The New Humanitarians Volume III - The Community Relations Council

Imagine this scene for a second. You are standing in a kitchen. It is the early 1980s, right? And you are in the countryside of Mid Ulster in Northern Ireland. Now, to the casual observer, this looks like a, you know, a pastoral, very quiet landscape. But the locals actually have a different name for it.

Yeah, they call it the Killing Fields.

Which is just a tremendously heavy designation for a place where people are frankly just trying to raise their families.

It really is.

So standing at the sink in this kitchen is Mary Fitzstuff. She's the author of the report we are doing a deep dive into today. Her kids are small, they're scampering around on the linoleum floor, and suddenly the silence is shattered. There's this loud, aggressive pounding on the front door.

And in that specific time and place, a knock like that usually meant only one thing.

Exactly. She goes to answer it. She opens the door, and standing there is a patrol of young British soldiers. They are incredibly tense. They are shouting, and they are demanding to search the house right then and there.

Which, and the source notes, this was standard operating procedure during the Troubles. Yeah. But obviously, absolutely terrifying if you are a mother with young children in the house.

Right. But here is the cinematic split-screen moment. This is the detail from the report that literally gave me chills. While she is standing there trying to manage these shouting soldiers at her front door, she glances back through the hallway, out the rear kitchen window.

Oh, wow.

Yeah. And in the field right behind her garden, she sees men maneuvering. They're wearing balaclavas. They're holding rifles. And she knows instantly that these are members of the IRA.

So she is literally physically sandwiched between the two warring factions of this conflict.

Sandwiched. The state forces at the front door, the insurgents at the back door, and her family trapped right in the middle. She realizes that if one side spots the other, her kitchen isn't a home anymore. It is a crossfire zone.

And it was in that moment of just absolute frozen terror that she had what she later calls a Damascus moment.

She realized that while conflict might be inevitable, because people will always fight to change oppressive structures, there simply had to be a way to do it without the violence, without the bodies literally piling up in her garden.

And that realization is just the perfect entry point for what we are unpacking today. We are looking at a report by Mari Fitzduff titled From Violence to Agreement.

Now, before you tune out thinking this is going to be a dry history lesson about politicians signing treaties in fancy suits, let me stop you right there. This isn't about the treaty.

No.

This isn't about Tony Blair or Bill Clinton. This is about the plumbing.

That is such a great way to put it. We often focus on the big handshake on the White House lawn, you know? But this deep dive is about the gritty, messy, frankly corroded pipes underneath the floorboards that had to be completely replaced before any water could flow. We are looking at the ground-level work of the Community Relations Council.

The CRC.

Right, the CRC. And how you actually go about building peace when your neighbors have been killing each other for 30 years.

So let's unpack the landscape first, because I think for a lot of us, the Troubles is a phrase we vaguely know, but the sheer scale of it is really hard to wrap your head around.

It is absolutely crucial to understand the scale. The source material breaks it down and the numbers are just shocking. In Northern Ireland, you had two main sides. You had the Unionists who were mostly Protestant, who wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom.

Okay.

And you had the Nationalists, mostly Catholic, who wanted to unite with the rest of Ireland. And we are just imparting what the source reports here, not taking any political sides.

Of course. And this wasn't just a heated political debate at the local pub. This was a war.

A low-level war, but a highly deadly one. The source notes that 3,600 people were killed. Now, the population of Northern Ireland is tiny. It's about 1.6 million people.

Right.

If you were to map that death toll proportionally onto the population of the United States today—

OK, what would that look like?

That would be the equivalent of 600,000 dead.

600,000.

Yes.

That is staggeringly high. That is Civil War numbers.

Exactly. And 10 times that many were injured. So statistically speaking, almost everyone knew someone who had been hurt or killed. The segregation was almost total. The report mentions that only 7% of people lived in mixed areas.

7%.

Just 7. You had these physical peace walls. Massive barriers of brick and iron and steel cutting right through Belfast to separate the communities.

There's a detail in there that totally blew my mind.

Mm-hmm.

Fitzduff writes that by age 12, children knew 30 different ways to tell a Catholic from a Protestant.

It wasn't just religion. It was a literal survival skill.

Mm-hmm.

