Quakers in Ireland Part 2: The Troubles

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1. In the episode, a simple cup of tea was the disarming starting point for breaking down massive ideological walls. What is the modern-day equivalent of “making tea” for someone on the opposite side of our current political or cultural divides?
2. Quaker House functioned as a confidential backchannel for rival leaders to talk off the record. In our modern era of constant public visibility and social media transparency, is this kind of secret diplomacy still possible? How can we practice this in our spaces? 
3. The peacebuilders in Belfast were granted access because of the quiet, helpful work their ancestors did a century earlier. If future generations were to inherit the reputation your community is building right now, what doors would it open for them?

Zack Jackson
Hey friends, Zack here. We officially wrapped up our late-season supporter drive, and I wanted to give you all a quick update. Our ambitious goal was to bring on 50 new supporters, and we ended up welcoming 41 of you to the team! That is a massive milestone for us. To every single one of you who stepped up to help make this podcast financially sustainable: thank you so much.

As a thank you, we wanted to let you in on an exclusive live event for supporters coming up next month. With the 250th anniversary of the founding United States right around the corner, we have an upcoming episode featuring Quaker historian Max Carter. It’s a look at how Quakers “Invented America”, digging into the many, and sometimes very surprising, ways that Friends influenced the foundation, history, and culture of this country.

To pair with that release, we are hosting a live Zoom event with Max on July 7th at 7:00 PM Eastern Time. He’ll be going even deeper into these surprising stories and answering your questions live. It’s a perk exclusively for our podcast supporters. And if you can’t make it to the live Zoom event, don’t worry, we’ll record the whole thing and share it with supporters afterward.

If you missed the May drive but still want in on this live Q&A, it’s not too late. Just head over to quakerpodcast.com and click the ‘Support’ button in the top right corner to get on the list.

Thank you again for making this work possible, and now, here is today’s episode.

Zack Jackson 
Last month, I traveled out to Ireland to attend Ireland Yearly Meeting. I wanted to get to know Irish Quakers, and to learn how this small group of dedicated people have had such an enormous impact on the Island of Ireland. As I talked to Irish Friends, they pointed to two pivotal moments in their history: the devastating potato famine in the 1840’s and the violent sectarian conflict known as the Troubles which consumed Northern Ireland from 1968-1998. While there is a strong cultural memory of the famine, I met plenty of Friends who remember the Troubles first hand. 

So, after the Yearly Meeting wrapped up, I took a bus three hours north to Belfast to see for myself. While I was there, I met up with Felicity McCartney, whom you met in the last episode. She’s a lifelong Quaker who grew up here and literally wrote the book on Quaker Peacemaking during the Troubles.

After lunch, she drove me around the city to show me what decades of division looks like…

Felicity McCartney  

Now, straight in front of us is the peace wall. Now, some there are gates, and some there’s these gates aren’t open, but we’re going to go through where there are open gates. But this, there are Protestants living on the other side here. Oh, of this, it’s the Shankill area, so they put a wall right across, and then called it the peace wall.

Zack Jackson  

It’s got barbed wire all over it.

Felicity McCartney  

Yes

Zack Jackson  

It’s not very peaceful.

Felicity McCartney  

No, and you know, there’s all these sort of cul-de-sacs on either side of it, like this, and that people have tried to get little groups of people who live on both sides together at different times, we’ve had nuns having community houses and Methodists having centers near the peace wall to try and bring people together,

Zack Jackson  

So calling it a peace wall, that’s that’s euphemistic.

Felicity McCartney  

Yes, yes, absolutely. It’s no, it’s just a division wall, really, like the Berlin Wall,

Zack Jackson  

right?

Felicity McCartney  

What may even be where they got the idea? Sure. So then people lived in all these houses, but I wanted to find there was a very good…

Various Speakers

Thee Quaker Podcast. Story. Spirit. Sound.

Zack Jackson 
To understand the conflict known euphemistically as the Troubles, you have to rewind. For centuries, Ireland was under British rule, with Protestant settlers from England and Scotland holding much of the power and land in the North. When the island was partitioned in the 1920s, the South gained independence, but Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom. The Protestants in the North were worried that a unified Republic would make them underrepresented and powerless, so the border was drawn between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. 

