My name is Máirín Colleary and I am chief executive of the Glencree Centre for Reconciliation. I have put together a small set of slides but I gather that there is a glitch. I will quickly describe who we are and the work we do. Many people say, "you are that crowd up in Wicklow", and ask what we do.
The Glencree Centre for Reconciliation is an inclusive, non-judgmental, autonomous non-governmental organisation. We provide a safe place in which people can participate in peace-building on the island of Ireland and beyond. The centre is in Glencree valley. It was a British army barracks, therefore, it is a nice turn that it has ended up as a peace centre. The centre was first set up in 1970 as a respite centre for people who were coming from the North having been burned out of their homes. We call it ethnic cleansing now but we did not have that language in the 1970s. The centre lost its focus in 1988 and closed for a number of years, opening again in 1992 when I first became involved as a volunteer as a member of the council. Since then, we have focused on peace-building, reconciliation and conflict management and resolution.
The team in Glencree is made up of the board, which can have up to 16 members - although there are 13 at present, all of whom are voluntary participants. There are 14 full time staff, including five people who are directly involved in the programme we do which I will explain shortly. There are also up to 12 volunteers in the centre at any one time, who come from Ireland and overseas. They are an essential and integral part of the organisation. We also have up to four interns but more often two in number, who also help us in our work carrying out research and helping us to facilitate and deliver programmes to our participants.
There are seven main areas in which we work. In 1992 we started running political dialogue workshops, at a time when the political parties in the North were unable to come together or sit in the same room, never mind have a dialogue. We did a great deal of work, which was done at sub-leadership level. It was done behind closed doors because Glencree guarantees a safe and private place for people to do their work. One of our difficulties is fundraising because we cannot talk in public about much of the work we do. Many people take huge risks in coming to work in Glencree. They risk their lives sometimes or losing the support of their communities. Therefore, we must always be sensitive about how it is handled.
From the political dialogue workshops, we became involved in victims and survivors programme. The programme is funded under the PEACE II initiative by ADM/CPA. Bringing together victims of the Troubles, we work with people from both sides of the community in the North, people in the South and people in the United Kingdom because we recognise that people in the UK have lost loved ones, for example, soldiers on duty, who also see themselves as victims of the Troubles.
The ex-combatants' programme grew out of that programme when the victims began to try and find some understanding of why this had happened and what were the motivations of the people who had delivered the bombs, shot people, or carried out atrocities. We engaged, mainly through the prisoners' organisations, with ex-combatants. We take a very broad view of ex-combatants. We include all people who were involved in the armed struggle, which includes the British Army, the RUC, the Army and the Garda Síochána as well as paramilitaries. That programme has grown and is working well. We have identified a huge need for reconciliation into the community for people who were formerly involved in the armed struggle.
Our schools and education programme is growing. We work mainly with transition year students in the areas of conflict management, prejudice reduction and understanding diversity and difference, all of which have become increasingly needed as we face the challenges posed by our new immigrants, which has raised difficulties, particularly among young people.
We have a women's programme which is entirely based of capacity building. We recognise, particularly in more disadvantaged areas in the North and the South, that women are often the glue of the society or community but rarely rise to leadership or a level where their voices are heard. We are working with many women's groups by building capacity and by teaching negotiating skills and how these women can stand for election, handle committees and the media and so on. It is a powerful programme.
We initiated the churches programme because there was a question-mark in the minds of people at Glencree about the role of the churches in peace-building in Ireland. We started with a request that the churches participate in our believers' inquiry programme from which we produced a publication entitled Imprisoned within Structures, which was launched by President McAleese. That has gone on to work on two levels - we work with communities across the divide - with parish priests, ministers, vicars and so on as well as the church leaderships to see if they can develop a dynamic and positive role in peace-building.
Our volunteer programme involves up to 12 volunteers at any one time. We provide what we call the "serve and learn" programme, which is funded from our own resources. It is a programme we hope to get support for. Our final programme is not really about reconciliation but social inclusion. It is a FÁS social economy programme. The criteria for this is rigorous because participants must be members of the Traveller community, ex-prisoners, people with physical or mental challenge or people who are long-term unemployed. We are delighted to have five people working with us, whom we are supporting to get them back into being able to play a role and have the self-respect which comes from being involved positively and successfully in the workplace.
