Monica McWilliams

In 2003, five years after she signed the momentous Good Friday Agreement that ended Northern Ireland’s cycle of violence, Monica McWilliams acknowledged the country’s ongoing difficulties: “When you have normalized yourself to an unacceptable level of violence, then peace is going to take a long, long time. I don’t think I can, in my lifetime, say that the war on intolerance ended, and that we now have complete peace.” Despite the challenges Northern Ireland continues to face, the country has officially taken another step toward that complete peace. Today, nine years after the breakthrough Good Friday Agreement was signed—and after she was called a cow by fellow negotiators—the Northern Ireland Assembly is back in session, with hard-line political parties included for the first time.

Monica McWilliams has always demonstrated confidence in women’s leadership abilities. She is now a leader herself, serving as chief commissioner at the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, a body established by the Good Friday Agreement. When she was a university professor, Dr. McWilliams started a certificate program for uneducated women who had leadership potential. “Many of the women had husbands in prison for 15, 20 years,” she said. “They had to run their homes and their communities, and they were doing incredibly well, without any education and without any skills.” And for 25 years, she worked with domestic violence victims, establishing rape crisis centers and attempting to change divorce laws that kept women in abusive situations. “The kinds of problems we were dealing with are not exclusive to any side,” she said.

In 1996, Monica parlayed this community work into a vital role in the Belfast peace negotiations, which eventually led to the Good Friday Agreement. In spite of her reputation as trustworthy and nonpartisan, Monica’s participation in the negotiations did not come without a struggle. Facing traditionally sexist attitudes, the political party that Monica and Pearl Sager co-founded, the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition (NIWC), ran under the slogan “Wave goodbye to dinosaurs.” After what Monica calls a “kitchen-table campaign,” the newly-created NIWC placed ninth in the elections. With the top 10 parties guaranteed a place at the negotiations, the NIWC had earned two seats at the peace table.

Eventually, the NIWC was, according to McWilliams, “the only political party that was accepted in all of the communities,” and its representatives were the only ones at the peace table who had no difficulties working across the divide. But they weren’t respected right off the bat. The morning after the elections, one newspaper story proclaimed, “Hen Party Come Home to Roost,” a mere hint of the disrespect to come. When the women arrived at the negotiations, the “dinosaurs” they had campaigned against treated them shabbily, calling them dogs and cows, mooing through their speeches and booing while they made comments. The women repeatedly faced sexist insults and, at one point, they created an “Insult of the Week” notice board. The men’s behavior was sometimes so ingrained that they did not realize they were harassing the women. By way of confronting the name-callers publicly, the NIWC’s notice board sent a strong message that the women would not tolerate this sort of treatment.

The NIWC’s representatives proved to be more-than-capable negotiators. They were the only participants to do the “homework” assigned by Senator Mitchell, the chair of the negotiations. They returned to the table with confidence after sorting out their positions on complex constitutional issues. McWilliams and Sager, the party’s delegates, played two essential roles at the table. They supported the process as a whole, serving as facilitators for the negotiations and encouraging political opponents to work together. At the same time, they never lost sight of what they personally had set out to accomplish.

At the negotiations, the NIWC raised some substantial issues that would not have been addressed otherwise. For instance, they discussed the importance of integrating communities and schools, educating Protestant and Catholic children together for the first time. They also provided key contributions on issues of import to all the negotiating parties, such as decommissioning weapons. The women provided a unique perspective on this potential sticking point, noting that illicit weapons had been used not only for political purposes but for acts of domestic violence as well. The women spoke about the importance of many other security and safety issues.

Following the signing of the agreement, from 1998 to 2003, Dr. McWilliams was a member of the Northern Ireland Assembly, representing 60,000 people from South Belfast. Although the NIWC was dissolved in 2006, she remains a strong voice for women and for human rights in Northern Ireland. As she has said, “Someday, a ‘women’s coalition’ should be redundant. It should be a people’s coalition.”

 

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