Martin O'BrienRev. Gary Mason speaks to Martin O’Brien about his unique approach to peace building
Sitting in his office in the spacious and magnificently equipped £21m Skainos Centre in the heart of loyalist east Belfast, Methodist minister Rev Dr Gary Mason (56) talks passionately about his new job and its big challenge.
A native of the Ravenhill Road area in the south east of the city, he extols “the twin track approach” of Methodist theology which embraces personal holiness and social holiness.
“A lot of my ministry has been trying to build bridges and create space for hard conversations and allowing the Gospel to take shape in the sectarian cockpit that we call Northern Ireland.”
He is married to Joyce and they have four children. Back in July after serving 12 years as chairman of the Skainos board, from its inception, his Church granted him a three-year secondment to the Northern Ireland Association of Mental Health to direct a programme called Journey Towards Healing (JTH).
He sees JTH as “a psychologically informed approach to conflict transformation in a local, national and international context”.
Nine months after the departure of US diplomat Dr Richard Haass, the political parties at Stormont are still deadlocked over how to contend with the past – and much else besides – but Rev Mason has hit the ground running, and his PhD in psychology is useful.
Seminars
He has already launched a programme of six seminars in Skainos (Greek for tent). The first, “How do we deal with the pain of victims?”, was held a month ago.
Others up to next March include such hot button subjects as parades, emblems, the meaning of “national reconciliation” and sectarianism.
Rev Mason has been a minister at the sectarian coalface in Belfast for 27 years and an unofficial chaplain and confidant of loyalist groups since long before the ceasefires.
His darkest moment in that time was probably the Shankill bomb when he ministered to families and feared the situation was spiralling out of control.
Among those he tried to comfort was Alan McBride who had lost his wife in the explosion. Dr Mason had officiated at their wedding.
For Dr Mason, the Good Friday Agreement is “a masterpiece in terms of compromise, but it is not a masterpiece in building peace”.
He advocates “a twin track approach” to embedding the peace which will involve both “unblocking the political logjam and a comprehensive package on the ground to allow what I would call strategic peace-building to take place”.
This means, he says, the absolute imperative of people from both sides getting together and having honest dialogue about “the really hard issues we have been avoiding”.
It is not enough “to put Catholics and Protestants in the same room and give them cups of tea or glasses of wine. We need to ask the hard questions of one another, we need to explode myths and explode stereotypes”.
Gary Mason is putting his finger on something that many in Northern Ireland – including the politicians – may prefer to overlook.
The Good Friday Agreement may have set out principles and created novel political institutions, but inter-community conversations are “on the surface and superficial”.
His hope is that JTH, which holds its meetings in Skainos, and spin-offs from it can help break through the superficiality.
What sort of hard questions, I wonder. “For generations, many of us have been taught to hate each other. What were the reasons for that? Fear? Land? Uncertainty? Sectarianism? Discrimination?” Rev Mason asked.
“There is no question about it – Unionism did discriminate against Catholics. It was wrong and it needs to be said it was wrong.”
Dr Mason said there was “an attitude of righteous superiority” on the part of people in Churches “on both sides… both of our communities have had this ability to dehumanise each other. There was at times what I would call a toxic theology that sadly allowed people to take up the gun”.
He knew numerous loyalists who ended up in prison and admits he could easily have joined a paramilitary group.
Gary Mason points to the political context of the violence and considers that 80% of republicans and loyalists paramilitaries would not have been imprisoned but for the conflict.
The Skainos Centre grew out of the Methodist Church’s East Belfast Mission – where Gary was superintendent/CEO for 15 years until this summer. It is widely considered the most ambitious and visionary development to emerge from the Protestant community in the North in living memory.
The idea is that, inside the Skainos tent, intractable issues that continue to plague the North and impede normal social and political progress will be addressed in a frank and honest way, and in an unthreatening atmosphere.
But the region’s troubled past casts a long shadow. Last January, four PSNI officers were injured when loyalist extremists rioted outside Skainos when the Brighton bomber Patrick Magee and Jo Berry, who lost her MP father in the bombing, spoke at a meeting.
Rev Mason calls Skainos “a world class urban centre developed in a post conflict society as a model of co-existence and shared space, and acknowledged as the largest faith-based redevelopment project in Western Europe”.
The Skainos project took many years to complete before it finally opened in 2012.
Along the way, Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip gave it the royal seal of approval when Dr Mason showed them round the proposed site in 2008, a year after he received an MBE from Queen Elizabeth in recognition of his services to community relations.
President McAleese paid a visit in 2011.
Today, Skainos brings together under one roof all strands of work by East Belfast Mission ranging from a day nursery for children of up to five to a day centre for older people to a theatre. In the 12 months from October 2012 to 2013, 100,000 people came through its doors.
Dr Mason is an admirer of Mary and Martin McAleese for their long-term outreach to loyalists. He became a friend of Mrs McAleese when he served on the inter-Church working party on sectarianism which she co-chaired in the early 1990s.
“I think Mary has given great leadership on this island and Martin rolled up his sleeves and got involved with parts of loyalism that really needed help and encouragement to move forward,” he said.
Reaction
Dr Mason also praises Pope Francis, echoing the reaction of many beyond the Catholic fold: “Superb, superb. [Francis] is human, engaging, not frightened to deal with hard issues and he is not there to preserve the institution. He is there to preserve the rigours of the Gospel which in colliding with anything is robust enough to stand on its own two feet,” he said.
Gary Mason has a distinctly all-island and international perspective, and values in particular his links with the Edward M Kennedy Institute for Conflict Intervention at NUI Maynooth, of which he is a research fellow.
He has given lectures on conflict resolution all over the world and visited Israel, the West Bank and Gaza shortly before the war in Gaza this summer.
“The journey towards healing may have begun in the North, but it can also be an island-wide peacebuilding mechanism for people in the Republic to find out about what is happening in the North.”
Regarding the North’s immediate future, he thinks the politicians should make a huge effort between now and Christmas to agree a way forward on the past – where he senses there is more common ground. He thinks that progress there might create a better atmosphere for having another go at the more intractable issues of parades and flags in the new year.
Peace
process
Before we parted, he underlined the “massive loyalist contribution to the peace process” and made a point of saying that, since David Ervine’s death, the loyalist engagement with the Republic has reduced.
Rev Gary Mason would like to change that and would welcome invitations to have conversations between loyalists and any interested Catholic parishes in the South.
There is little doubt that such engagements would bear fruit.