But Northern Ireland remained deeply divided between Catholics and Protestants 

Felicity McCartney  

A lot of their activities are still happening in buildings which are on one side of the community or the other, church halls, schools, GAA halls, orange halls, the vast majority of people in things like sport and the arts and badminton, you can do Protestant badminton or Catholic badminton in the two church halls or something like that.

Zack Jackson 
By the late 1960s, a Catholic civil rights movement rose up to demand basic equality, but those peaceful protests were met with violent crackdowns. By 1969, British troops were deployed, paramilitaries armed themselves, and neighborhoods were carved up into opposing factions: Protestant Unionists who wanted to remain part of Britain, and Catholic Republicans who fought for a united Ireland.

For people living in Belfast, this war wasn’t something you watched on the evening news. It was on your street. Kate Campbell was in her early twenties at the time, working as a youth leader.

Kate Campbell  

I mean, Belfast is a small city, and because my area was pretty close to the town center, if there were any bombs or anything like that going off, we could hear them, and the children would sometimes you know scream or say, oh, my mom is in town today, or something like that. So then there would be worry, and some would be quite tearful, and so I think me not having any experience really, in terms of dealing with the situation, I don’t think any of us had, really.

Zack Jackson  

For the children that Kate worked with, the geography of their childhood was mapped in debris.

Kate Campbell  

And there was a burnt-out cars, or lorries, or busses, or whatever in your street, or you know, on your way to the playgroup, this was always a talking point, and then sadly, after a while, it just became the norm, lots of broken glass things like that all over the streets.

Zack Jackson 
In last week’s episode, we explored the core of Quaker theology: the belief that everyone is fundamentally equal. When you truly believe that there is that of God in everyone, the dividing lines of a sectarian war become meaningless.  

But for the rest of society, those dividing lines were everything. You were expected to pick a side. Protestant or Catholic. Loyalist or Republican. But Quakers refused. They leaned on their history of being a trusted ‘third thing’, standing in the middle and offering a hand of peace to both sides. 

In 1970, Felicity was in her 20’s, trying to set up a summer camp for kids in a hardline Republican area called Ballymurphy. She and a friend walked into a meeting with local leaders, unsure of the reception they’d receive.

Felicity McCartney  

The secretary of the organization, who’s from a very Republican family and ended up in Long Kesh Prison, said, “We asked to work with Quakers because they helped us during the famine”, so we were quite astounded, and laughed and said, “Well, that wasn’t you or me”, but it was a folk memory, it was handed down, a handed down story, which he knew from his nationalist connections in the south and everywhere

Zack Jackson 
During the brutal potato famine of the 1840s, many institutions only offered food if starving people agreed to convert to their religion. The Quakers did not. More than a century later, that radical neutrality became a shield for Quaker peacemakers. 

Felicity McCartney  

So we found that Quakers had a reputation on both sides of the divide. Here it kind of taught us a lesson that, that you know we were with, with a Quaker organization, we were somehow acceptable to people, not for anything we’d done, but our ancestors, our people who’d been there before us, had this, so I mean, it was, it was very, it made it very good for us to be able to do these things without having to establish we were okay.

Zack Jackson 
That historical trust was like an old skeleton key. It unlocked doors that were bolted shut to the government, the police, and even other churches. And so, the Quakers looked around Belfast, found the places where no one was helping, and quietly went to work. This work would later coalesce as an organization called Quaker Service, and it rested on three pillars: the prison, the families, and the peace process. 

The first pillar was built inside the walls of the Maze Prison. During the Troubles, the government interned paramilitary fighters—both Republicans and Loyalists—without trial. Their families would travel for hours to visit, waiting outside the prison gates with no shelter and no support. The government asked the Quakers to set up a visitor center. It was a highly controversial task: offering hospitality to the families of accused terrorists. But Felicity remembers the brilliant way they recruited everyday people to help.

Felicity McCartney  

When they were recruiting volunteers, they didn’t say, you know, do you want to come and meet prisoners’ families and support loyalist and Republican prisoners, or any of that. They said, can you make tea, and so people felt, yes, that’s something I can do. Some of them even brought buns.

Zack Jackson 
A cup of tea. It was a disarmingly simple starting point. But that tea led to conversations which led to relationships, and it becomes hard to hate someone that you love, no matter what side they’re on. The visitor center grew to include a nursery for children, and transport busses for families. Soon, they realized there were prisoners inside who had no families at all. Here is Kate Campbell again.

