It is somehow fitting that the Good Friday peace agreement of 1998 has become inseparable from Irish poetry. If, for a moment in Northern Ireland, “hope and history rhymed” or those involved in resolving the conflict “walked on air against their better judgment,” phrases that politicians and other speechifiers ubiquitously quoted, they had poet Seamus Heaney to thank for their … [Read more...] about Walking Into The Marvelous With Declan Kiberd
Kelly Candaele
Good Friday Agreement 25 Years Later
Queens University, Belfast Conference
By Kelly Candaele
IA Newsletter April 29, 2023
IA Newsletter April 29, 2023
Senator George Mitchell turned out to be the star of the Agreement 25 conference held April 17-19, 2023 in Belfast at Queens University to mark the twenty-five-year anniversary of the signing of the Good Friday Agreement that largely ended the sectarian war that had devastated Northern Ireland. In a keynote address on the first day of the conference he noted that “If history … [Read more...] about Good Friday Agreement 25 Years Later
Queens University, Belfast Conference
Senator George Mitchell
Reflections on the Good Friday Agreement, 25 Years On Q&A with Kelly CandaeleKC: Perspectives sometimes change with time. Looking back from 25 years, are there any perspectives about your experience or the Good Friday Agreement that have changed for you during that period? GM: On the day the Agreement was reached I praised the men and women who … [Read more...] about Senator George Mitchell
Good Friday and Us
I wonder if we are, as novelist Salman Rushdie has written, at the deepest level of our nature, “frontier-crossing beings.” Is it part of an innate desire to step across borders, and by doing so enter into places that can be disorienting or even dangerous? If that is so, are we not wall-builders as well, determined to keep at bay the foreign, the invader, and the … [Read more...] about Good Friday and Us
Man of Peace
John Hume, winner of the 1998 Nobel Prize, is interviewed by Kelly Candaele. John Hume is the rarest of political figures. For over thirty years he has doggedly pursued peace in Northern Ireland, initially as a civil rights activist in Derry, his hometown, and later as leader of the largest nominally Catholic political party in Northern Ireland, the Social Democratic and Labor … [Read more...] about Man of Peace