You were constantly scanning your environment for threat levels. It was your first name, your address, which school uniform you wore, even how you pronounced the letter H. Wait, the letter H? Yes. If you pronounced it H, you were likely Protestant. If you said H, you were likely Catholic. Wow. Something that incredibly small could mark you out as the other.

That is wild. It is like a superpower, but the absolute worst possible kind. You are scanning everyone for danger constantly.

Precisely. And in the early days, when people like FitzDuff started trying to change this dynamic, the concept of conflict resolution was so new it barely even existed.

I love the story she tells about her first university course. She offered a class on mediation, and half the class showed up with yoga mats.

Because they thought it said meditation.

They thought they were coming to breathe and hum, not negotiate a ceasefire.

It is funny, but it is also deeply tragic. It shows how completely foreign the concept of sitting down and talking really was to that society. And the resources were pathetic. In 1984, the report lists about 45 tiny groups working on community relations. Their total budget across all groups was less than $2 million.

Which, I mean, sounds like real money until you compare it to what the government was spending on the war itself.

It was 0.5% of the security bill. You had 30,000 security personnel—police, army, prison officers—all trying to keep a lid on the violence with force. And you had maybe 117 people trying to actually fix the relationships.

Talk about an uphill battle. Hmm. So the government is spending billions on security, but just pennies on peace. How do you go from 117 people and a yoga mat misunderstanding to actual systemic agreement? You build infrastructure.

This is where the story shifts to the creation of the Community Relations Council, the CRC.

This was the major turning point.

It really was. Following a massive government report in 1986 called the Hesse-C.H.R. Report, the overall strategy completely changed. They realized they needed a dual approach. First, they needed a unit inside the government, the Central Community Relations Unit. Okay, the CCRU. Right. Their job was to challenge the government itself, to audit policies on housing and employment, to make sure they weren't accidentally making the conflict worse.

Like an internal affairs department for fairness.

Exactly. But you also needed an independent body to work with the actual people on the ground. That became the CRC, founded in 1990. And this distinction is vital. Fitstaff says she only accepted the job of director on the strict condition that the CRC was truly independent.

Why was that independence so incredibly important?

Because in a deeply rooted conflict like this, the government is not seen as a neutral player. To the nationalists, the British government was the enemy. If the CRC was just a government mouthpiece, half the population wouldn't even open the door for them. It had to be independent, answerable to its own board, not to government ministers.

And there is another point she makes in the report about justice versus relationships.

Yes. She argues that relationship building is complementary to justice. It is not a substitute for it.

Right. Because if I'm being actively discriminated against in housing and you come along and say, hey, let's have tea and understand each other, I am going to tell you to get lost.

Precisely. You need the fair housing laws and the tea. You need both legs to walk.

Okay. So they set up the CRC. In 1990. And this is where it gets really interesting for me because their strategies were frankly counterintuitive. If I said, hey, we have two groups who violently hate each other, your first instinct would be get them in a room and make them talk.

That is the standard instinct. It is called the contact hypothesis in sociology. But the CRC found that if you did that too early, it could be absolutely disastrous because they would just sit there and scream at each other, or they would retreat into deep defensiveness. So they adopted a totally different strategy called single identity work.

Which sounds like the exact opposite of what you want. You are funding them to stay apart.

You are funding them to build confidence. The insight here is brilliant. You cannot have effective dialogue if a community feels under siege, insecure, or defensive about who they fundamentally are.

So before you meet the enemy, you have to be okay with yourself.

Yes. They would fund groups, even hardline groups like the Orange Order, to look at their own history, their own culture, to explore it, understand it, and feel proud of it without needing to attack the other side to define themselves.

It is like the airplane rule, putting on your own oxygen mask before helping others.

That is a perfect analogy. Once they felt secure in their identity, then and only then could they move to the interface work.

And speaking of interfaces, we have to talk about the mobile phones. This is one of my favorite details in the entire report.

This was a very specific tactical intervention. The interfaces were the specific streets where Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods physically touched. These were the primary flashpoints for riots. Danger zones. Now remember, this is the early '90s. Cell phones are the size of actual bricks, and they are very rare. The North Belfast Community Development Center started giving mobile phones to community leaders on both sides of the wall.

