This article originally appeared in T&S Issue 40, Winter 1999/2000.
In 1997, Trouble & Strife interviewed Monica McWilliams, one of the founders of the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition. Back then she talked about the challenges involved in participating in the peace process talks. Two and a half years later, Linda Regan interviews her again, and asks her about the role the Women’s Coalition can play in the politics of post-Good Friday Agreement Northern Ireland.
Linda Regan: The first thing I want to say is congratulations.
Monica McWilliams: Yes, we finally seem to be starting to make a difference here now.
Linda: I suppose I really want to start about that. What’s it like finally getting to a point where you’re actively participating in government, as opposed to going through the process of trying to get there?
Monica: Well, it’s brilliant to be on the Health and Social Services Committee — the first meeting was yesterday and there’s another one tomorrow on education — as opposed to going around endless negotiations. The negotiations were tiring; they seemed to be never-ending, because every time we thought we had got somewhere, we would take six steps back. We never knew our timetables from one day to the next or when we would be on call, so you couldn’t actually organise your life. Occasionally you were in very late hours, not knowing whether you were going to be there all night or not. And obviously it was demoralising because no-one actually knew whether we were ever going to make it. And now to have all that behind us is just such a relief; it’s like a weight lifted off our shoulders. In the end, though, it wasn’t done with huge euphoria; we did it by breaking the problem into little pieces and dealing with each of the pieces until we got through all of them. So in a way, moving into the Assembly, getting the ministers declared and getting into the committees has been just another part of the process. It wasn’t like we all danced in the streets or threw our arms up in the air or declared that peace had broken out, do you know what I mean? We’re all sufficiently aware that there are still enormous hurdles to overcome because people are strangers to each other; they don’t really know each other and only now is dialogue starting to happen between various parties and individuals in those parties even though we’ve almost been together, some of us, for three years. But getting into bread and butter issues is great. It’s been good and I’m really looking forward to starting to tackle some of the health problems because we’ve huge problems here now about closure of rural hospitals. There are issues around maternity services and around acute services — accident and emergency services. I’m also keen that we get into family and child care work. Yesterday at the committee we were each allowed to declare what we wanted to see happen and that was quite good.
The process of peace
Linda: Can we go back just a little bit? The whole process of getting to where you are now. You said it was very slow, very frustrating with three steps forward and one step back. What were some of the main difficulties for you, for the Women’s Coalition, in this process?
Monica: Since the implementation of the Good Friday Agreement we always wanted to move to implement it, particularly since we had the referendum — it was the will of the people. But clearly there were parties, particularly the Ulster Unionists, who had huge problems with it going too fast and they wanted to slow things down till their people became more comfortable with the idea of sharing government with Sinn Fein. In the end that’s what it was about. Decommissioning was a ruse; it wasn’t really the main issue, though it became the main issue. For us the major difficulty was having to debate decommissioning endlessly when in fact we felt that the debate should have been much wider. And because the terms of reference of Mitchell’s review was very tight — it was about the formation of an inclusive executive and an agreement that decommissioning was part of the process — we ended up talking mostly about decommissioning once again.
We had to go to London at one stage to the American ambassador’s house because they wanted it to be done away from the media and behind closed doors because there was so much negotiation taking place by proxy through the newspapers. They actually said, ‘Look the time is right now for people to talk to each other rather than to journalists.’ So we put forward a paper there which outlined the range of options: here’s what we get with the most acceptable option, which is the formation of the executive and thereafter an agreement to work with an international body on decommissioning, then there was another option which was to establish a shadow executive in the meantime, to establish the committees etc. People thought our paper was quite useful, to at least see what was in front of us, because most of the other parties were refusing to commit to paper. I took from the area of domestic violence the idea that if you were going to get some confidence amongst parties, people needed to acknowledge the hurt they caused and take some responsibility for that and make a declaration of intent about what they intended to do, and if they didn’t, they would be held accountable. We felt that it was important to acknowledge that we all had a part to play in the conflict, because there were some in the room who still believed that all of the conflict was caused by the other and not by themselves. And so responsibility was always minimised or rationalised and they wouldn’t take it on board. So that was quite interesting and in the end those statements did come out from both Sinn Fein and the Ulster Unionists — they were the most radical things I’d ever seen, compared to what had gone before.
Linda: You said you put forward these papers and these proposals. Who was involved in the process of drawing those up? Was it just members of the Coalition? Or did you go out to women’s groups?
Monica: The members of the Coalition belong to women’s groups, community groups and NGOs. We have a structure where one in four weekly meetings are completely open — on a Saturday, with crèche facilities (the other three meetings are decision-making meetings for the whole membership). That’s where a lot of what we would discuss would come up. We would do a feedback on what’s happening at the negotiations and then throw it open in terms of where we intended to take it. We also have our own co-ordinating meetings — team meetings — that meet every fortnight and we have a negotiating team. We would also speak publicly at various meetings, so there were lots of ways that we were disseminating the information. There is now a Coalition newsletter that we circulate and I have my own constituency newsletter that I personally, along with a team of women, put round 60,000 doors.
