among the 28 dead was her 17-year-old cousin, as was one of Heidi’s classmates.

Before this summer, Keelin couldn’t have imagined turning to a Protestant friend for comfort. Back home, she has attended an all-Catholic school for as long as she can remember. All her friends are Catholic.

But eight weeks on neutral American ground, in the company of other Northern Ireland youngsters from both sides of the religious divide, served to broaden her horizons. In the strip-mall Philadelphia suburb of Levittown, she discovered that Catholics and Protestants have much more in common than she imagined.

The program that brought the 126 girls and boys to the United States is the Children’s Friendship Project of Northern Ireland, a nonprofit group based in Atlanta.

It pairs Catholic and Protestant teenagers, each from the same Northern Ireland community, and places them with U.S. families for a summer to foster friendship and tolerance. Heidi and Keelin were roommates with Maggie Currey and her family.

“We thought maybe if we could do something, when they grow up things would change,” Currey said.

“It’s one pair at a time, who in turn influence others. It’s a slow process, but there is change,” said Beverly Cassel, regional coordinator for the project.

In the program’s early years, sectarian arguments between teenagers were common, even leading in rare cases to violence. Organizers have since excluded most inner-city youths as already too hardened to change. They also require participating pairs to meet before leaving Northern Ireland. If they don’t get along, they are disqualified.

The program probably doesn’t reach the most crucial youths, such as those who live in Belfast and may one day join the cycle of violence, Cassel admitted.

“We do not have someone who’s been in trouble, who probably has so much hate in them they probably wouldn’t be open to this kind of program,” Cassel said. “All of the children could really use something like this. All have witnessed some horrific things: their father being shot, their neighbor.”

“These young people are the hope of the future,” said former U.S. Sen. George Mitchell, who brokered the Northern Ireland peace agreement last Easter.

“They’re raised in a segregated society and can really benefit from these programs that bring people of different religions together,” he said at a ceremony in Philadelphia attended by eight of the girls.

Of the 126 participants, 22 were from around Omagh, site of the recent bombing.

“It just gets you and all your friends and family. There’s nothing you can do,” said Keelin, speaking by telephone from her home as her family was returning from her cousin’s funeral.

Heidi, also reached by phone, said the bombing struck closer to home for her than did any previous act of violence in Northern Ireland. “The other stuff seemed farther away. This was so close,” she said.

After the bombing, Keelin and Heidi stayed up all night talking, Currey recalled. “They were a strength for one another,” she said. “They didn’t lay any blame at all. All they cared about was how to get through it all. Keelin worried about Heidi’s family; Heidi worried about Keelin’s family.”

The attack was claimed by Irish Republican Army dissidents opposed to the deal brokered by Mitchell. Since then, the group declared a cease-fire.

“Even though something this horrible happened at the end, I know the program is still a really good idea. There are 126 people that are changed, that have bonded with someone of another religion. So there is an end to all this,” Heidi said.

The youngsters who spent their summer here say it was strange to watch events in Northern Ireland through the prism of American TV.

“You see it here and it seems so big. They only televise the big events,” said Joanne McCracken. “At home, it’s like we see it every day. Every roadblock, every detail.”

Heidi said that when she’s at home, she often watches TV to find out if roadblocks have closed any routes she might want to use.

Keelin added: “But if you were scared every time you went outside, you’d never leave.”

Keelin and Heidi say they learned much about the other’s religion--especially the many similarities.

“Hopefully some good will come out of it. Already, Catholics and Protestants are coming together at chapels for funerals, and that wouldn’t have happened before,” Keelin said.

As a result of her close friendship with Heidi, Keelin is considering enrolling at Strabane’s integrated school, one of the few in Northern Ireland that are attended by both Catholics and Protestants.

Until now, Keelin said, she would have been frightened to go near the school while wearing her school uniform, because its insignia would single her out as Catholic.

But Heidi convinced her she would be safe.

To Currey, forging such friendships is a way to break down suspicion and ignorance chip by tiny chip.

“This is how the argument would get continued to the next generation. ‘Your neighborhood is dangerous,’ or ‘Your friends are paranoid.’ But these girls are trying to change that,” she said. “Then maybe their kids and their kids’ kids will be different.”