10 August 1976
This was a day of tragedy – three children of Anne and Jackie Maguire (Joanne aged 8, John 2 and a half and Andrew 6 weeks) were killed after IRA fugitive Danny Lennon was shot dead at the wheel of his car by soldiers. Within a week, Betty Williams, who lived nearby and rallied a call against violence, Mairead Corrigan (later Maguire) the sister of Anne Maguire who made a plea for peace, and Ciaran McKeown a journalist and nonviolent activist, would form the movement known as Peace People. Consequently the tragedy was converted into a positive force and one that endures to this day, assisting peaceful activities worldwide.

The following description of events on and after 10 August 1976 is given by Ciaran McKeown:

In the week following the terrible events and four deaths of that sunny afternoon, there were widespread protests of various sizes across Northern Ireland, most of the kind of helpless spontaneous expression which I had often previously witnessed. On this occasion I was determined to harness the energy of the anguish and revulsion and on the evening of the children's funeral, August 13, Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan and I met and discussed forming a "real" peace movement.

Mairead and I had separately met Betty Williams on August 12, all three of us met on August 13, and on August 17 we formally agreed, after a very serious conversation, to form The Peace People, and I wrote the Declaration of the Peace People that afternoon.

From day one The Peace People was a focused movement as opposed to a large number of spontaneous protests of the nine-day wonder variety. I drew up a programme of rallies stretching into December and reaching throughout the British Isles, rather than risk that week's emotion being overwhelmed by the next atrocity.

Prior to the formal constitution of the organisation in 1977 (to carry on the work of the marching/mobilising phase through local peace groups, each having the right to send delegates and vote for an Executive committee), the three of us acted in concert as co-founding leaders, with myself as director and Betty and Mairead doing most of the fronting.

Betty came to the fore after protesting women came to her door (she lived about 600 metres from the scene of the tragedy) asking her to sign a petition against the violence. Betty rang a local newspaper and was quoted with her name -- a rare enough thing -- and put out her telephone number for others to ring her -- much rarer again.

Mairead, as the children's aunt, had accompanied her brother-in-law to the mortuary to see the children, and made a most moving televised plea for peace.

I covered the event for my newspaper, and was doing a television programme about the events on the evening of the 13th, when I met the two of them together.

We each brought very different gifts and experience to the task and for most of the next 12 months we were able to act as "one" with an almost telepathic trust. Mairead has a natural uplifting and inspiring charisma allied to steely determination. Betty was a tremendously forceful and crowd-pleasing platform performer, a great asset.

The rate of violence, as measured by fatalities, fell by 70% over the following year, never to resume its appalling previous levels; and dialoguing groups sprang up all over Northern Ireland, beginning to weave what Martin Luther King might have called "the beloved community" out of a society fractured murderously along sectarian lines. Northern Ireland, having plunged horrifically into a downward spiral of pointless slaughter, began the slow upward spiral towards tolerance and stability. It still has a long way to go for real, dynamic "organic peace". There is a serious danger -- as always with ethnic conflicts -- that people will be more than happy to settle for the absence of serious violence, and ignore the fact that the sectarian/tribal dynamics are still there, not far from the surface. We are "managing" the conflict: we have not resolved it.

See: http://www.peacepeople.com/