Linda: Do you think the fact that you’ve got such a large constituency through the Coalition itself and the fact that you’ve got all of this consultancy through open meetings had any influence on the way the others received what you were putting forward?
Monica: No [laughter]. Not at all. We were be seen by many of the larger parties, particularly the Ulster Unionists and, to some extent, John Hume’s party, the SDLP, as irritations.
Linda: So that hasn’t changed? When you were talking to Trouble & Strife before, back in the summer of 1997, you spoke quite a bit at that point about how antagonistic some people were.
Monica: That’s still there. Now that we’ve got devolved government, that will probably disappear because we’ve set up our government. But one of the reasons, Linda, why we’ve received the brunt of people’s antagonism is because they called us ‘women in love with paramilitaries’ and some of them referred to us as ‘Sinn Fein in skirts’. We understood what needed to happen in order to get stability, that it wasn’t all just about decommissioning, and our analysis was different from the rest. We felt that all of us had an influence to bring to bear on creating the conditions that would lead to paramilitary stepping-down and you just didn’t go around telling them that was it, they had to step down. There was no point in getting them to do that because they would see it as surrender. You had to create the conditions that enabled us to be able to say, ‘This war is over’. We had to create the conditions where they could see that people now were truly interested in sharing power.
Signing up to the Agreement
Linda: And what about links with other parties inside the process. Was that any better as time has gone on?
Monica: We have very good working relationships with the smaller parties because we had to co-ordinate our efforts. There’s a small party, the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP), led by Davy Irvine, who’s quite a radical, who also is from a paramilitary background. But he had a much more radical analysis, given his years in prison and given his own paramilitarism; he also knew and confronted the kind of hegemony that existed amongst the Ulster Unionists as power-holders. He challenged from inside and I felt he played a good leadership role within that ‘tribe’, so to speak, by making them look at themselves. He really confronted and challenged their belief system, which is always harder to do if you come from inside the tribe. So we acknowledged that role and worked quite closely with them even though there might have been political differences in relation to how they saw the Union working. We believe that you implement the will of the people, not your own sectional interests. And to some extent that’s what they have been saying too, though Sinn Fein and the loyalist parties would differ on the question of nationalism and unionism. But actually there’s a lot of similarity there between how they see the war.
So we worked closely with the PUP, and our relationship with the Alliance Party is much better too — it’s also a small party and a cross-community party though more predominantly middle-class. The PUP is very working-class and so we found ourselves constantly having to make the point that the process needed to be inclusive. In the final stages of the negotiations and in the review of the negotiations there were times when it became quite exclusive and only certain parties were going to the negotiations in London and we said, ‘Look, we’ve got to keep everybody on board and informed’. And that’s what happened when the negotiations collapsed last April — they were trying to force Trimble and Adams to agree, and they left the rest of us out of it. So we were very process-focussed again as well and I think the other parties found it a bit irritating that we kept saying to them, ‘Look authorship is ownership and all of us need to be involved in this’. If we didn’t stay together as a pro-Agreement collective, then the anti-Agreement people would have a heyday over it because they would split us all off and go at us individually, which is what happened for a long time. But now we’re working together much better as a pro-Agreement group.
Linda: And who would you say is automatically in that group?
Monica: Well, all of the pro-Agreement parties are in it. But some of them work more closely. Sinn Fein’s in it, the PUP, the Alliance, ourselves, David Trimble’s party, John Hume’s party the SDLP, and UUP as I just said and that’s it.
Linda: You’re now up and running, which everybody breathed a sigh of relief about here, I think, as well as there and there was some cheering over here when it finally happened.
Monica: Is that right? Because there wasn’t here, which is interesting. There was celebration amongst the people and I’m feeling it a bit more on the streets with people coming up and saying, ‘well done’ and ‘thank god you’ve made it’ and ‘it’s great that you’ve stayed with it and you did a great role’ but that’s what I was trying to explain to you — there wasn’t any cheering on the day we did it.
Linda: Yes I think that there was some over here, not enormous amounts of it, but I know there were people saying in the media, ‘oh thank goodness for that’. But there was also questions about where it was going to work, which I presume is there too — it’s early stages.
Monica: Yes, because there’s still this deadline that Trimble laid down in February which is worrying, but we keep saying ‘That’s his deadline, it’s not ours’. We also say that he doesn’t get to set the dates of what people should do by when — that’s entirely it’s up to the Agreement which stipulates that we all work towards May 2000 to implement all aspects of the Agreement. So there’s still a worry about what’s going to happen in February but I think it’s going to be OK. Everything so far has been very positive.
