Mags GarganMartin O’Brien meets controversial peace activist Mairead Maguire
One would understand entirely if the faith journey of Mairead Maguire, controversial Nobel Laureate, passionate pacifist and international peace activist had included a wobble or two down the years.
Not a bit of it.
Her unshakeable faith and inner calm may be considered remarkable because she and her family circle have had to bear a scale of tragedy and loss that is very great.
“My faith is very important. I grew up in a socially active Catholic family in Andersonstown [west Belfast] and I continue to believe that prayer gives you the spiritual strength and joy of life which is really important for all of us.”
Maguire’s life changed for ever on a sunny August day in 1976 when she was returning from a holiday in Achill Island.
On the journey back to Belfast, she picked up the first reports of a terrible incident on the car radio.
Northern Ireland, already apparently inured to violence from seven years of bloodshed, would be shocked to its core and the reverberations felt far beyond its shores.
Three little children, her niece and two nephews, Joanne (8), Andrew (6 weeks) and John (2) were killed and their mother Anne Maguire (née Corrigan), Mairead’s sister, was critically injured when a car ploughed into them near their west Belfast home.
Shot dead
The car’s driver, Danny Lennon (23), an IRA member, was also killed, having been shot dead by British soldiers pursuing him in a Land Rover.
Over the next hours and days – and years – the extent of the tragedy would unfold.
Its aftermath would propel Mairead Corrigan, as she then was, onto the world stage as – at 32 – the youngest-ever recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, meeting everyone from Pope St John Paul II to Queen Elizabeth to President Carter.
Out of the tragedy, a peace movement sprang up and mass peace rallies were held in the North, the Republic and Britain attracting tens of thousands of people and world attention. Two of the co-leaders, Mairead and Betty Williams, were jointly awarded the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize.
They remain the only Irish women who have received Nobel prizes and she is pleased to stress in answer to a question that, despite reported tensions long ago, they “are very good friends”.
Maguire’s sister Anne, married to Jackie Maguire, who at the time had one surviving child, remained unconscious for a fortnight but appeared to make a reasonable recovery, emigrating briefly to New Zealand to start a new life the following year.
They had two more children, one in New Zealand and a second on their return home in 1979.
Maguire wrote in her book The Vision of Peace “we all rejoiced, and for a short while fooled ourselves into thinking that Anne was getting better”.
Anne, suffering from severe depression made several attempts to take her own life and finally did so in January 1980.
The following year, Mairead married Jackie Maguire, her former brother-in-law in the Church of San Silvestro in Capite in Rome. They live by the sea in Strangford, Co. Down, and have two children of their own, in addition to the three surviving children of Jackie’s marriage to Anne, and six grandchildren.
Tragedies
Asked if the tragedies she has experienced in her own life and in a host of world trouble spots she has visited has in any way shaken her faith, Maguire is adamant.
“If anything [those tragedies] have absolutely deepened my faith because my faith comes from an absolute belief that love, and love of our own life and love of those around us, is really what is important.
“I take as my model Jesus who loved everyone. I ask the question in every situation, what would Jesus do?”
Maguire has been clearly influenced by Christian mystics, singling out St Francis and St Claire of Assisi who loved peace and creation and cared for the poor, and admires Pope Francis for his focus on the poor.
She christened one of her sons John Francis, after his father and the saint.
More modern heroes who have inspired her include three Americans, Dorothy Day, Servant of God, and fellow peace activists the Berrigan brothers, Daniel and the late Philip whom she visited in prison in 1998 and refused to leave in protest against US/British bombing in Iraq spending a night in jail herself.
As a 13-year-old, encouraged by her mother Margaret – “a woman of deep faith, incredibly internationally aware though she never left Belfast” – she joined the Legion of Mary which appears to have been a profound influence.
As an adult in the Legion, long before fame and the peace movement, she did a lot of voluntary work including ministering to internees in Long Kesh and their families.
“The Legion was about loving and serving others, seeing the person of Jesus in those you served,” she says.
Prior to this interview, the last time we had spoken was about four years ago when, as a BBC producer, I snatched a “live” interview with her while she was in a prison cell in Tel Aviv awaiting deportation.
She had entered the country in breach of a 10-year deportation order – which she says she will continue to challenge, imposed for taking part in a flotilla that tried to break the blockade of Gaza.
Maguire has been a relentless critic of Israel for years and is distressed by this summer’s carnage and destruction in Gaza.
“Look at Gaza today. The message must be clear. We must abolish militarism, the drones, and nuclear weapons.”
She is critical of the Catholic Church for not “explicitly ruling out the idea of a ‘just war’” and insists “non-violence works, that is the message of Jesus”.
Statements
Even strong anti-war statements by successive Popes, not least by Pope St John Paul against the 2003 Iraq War, do not cut much ice.
She recalls meeting John Paul II with Betty Williams for half an hour early in his pontificate.
“I said to the Pope could we have a theology of non-violence and throw out the ‘just war’ theory, no to militarism, no to killing. I’ll quote you his exact words [in reply]. He said ‘You are right to work for peace but there are different circumstances in different countries.’ I remember those words. I don’t think it was good enough.”
“Are you not naïve making proposals that would only work in a utopian world?” I wonder.
“As long as we believe we can’t get it, we won’t get it. You don’t get anything if you don’t ask for it, if you don’t dream about it,” she counters.
It is “an upside down Orwellian world” when Trident, Britain’s nuclear submarines costing many billions of pounds can sail past her home on the Irish Sea while there is a threat to the future of Strangford health clinic.
Unhappy
Mairead Maguire is very unhappy about “the silencing and censuring of priests for exercising their right to freedom of conscience”.
The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith “is still silencing some of our priests where they have been merely questioning doctrinal issues.
“I would like to see reform to the CDF, if [it is not be] closed.”
Maguire also believes “there is not enough openness in the Church to allow the space for such issues as women’s rights, homosexuality, contraception, married priests, to be debated”.
Surveying Northern Ireland today in the Peace People office in south Belfast, she says “We have come a long, long way. We have our peace and it is wonderful.”
However, Stormont is “an ethnocracy” rather than a normal functioning democracy with an opposition, and that “is what we should move to, but it will take time”.
A very active 70-year-old, Maguire considers it a privilege to have the world platform that comes from being a Nobel Laureate and to have the likes of fellow Laureates the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Tutu describe her as a friend.
But above all, she says she is happy and, for all her outspokenness, radiates a pleasing serenity.
“I have learned to live in the moment and to be as happy as I can possibly be. I haven’t time to look into the past.”