Kate Campbell  

But one of the projects that we have at prison within the prisons was those offenders who had no visitors because of the nature of their offense, or maybe because of the family and relationships, etc. or they might have been foreign national prisoners, men in prison, some women as well, and we then developed a project, piloting piloting it, first of all, to to set up volunteer visitors who would go in and visit and begin to begin a friendship, you know, with with those prisoners and that that is the work that continues today and we’ve expanded it to all the prisons

Zack Jackson  

While some volunteers were walking into the prisons, others were heading for the hills. The second pillar of peacemaking took place on a mountain overlooking the divided city.

Kate Campbell  

The location of the cottage meant that there were two roads that you could come up, one from a predominantly Protestant unionist area and one from a predominantly Catholic republican nationalist area, so offering that on a cross community basis, offering that provision, if you like, it was really important that that we could offer it on a cross across community basis.

Zack Jackson  

This was Quaker Cottage. A family center for mothers and children who were buckling under the trauma of the conflict. In a society where neighborhoods were painted in tribal colors, the Cottage was a rare sanctuary. A place where you didn’t have to be Catholic or Protestant. You could just be a mother.

Kate Campbell  

These were families that would have had quite severe disadvantages, trauma in the family. There may be various forms of alcohol and drug dependency, etc. So they were they were families with an awful lot of complex problems, and so the mothers met, but also the children then had had staff to look after them, and talking about child rearing and child practices, and difficulties, and all sorts of things, and the mothers, really, you know, would have bonded, and that was really, that was really important, so that was, that was really very crucial work that happened at a time when there was not any other provision

Zack Jackson 
Tea for the prisoners. A cottage for the families. But the third pillar of Quaker peacemaking tackled the conflict at its root. They called it Quaker House.

For decades, it served as a secret, diplomatic backchannel. A quiet living room in South Belfast where politicians, paramilitary leaders, and rival church officials could sit down together off the record. The work was so sensitive that the official records of these meetings remain locked away for at least the next 30 years. In a country where you couldn’t even trust your own neighbors, the only people with the social capital to host these secret meetings were the Quakers. 

Felicity McCartney  

It befriended and offered a place to meet for a whole range of people, politicians, church leaders, community groups, other peace groups, and just invited people around for lunch, and chat up to them, and listened to what their problems were, and tried to follow what was happening in Northern Ireland as a whole. School, if there were any protests or difficulties anywhere, they would be there, perhaps alongside others, trying to listen and see if there was something they could do,

Kate Campbell  

but it was, it was very good to have that safe space and having that confidentiality as well was absolutely crucial at times for people to be able to speak freely or meet, but could not do it in public, plus ideas, I know that new ideas came in from other conflicts, and so there was, there was very much a contribution, you know, by Quaker House to broadly conflict resolution mediation, etc. etc.

Zack Jackson  

By 1999 that back channel diplomacy combined with decades of grassroots peace building finally bore fruit. The Good Friday Agreement was signed. The official war was over, but peace treaties are signed on paper. Peace itself has to be built on the ground. And as the dust settled. The people of Belfast looked around and realized the hardest work was just beginning. More on that after the break.

Midroll

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Lottie Blunden  

For a really long time, I think I have been searching for a way to, I suppose, give my life meaning, to make sense of the world in a more meaningful way.

Zack Jackson  

That’s Lottie Blunden. She lives on the east coast of England, and her journey to finding that meaning was born out of a profound, unimaginable loss

Lottie Blunden  

Three years ago now, one of my sons got very seriously ill. He had a brain tumor, and then the doctor said, which I wasn’t expecting, there’s nothing that we can do. We can’t do anything else, and your son will die

Zack Jackson  

In the years after her son’s death, Lottie searched for meaning, and one day she noticed a book about Quakers that had been sitting unread on her shelf for almost a decade.

Lottie Blunden  

I came across a Quaker book and read it, and thought, hang on these Quakers book, loads of ideas that seem to chime with what I really feel is really important.

Zack Jackson  

From there, she found Thee Quaker Podcast.