Women in NI politics
Linda: That’s really good to hear. When the Women’s Coalition got started, back when we talked to you in 1997, there was this thing about all women being pulled into the political process because of the Women’s Coalition providing an opportunity for women to get involved. How much development of that has there been since? Are more women being called in? I know that there are a lot more women standing for local elections and things. Do you see that as continuing and being built on?
Monica: Yes, the test for us now is next year. We’re going to be using the whole of 2000 to really get women now to start identifying local constituencies in which they would be happy to stand in 2001. The first time, we just ran at it and stood in all sorts of places. This time we’re going to actually train up candidates and let them work out where the vote comes from and work with people in those constituencies to try and promote themselves. It’s wonderful for me to see women already identifying constituencies they want to run in. There’s still a reluctance, as you can imagine, in Northern Ireland, for people to be involved in politics at all — it’s still a dirty word and it’s going to take some time for new blood to come in, especially young people who are so demoralised by what passed for politics here, but I think it will happen. And they’ll probably get involved with other parties as well, not just ours, and women will also get involved with other parties. I’m sure that’s the case, because we still have a hard time; people identify us as feminists and they also identify us as cross-community, and cross-community parties don’t do well in Northern Ireland.
Linda: Do you think that’s going to change?
Monica: I think it will change. It’ll be an interesting test when we go out to stand again in elections whether people will now be more supportive of the cross-community candidates because when you’re in conflict you always want your own tribe to be in there, fighting your cause. But when you start coming out of that a bit then you actually are prepared to risk your vote elsewhere. And that’s what I’m hoping people will now be prepared to do.
Linda: And when you say that you’re identified as feminists, is it being used as a stick with which to beat you?
Monica: Yes.
Linda: All the time?
Monica: Yes. By those who voted more traditionally. Indeed the other parties see us as feminist and have no time for us — you’re talking fundamentalists here, who really have no time for equal opportunities, never mind a women’s party. And then there are some women on the ground who don’t see us as radical enough and are very critical of us. I think that’s unfair, because they ought to level that accusation at some of the men’s parties too, but it’s always at us, rather than at the main parties. Some of the criticism is from lazy academics. For example, one male academic recently wrote that we seem to be more interested in getting women into politics and we don’t seem to be doing anything about domestic violence; the guy clearly doesn’t know what my background is — he doesn’t know that I’m practically spending half of my day on constituency issues in relation to domestic violence. Do you know what I mean?
Linda: [Laughter] Yes.
Monica: So it’s dead easy for people outside to do that. They’re very critical of the political system these people who write like this — they want the whole thing torn down. They just think that we’re about replicating what men do. Believe me we’re not.
The women’s agenda
Linda: That’s one of the things that I was wanting to talk with you about briefly, too. Do you think that the women’s agenda — issues to do with women and women’s lives — will now be incorporated within the new structure, including the issue, obviously, of violence against women. Are other members of the assembly hearing about those issues, listening?
Monica: Well they haven’t yet, because we haven’t had an assembly until this Monday [December 6, 1999] was our first sitting.
Linda: Were they listening to you when it was brought up before?
Monica: Yes they were. In the last year and a half since we got elected, the Assembly has sat six times and each of those six times was to discuss the establishment of a government. We never had motions on issues. We’ve never actually debated a single thing outside of the Good Friday Agreement. Never. We’ve never got around to debating anything other than decom-missioning.
Linda: So it’s only the official start of the process.
Monica: Yes. Where I’ve managed to get a few points in is about wanting legislation on legal guns — legal guns. The Dunblane initiative and the legislation on small guns haven’t been extended to Northern Ireland, although we pushed for that, because so many people here carry personal protection weapons. And my argument is that domestic violence homicide rates have increased as a result of the higher numbers of legally-held weapons. Everybody thinks it’s illegally-held weapons, but illegally-held weapons have not been used in domestic violence incidents, because they’re buried in the ground and you’ve got so much surveillance attached to them. If any person used an illegal gun which had forensic on it in a domestic violence incident that person would be shot. Are you with me?
Linda: Yeah, I’m with you.
Monica: So it’s legally-held weapons that have been used and nobody wants to hear that debate. They only want the so-called terrorists to be demonised.
Linda: So are they prepared to start looking at issues of non-sectarian violence? [Ironic laughter] Yet?
Monica: They like to think they are. And because we’ve had such huge numbers of murders here in the last year in domestic violence — there were twelve murders in one year in a tiny country.
Linda: That’s a huge proportion.
