It took a quarter of a century but Mo Mowlam and other women who helped clinch the Good Friday agreement are finally gaining recognition.
After years of being belittled, marginalised or forgotten, the late Northern Ireland secretary and other figures are receiving tributes from politicians, diplomats and artists on the eve of the agreement’s 25th anniversary.
An exhibition titled Peace Heroines has opened at the UN’s headquarters in New York. Hillary Clinton will recognise 25 women who made significant contributions at a conference at Queen’s university in Belfast. Ulster University has named a refurbished arts studio after Mowlam and will unveil a video portrait of her. A new play in Belfast gives Mowlam a central role in the talks that paved the 1998 agreement.
The former prime minister Tony Blair, Ireland’s taoiseach, Leo Varadkar, and other politicians have also lauded the contribution of female negotiators.
“What’s hit me recently is that we’re getting more attention now 25 years later than we were at the time,” said Monica McWilliams, who co-founded the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition and was a delegate at the multiparty talks in Stormont in 1998.
Female participants confronted sexism and scorn, said McWilliams. “There was huge condescension. The title of my book is Stand Up, Speak Out because I was told on a regular basis to shut up and sit down. We did call it out before the #MeToo movement.”
The coalition helped to secure the agreement by winning the confidence of republican and loyalist paramilitary groups, said McWilliams. “We knew that leaving people out in the cold would cost us all a lot. Now we know the value added that women bring to the table.”
Women also successfully lobbied to include clauses about victims’ rights and integrated education, she said. “We brought solutions when a lot of parties were bringing problems.”
Bríd Rodgers, a founding member of the Social Democratic and Labour party who was part of the talks, said it was understandable that party leaders such as John Hume, Gerry Adams and David Trimble, as well as Blair and the then taoiseach Bertie Ahern, were garlanded after the deal.
However the impact of women such as the Progressive Unionist party’s Dawn Purvis or Mowlam had been overlooked, said Rodgers. Mowlam was Northern Ireland secretary from 1997 to 1999 and died in 2005.
“Mo Mowlam was absolutely brilliant,” said Rodgers. “She connected with ordinary people. She got the trust of the paramilitaries, she went into the Maze [prison]. She had a human touch and didn’t stand on ceremony. I’ve never met a politician like her. She was instrumental in setting an ambience that was conducive to reaching agreement. I don’t think her role was recognised at the time.”
In a 2018 Guardian article Mowlam’s stepdaughter Henrietta Norton upbraided Blair for omitting his former minister in a speech marking the agreement’s 20th anniversary, and said her “absence was everywhere” in media coverage.
In an interview with PA Media last week, Blair lauded Mowlam’s “liberating energy” in the peace process. “I chose Mo because I thought she was completely different, because she would be a complete breath of fresh air, and she was, and also because she was a very clever politician,” he said.
Hilary Clinton said the awards at Queen’s will recognise those who broke the glass ceiling and made sacrifices for peace. “For a long time, we saw politics being played out by men, and men only. When I visited in 1995, I saw at first-hand how the women on the ground were making an indelible mark and helping shape the peace process in a variety of ways.”
Last month Varadkar quoted the former politician and civil rights leader Bernadette McAliskey who said the real problem was not that women were written out of Irish history but that they were never written into it in the first place. “We can have no meaningful commemoration of the Good Friday agreement unless the role of women is properly recognised and applauded,” the taoiseach said.
Naoimh McNamee, who heads Ireland’s Glencree Centre for Peace and Reconciliation, said women who were often unpaid and underfunded were today holding communities together in the absence of a functioning government at Stormont. “Younger women need to take up the mantle now, while we wait for politics to function again. We must champion and support these women, so they may pass on their hard-won learnings to the next generation.”
