Chai Brady
MEP Mairead McGuinness 
The new British government should acknowledge the “fragile peace” people of Faith have strived for in Northern Ireland and prioritse the peace process as Brexit looms, MEP Mairead McGuinness, Vice-President of the European Parliament, has said.
Following the Conservatives’ massive election victory on December 12 and Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s moves to make it illegal to extend the Brexit transition period beyond 11 months, making a hard deal more likely, Mrs McGuinness said the new government must make the peace process a priority.
Mrs McGuinness warned that since the Brexit vote there’s a need to “rebuild relationships between communities”.
“I think Brexit perhaps was a wakeup call, because if you remember the peace process was people of faith in the background working for a long time to bring people of violence to a better place within communities,” she said.
“We need those voices again, we need the groundwork to be rebuilt and I would hope that whatever comes of Brexit that we acknowledge and realise that a peace that is fragile needs a good scaffolding to hold it up and that’s why we need community engagement and the role of people in faith.”
Mrs McGuinness was speaking to The Irish Catholic after an intercultural dialogue with Churches and religious institutions in Belgium recently.
“When you talk to people in Northern Ireland who had been very happily building this peace, 20 years seems like a long time but it’s a short time when you’re resolving conflict,” she said. “I would hope that something would guide whoever is leading the UK to understand how easy it is to pull people apart and how very difficult it is to rebuild communities.”
British society is deeply divided “on many questions”, Ms McGuinness continued, but particularly on their future in Europe. “I don’t relish that division and I think it will be incumbent upon political leaders to try and rebuild from a very difficult foundation because it is extraordinary that after the referendum in 2016 you would imagine that things might have been moving towards reconciliation or a healing, but that hasn’t happened.
“The convictions on either side were so deeply held that there has been no dialogue at all and if any conversations are happening it’s a dialogue of the deaf.”
The European People’s Party annual group intercultural dialogue took place at the Lebanese Maronite Monastery Saint Charbel near Brussels.
Document
Leaders from Muslim, Christian and Jewish communities took part and discussed the document ‘Human Fraternity for World Peace and Living Together’, which was signed by Pope Francis and the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, Ahmad Al-Tayyeb during the Pontiff’s visit to Abu Dhabi in February this year.