Lottie Blunden  

I just, I kind of binge listened when I found your podcast, I just to hear other people’s voices, other people that were negotiating, or had negotiated like a spiritual path,

Zack Jackson  

Having been encouraged by the stories on the podcast, she felt a small voice urging her to actually step inside a Quaker meetinghouse. She went during the anniversary of her son’s passing,

Lottie Blunden  

For nearly the whole hour, kind of, I just had was just crying very quietly, just silently, just tears were coming, and I just sat. And then one of the other people stood up and gave some ministry, and I just it was something about death and what and people dying, and people that we love dying. I just found that so incredible that that can happen in meeting for worship, and that feeling that another person has to have a message, to stand up and to say it, and that it’s, you know, for somebody, it’s for somebody. And I felt that it was for me, and that was just amazing. 

Zack Jackson  

Lottie told me that the podcast is especially helpful these days when her work schedule doesn’t allow her to get to Meeting. So I asked her why she decided to become a monthly supporter.

Lottie Blunden  

I just felt it was important to kind of recognize that, and to think actually, it’s really useful and helpful to me, and it can’t just run by itself. It needs a community of supporters that’s really important. Otherwise. How can it? How can it carry on? You know, because there’s all, there’s quite a lot of content of like, you know, would you consider being a supporter? And then I was just listening to that, and just thought, actually, this message is not just for everybody else. This is for me as well. And I can’t afford to give loads and loads, but I could actually afford to give something, because I think it is really important

Zack Jackson  

This show only exists because of the community behind it. So if this podcast has been a companion on your own journey, please consider helping us to sustain it. Just go to QuakerPodcast.com and click support in the top right. That’s QuakerPodcast.com. 

And now back to the show.

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Zack Jackson  

Welcome back. Driving through Belfast today, nearly thirty years after the Good Friday Agreement, you can still see the scars. The peace walls haven’t come down. The gates are still locked at night. The emergency may be over, but the unfortunate reality is that, when the headline-grabbing violence fades, so does the crisis funding.

During the Troubles, the government relied on organizations like Quaker Service to step into the chaos. But decades later, peace brought bureaucracy. Here is Felicity McCartney.

Felicity McCartney  

A few years ago, the government’s got an awful lot more bureaucratic about everything, they put the prison visitor services out for tender, but it was much more expensive than another one from an organization who was providing these services for prisons in England, and didn’t include, didn’t include a creation transport and all those things, and but it was much cheaper, so they got the new people got the contract. Some of Quaker service staff were able to stay on and work for the new project, but quite a few of them were made redundant at that stage.

Zack Jackson  

The same thing happened on the mountain at Quaker Cottage. Local social services changed their strategy, pulling funding away from group family centers in favor of cheaper one on one home visits, but Kate Campbell says that approach completely misses the magic of the cottage,

Kate Campbell  

So the local social services and wanted those families then dealt with on a one to one basis, which we felt was just we saw how much the mothers got from each other, and always under a supervised, you know, kind of session, you know, by a member of staff to ensure everybody had their say, to ensure, you know, problems were addressed, information was given, etc. etc. but those bonds did go very deep, and we felt that was an important part of the whole process, and so when then funding was was withdrawn, we realized that we could not, we were we were already hard pushed to to match the money, and we realized we couldn’t complete the whole package. If you like,

Zack Jackson 
Quaker House was sold. The prison family center was handed off to a cheaper contractor. The Cottage was closed.

But Quaker Service didn’t pack up and leave. They looked around Belfast and asked: Who is being marginalized now? Because while the car bombs have stopped, the symptoms of the conflict just look different now.

Kate Campbell  

Racism is something that has really grown over the past, you know, 20 years, say, with new populations coming into Belfast, and I suppose because of the troubles, very few people came from various countries came to live in Northern Ireland, but now that that has changed, and you know, you can see graffiti on the walls, etc. People being burnt out of houses, so, and those, those are some of the issues that we would want to contribute to, you know, to addressing.

Zack Jackson  

To meet this new crisis, Quaker Service moved their headquarters to the Frederick Street Meeting House in North Belfast, and just as they did, the neighborhood around them began to physically transform. Felicity took me there to show me how the neighborhood is changing.

Felicity McCartney  

These big buildings up here, you see the people, that’s the University of Ulster moving into the area. Okay, they’ve moved from out of town to have most of their campus in this area, and they have built student accommodation for 5000 students. Wow, and there weren’t any students living here before that, so, so Frederick Street Meeting House is going to be surrounded by university buildings.