So instead of throwing rocks, they could call each other.

Exactly. Because riots often started purely on rumors. Someone would say, the Protestants are gathering at the corner to attack us. And the Catholics would run out to defend themselves.

And suddenly you have a full-blown riot. A completely self-fulfilling prophecy.

Right. But with the phones, the Catholic leader could call the Protestant leader and say, hey, what is actually happening over there? And the guy would say, no, it is just a crowd coming out of football match. Stand down.

Rumor control.

It completely stopped the spiral. There was a group in Derry called the Peace and Reconciliation Group that did exactly this. They intercepted rumors that usually led to violence. And they shut them down with facts. They stopped riots before the first brick was ever thrown.

It is so incredibly simple, but so effective. It is communication infrastructure. But the CRC didn't stop at just community groups, did they? They realized you can't just have peace groups on one side and real life on the other.

No, they had to mainstream peace. They had to infiltrate the everyday institutions where people actually spent their days. The workplace, for example. This part was fascinating.

The source talks about a group called CounterAct. It was a trade union group.

The workplace was a highly dangerous place in Northern Ireland. It wasn't a neutral zone. You had people being actively intimidated, flags being hung up over machines to mark territory, even targeted killings of workers. CounterAct trained shop stewards, the union representatives, to handle sectarian bullying.

So if someone was being harassed because of their religion, The union rep actually knew how to step in and shut it down.

Exactly. Not just as a human resources rule violation, but as a fundamental safety issue. And then there were the security forces. This is perhaps the hardest area they tackled.

Yeah, to the nationalist community, the police and the army were the active aggressors. They were the ones kicking down the doors.

They were. They were often rude. They tore houses apart during searches. Fitzhugh mentions the class difference, too. The posh accents of the British generals versus the working-class locals. It bred deep resentment. The CRC pushed for training in social skills and cultural awareness for the police and the army.

Which kind of sounds a bit like manners school for heavily armed soldiers.

It does, but the data showed it actually worked. When soldiers stopped trashing houses and started treating people with basic politeness, complaints plummeted. Violence against the soldiers went down. It turns out if you treat people like human beings, they are significantly less likely to attack you. Who knew?

Basic respect works. And then there was sport. I love this one because sport is usually so deeply tribal. You wear your colors, you hate the other team.

In Northern Ireland, it was literally tribal. Catholics played Gaelic football and hurling. Protesters played rugby and cricket. But the CRC supported initiatives for mixed rules games. Like combining hockey and hurling? Yes. But even more effective was introducing completely neutral sports, like basketball. Basketball. Basketball had almost no history in Ireland. It carried zero historical baggage. A Protestant kid and a Catholic kid could play basketball together without feeling like they were betraying their ancestors. It was a blank slate. That is so clever.

Just say, here is a ball. Nobody's grandfather died over this one.

Go play. Exactly. And eventually, even the business community got involved. For years, business leaders just sat on the sidelines complaining about how the bombs were bad for the local economy. But eventually, they formed a coalition, the Group of Seven. They started pressuring the politicians directly, saying, "Make a deal or we all go broke." Money talks.

But there is another layer here that I think is really fascinating: the culture war. Usually, we think of culture wars—statues, flags, language—as the things that inevitably tear us apart. But the CRC tried to completely flip it.

They tried to turn diversity from a problem into a resource. They created the Cultural Traditions Group.

And they held fairs, which sounds delightful, but imagine bringing hostile groups together just to show off their history to each other.

It was incredibly risky, but it allowed people to see the other side's culture not as an active threat, but as a curiosity. And language was a huge, huge part of this. The Irish language. For a long time, the Irish language was practically banned from public use in Northern Ireland. It was used as a political weapon. The CRC pushed for funding for BBC shows in Irish, for bilingual street names.

But they didn't just support the Catholic side.

No. And this is key to their whole strategy. They also validated Ulster Scots, which is a dialect spoken by many in the Protestant community. It had been looked down on as just bad English for years. The CRC elevated it to a proper heritage language. They said, you have a culture too.

It is valid. It is that balance again. You get your heritage, you get yours, nobody loses.

And my absolute favorite example from the source is the music, the different drums project.

Oh, this is cool. Tell us about the drums.

