Patient Philanthropy in Northern Ireland

March 19, 2009 at 2:32 pm · Filed under Human Rights, International and tagged: Ireland, peace process, philanthropy

The recent news out of Northern Ireland, although momentarily obscured by the March 17 celebrations, signals such a profound change in attitudes there that it made me stop and think. A number of years, all right decades, ago, I first got involved in philanthropy because of the terrible conditions in Northern Ireland. “The Troubles,” and various eruptions of inter-religious and political conflict had caught children in the cross-fire, figuratively and literally. Children trapped in gritty neighborhoods, walled off from their counterparts of a different religion, had few safe places to play, and grew up with no opportunity to encounter other faces, different viewpoints.

Many Americans, with wonderful intentions, began to bring children from Northern Ireland to live with their families for summer holidays. Their hope was that the guests would begin to understand a more open outlook, and at least enjoy a brief respite from the violence and hatred that pervaded their lives. Elsewhere, in Irish-American communities, funds were raised for the care of children in the North, and for the welfare of families whose husbands and fathers were imprisoned or killed in the conflict – which took thousands of lives and inflicted pain on countless others.

The problem with these collections, though, was that some of them were simply vehicles to raise money for guns – literally perpetuating the problem, not the solution. And even the well-intentioned holidays for children had a downside: often the child returned home to resentment from siblings or playmates. And the conditions from which they’d had a brief respite hadn’t changed. Yet these children bore the burden of expectations that they’d be individual ambassadors for peace, all on their own.

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