Zack Jackson 
Felicity took me inside the Frederick St Meeting House which now also houses the Quaker Service offices. The worship space is perfectly round, with windows that open to the city. It felt appropriate for the work that they have been doing for the past 60 years, getting diverse and often opposing groups of people in a room and creating a space where they could look each other in the eyes. 

They see this moment as another sort of opportunity, where they can open their doors to the rapidly changing neighborhood around them, and offer that famous Irish hospitality that we talked about in last week’s episode. 

Felicity McCartney  

Happening once a month, they meet here and have a shared meal, which they will contribute, yeah, so then they do lots of other types of activities and discussions, and yes, too, but it gives people somewhere to go, because quite often overseas students can be a bit lost.

Zack Jackson  

Alongside the students, the meetinghouse now hosts the Friendship Group, which provides free meals and community for refugees, many of whom come from the same countries that the students are from. Fifty years ago, peacemaking meant pouring a cup of tea for the isolated families of paramilitaries. Today, it means sharing a hot meal with an isolated immigrant who has nowhere else to go. It’s hospitality as a radical act of peace.

Zack Jackson
As Felicity drove me back to my hotel, she noted that I was staying near the Europa. It holds the grim distinction of being the most bombed hotel in the world, having weathered thirty-five bombings during the Troubles. Today, it looks beautiful. There is almost no evidence of that trauma.

But just a few miles away, the burnt-out buildings remain, and those barbed-wire peace walls still divide neighborhoods. Driving through the city, I saw dozens of colorful murals depicting Northern Ireland’s violent past, its unfolding present, and its hopeful future.

And I couldn’t help but reflect on how we tell history. We talk about the leaders, the politicians, and the inspirational speakers as if they are the ones who forge the future. But really? It’s a thousand acts of hospitality. It’s enemies who sit face to face with each other and become allies. It’s ordinary acts done with extraordinary love. 

The Quaker work in Northern Ireland hasn’t often made the papers. In fact, the one book that details their efforts is currently out of print. But they had an outsized, almost invisible hand in the peace process. They looked to the margins where people were being forgotten, and they served there. They used their reputation for integrity, and they made a real difference.

Kate Campbell  

Although Quakers are doing very discreet pieces of work, if you like, they still are very important, and individual lives do get changed, and it’s long and it’s slow, but sometimes also we get to join something that is bigger, and you know, you can see that all that groundwork, if you like, can contribute and does contribute. I know at times we slip back. Sometimes you feel you’re taking a couple of steps back, and maybe only half a step forward. Other times you feel there’s a couple of steps forward. Now you know, but yeah, I’ve been in it for the long term. And yeah, yeah, I think somebody said peace by piece, and you can, you can spell the piece whatever way you want to want to spell it. 

Zack Jackson 
Thank you so much for joining us on this journey through Belfast today. And a very deep thank you to our guides, Felicity McCartney and Kate Campbell.

If today’s story left you reflecting on how you might build peace in your own community, we have some discussion questions, a full transcript, and links to more resources at QuakerPodcast.com. 

This episode was hosted, produced, and edited by me, Zack Jackson. Jon Watts wrote and produced the music.

Thee Quaker Podcast is a part of Thee Quaker Project. We are a nonprofit Quaker media organization, dedicated to shining a light on these stories of spiritual courage. 

Just like the peacebuilders we talked about today, our work relies on a community of people who believe in what we are doing. If you’ve been moved by the stories we shared, please consider joining us as a monthly supporter. You can go to QuakerPodcast.com and click ‘Support’ in the top right corner. It takes less than five minutes, and we are so incredibly grateful for your partnership.

And as we close our time together today, we leave you with your daily Quaker message, read by Irish Friend Rose Tobin. 

Rose Tobin  

Dan Seeger, 2018 To the extent that the blessing of peace is achieved by humankind, it will not be achieved because people have out-raced each other in the building of armaments, nor because we have out debated each other with words, nor because we have out maneuvered each other in political action, but because more and more people in a silent place in their hearts are turned to those eternal truths upon which all right living is based. It is on the inner drama of this search that the unfoldment of the outer drama of history ultimately depends

Zack Jackson  

To get Quaker wisdom in your inbox every day. Go to Dailyquaker.com That’s Dailyquaker.com

Hosted, produced, and edited by Zack Jackson.

Original music and sound design by Jon Watts (Listen to more of Jon’s music here.)

This season’s cover art is by Todd Drake

Supported by listeners like you (thank you!!)