So you have the bodhrán, which is the traditional Irish frame drum. It is relatively quiet. It's rhythmic, very Celtic. And then you have the lambeg drum. It's a big one. The massive one. The lambeg is literally one of the loudest acoustic instruments in the world. It is used by the Unionists, specifically the Orange Order, to march. It is loud. It is aggressive. It is the sound of, we are We're here and we aren't moving.

And is the soundtrack of the marching season?

The project brought these two completely different drums together into a single musical performance. They took the actual instruments of conflict and forced them into harmony. It was symbolically incredibly powerful to hear those two sounds blending instead of battling.

That is such a powerful image. But I want to pause here because we are making this sound like a smooth ride. We gave them cell phones, We played some basketball, we beat some drums, and peace just broke out. But the source is very, very clear. This took forever.

It was agonizingly slow. This is the ultimate lesson of patience.

Fitzstuff gives the example of a mixed housing estate. Right. In 1992, they started talking to the housing executive about building a neighborhood where Catholics and Protestants could just live together safely.

1992. It took until 2006 for the housing executive to announce they were finally ready to start.

14 years. That is generation.

That is the grim reality of peacebuilding. It is not an event. It is a process. Fitzstuff calls it nurturing the ground. You have to build a peace constituency.

What does that mean exactly, peace constituency?

It means that if the politicians sign a peace treaty in a fancy hotel room, but the people on the ground aren't ready for it, the treaty will fail. We saw that happen before in Northern Ireland. The CRC spent the whole of the '90s getting the people ready. So when the Good Friday Agreement finally happened in 1998, there was enough of a foundation. There were enough relationships, enough trained shop stewards, enough kids playing basketball that the whole thing didn't just collapse.

We were prepping the soil so the seeds wouldn't die.

Exactly. And that required champions. That is a specific term Fitzduff uses. You need people inside the big institutions, civil servants, police commanders, housing officials, people who are willing to take a risk. Were willing to put their head above the parapet and say, we are going to try something different.

And sometimes those champions literally get shot at.

Fitzstaff herself received live bullets in the mail. This wasn't safe work. It wasn't just pushing paper in a bureaucracy. It was immense personal bravery.

Which makes the outcome even more incredible. So let's zoom out to the finish line here. We started with a 0.5% budget and 45 tiny groups.

And today, good relations is literally written into the law of Northern Ireland. Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act makes it a statutory duty for public bodies to actively promote good relations. They went from the absolute fringes to the very center of the legal—

And the visual transformation is just as stark. We started this deep dive with soldiers kicking down a door and IRA men in a field. And the source ends with a very different image from 2007.

The image of Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley, the ultimate odd couple. You really have to remember who these men were. Martin McGuinness was a former IRA commander. Ian Paisley was the most hardline, fire-and-brimstone unionist preacher you can possibly imagine, the man who spent his entire life screaming, "Never," and, "No surrender." And there they were, sharing power in the new government. Not just sharing power, they were known by the press as the Chuckling Brothers. They were seen laughing and joking together in public.

If you had told someone in 1980 that those two specific men would be laughing together, you would have been institutionalized. It would have been completely unimaginable.

But it happened because the grueling groundwork had been laid.

So what does this all mean for us? For you, the listener? Because most of us aren't living in an active conflict zone, but we are in a world that feels incredibly polarized right now.

I think the provocative thought here is about how we view conflict in the world today. We look at other regions or even the severe polarization in our own politics, and we think it is intractable. We often view it purely as a zero-sum game. If I win, you have to lose.

But the source explicitly says win-lose outcomes usually result in a massive loss for everyone involved.

Exactly. Northern Ireland proves that you can mainstream tolerance into the very structure of a society that has actively hated each other for centuries. But it strongly suggests that we might be entirely too focused on the treaty, the piece of paper, the election win, and not nearly focused enough on the plumbing. The plumbing, the brick cell phones, the shop stewards, the mixed basketball games, the messy, boring, incredibly slow work of building relationships when absolutely no one is watching. That is the true architecture of peace.

That is a profoundly powerful thought to leave on. The architecture of peace isn't a grand monument. It is the plumbing. Thanks for joining us on this deep dive. Thank you. We will catch you on the next one.