Small successes are great. We have one young man who is intellectually challenged. His job coach came to us two weeks ago to tell us that he had got such confidence from working with us that he had decided to live on his own in an apartment and they were supporting him to do so, away from the institution in which he has lived for many years. It is one small example of the many miracles which take place in Glencree.
It is a tribute to how Ireland and the peace process are respected internationally that many people want to come and see how we did it. Our work is highly regarded as a small piece of that success. At present small programmes are evolving with the Middle East, Sri Lanka and an international youth project involving young people from Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Belgium the UK and Ireland. We are holding a conference in the centre in July.
This meeting is considering the role of volunteers but it must be seen in he context of the work undertaken. Volunteers help us to run the centre in every way. We could not survive without them. They clean beds and cook dinner for peace. They do everything. They also participate in out-programme work. We try to have an international mix of volunteers and, through their diversity, they enhance the centre and help people by bringing an outside perspective because we can sometimes be very introverted. We also have volunteers who link with every group that comes and are called "angels". They participate with every need the group has an in all their activities. They enhance the centre and bring an international and young dimension - most are under 25 years. They also have a surprising role in facilitating conversations between groups who cannot talk to each other directly. Such people will sit down and talk to a volunteer and someone else will join and, via the volunteer, they engage. We find it extraordinary.
We have challenges around our volunteer programme, about which we are concerned. Traditionally, we have always had volunteers from Third World countries. In the past, wonderful young people have come from Nepal, Ghana, Nigeria, Palestine and Jordan. However, we are now finding that our volunteers are getting caught up in the general restriction on visas coming into Ireland. We have been talking to the Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform to try to get some understanding in officialdom of how wonderful are these young people, however, for the first time in ten years, we have no volunteer from a Third World country in the centre. This is not because of a lack of applications - we have received many. We screen them as rigorously as we can at long distance. Applicants must provide police references, community references and references from their educational institutions if they do not have a job.
Most of these young people want to give a year of their lives to help with peace and they often go back to their own countries and set up a similar type of operation. We had a lovely man from Ghana who is currently trying to obtain funding in Ghana to set up an equivalent of the Glencree Reconciliation Centre there. We are very impoverished by not having these young people in Glencree at present.
Our other problem is that we are quite isolated. There is no public transport access so it is difficult for people to come and see us. Volunteers are often a long way from home and they need special support. The volunteers who give up to a year of their lives in Glencree should be recognised and given some kind of certification in peace-building or applied peace work when they return. There is no formal academic recognition at present; there is no agency in this area. We are talking to FETAC and other bodies about setting up some kind of certification. For these young people, particularly those from Third World countries, to have something like this on their CVs would be of major benefit to them when they go home. It would be a recognition of the sacrifice they have made by giving up a year for us. This applies equally to the young people on our volunteer programme. We currently have two people from Cork and two from the North. It would benefit all of them if we could achieve this. This is important to me.
I did not mention funding. We are well supported in some ways, but we never have enough. Funding is always an issue for organisations. I acknowledge the Government's support through the Department of Foreign Affairs, the OPW, the International Fund for Ireland and the PEACE II initiative. We also receive some funding for some programme work from the offices of First Minister and Deputy First Minister in Northern Ireland. Uniquely, we also have a business club consisting of business people who recognise that peace pays a dividend to the business community. At present, the club has ten corporate members which have given us £10,000 a year for four years, so we do not need to go back every year begging. I am sure everyone would agree that those in the voluntary sector spend a lot of time banging on doors looking for money. That is often a problem for us.
Our work often grows organically. We identify a need and obtain a buy-in from the participants, who are the people we are trying to reach. Then we must stop it all and try to find funding. This means the work often goes in a stop-start fashion. We may obtain funding for one weekend or event, but it is clear that this is not what is needed. What we need is a two-year programme.