Monica: Yes. And that was a huge increase too. We raised that through the media and through documentaries on the television. I will be getting into this issue now, because the Health Committee started yesterday. Domestic violence is one of the priorities. We have a criminal justice review as part of our Good Friday Agreement, but remember that criminal justice and law and order and policing are still a reserved power for Westminster. So I’m trying to get some of the laws changed here; I’m trying to get the Department of Public Prosecution abolished because it’s useless. Other issues for us — we’ve held lobby meetings and invited the other Assembly members to them — are domestic violence, child protection, custody and access issues where the father’s been a perpetrator and women are being held in contempt of court. Those are big issues.
We’ve got a new group here now called Parents Against Sexual Abuse; so many of the women are just terrified about the way our judiciary are treating them. I’m working with a director of office for law reform here who is a woman and she is very, very keen to change the civil law and to keep abreast of the civil law to make it as good as we possibly can. We have amended the civil law here and ours often is better than the British legislation; we hope to continue to do that. We do have the power to look at civil law but we don’t on the criminal justice side. So ‘yes’, Linda, is the answer.
I’ve been asked to attend courts for some horrendous cases. We recently had a man who attempted murder on his partner and also got done for foetal destruction because the foetus was destroyed during his attack on his partner. She’s terrified of him; she’s got security around her house and everything. And I think on remand he was still able to make phone calls to her and threaten her. He’s now appealed his case and his case is now coming back up again. That’s in one of our constituencies and we’ve supported her and gone to court with her the whole way through. A couple of other cases that I’ve gone to court with — one woman has been held in contempt for not giving access to a father who has been suspected of child abuse. So stuff like that. Because we’re a women’s coalition, and maybe because of my background, we get more phone calls on that than any other party — more phone calls on it than maybe any other issue.
Setting new priorities
Linda: I suppose one of the things I’m interested in is how the other parties that are now in the Assembly are responding to those issues being raised. Are they seeing them as issues that they now have to tackle? Are they looking at them as being high priority?
Monica: It’s too early to really say. Some are sympathetic and would be interested but to what extent we don’t know yet until I start getting up on the floor and putting motions forward. I’m going to try and see if I can get a cross-party interest group going so that I can identify one individual in each of the other parties to sit on that. Then we can start lobbying on these issues. But because we’re inundated at the minute just getting the government off the ground, I haven’t got round to doing that yet. And I couldn’t have done it before now because people weren’t talking to each other. And they wouldn’t sit down in the same committee.
Linda: As you say, this is just the beginning, so what we need to do is to come back to you a year from now and see how it’s moving forward. But what are you hoping for in the fairly short term? What’s the Women’s Coalition hoping that they’re going to be able to get going?
Monica: What we’re doing at the minute is establishing policy teams and setting priorities for the short term and some for the longer term. There are currently reviews going on and we have to await the outcome of those review before we can take action. For instance, we have the 11-plus here, which is an exam that all children do at the age of eleven; there’s a review going that will finish in 2000 and then we’re going to form coalitions with other parties to make sure it gets abolished. On each of the policy teams we’re setting ourselves priorities and clearly child protection and the issue of violence against women and children are huge issues for us; the criminal justice review will report in January and we will be making a submission after that around the appointment of judges and around the prosecution service. Another big issue for us at the minute is reform of policing and we’ve just made our submission on that. Obviously our police is predominantly male and militaristic and was developed for a war. We are going to look at how we can re-orient them and get them thinking now about putting more resources and diverting their training into issues around violence against women and children.
Then we have all of the structures for the coalition formed with the two parties, Alliance and PUP; we’ve a member sitting on every committee. We’ll decide how to vote on issues when we hold our briefing meetings once a week with all of these parties, and decide on whether we want to be seen to be identified in the first instance with things that are happening, and if we don’t, what are we going to do about it?
We’re the opposition, Linda, here. It’s going to be a unique form of government if four of the parties and the majority of members are all in government. [Laughter] Right? There are ten of us who are not in government who are the opposition. So you can see the problem we’re going to have. There are some others in opposition, but they’re also small, there’s only about five or six others but they’re on the anti-Agreement side.
Linda: So those of you who aren’t in the government, who are in the opposition are going to have to work together if you’re going to achieve anything, really, aren’t you?
Monica: Yes, that’s right. That’s the first thing we’ve done is establish that structure and luckily the relationship with them is very good.
Making links internationally
Linda: Back in 1997, we talked about the Women’s Coalition’s links internationally. Has that continued to be built on?
Monica: Yes. For fundraising purposes alone, we’ve got to build those links internationally. Because it’s still the case that people don’t give a lot of funding to political parties in Northern Ireland. In fact political parties are ineligible for funding. Most trusts and foundations will not fund you because you have a political motive, which to me is just unbelievable; they really ought to look at what some of the parties are trying to do. So we get no money whatsoever. All of our money has to be raised by us and I do some of that in the United States, trying to make contact with women’s groups. Foundations over there can fund political organisations which have training and education functions. And they’re quite interested in doing that, either under the ‘women’s’ banner or under the ‘politics and conflict’ banner. And then we also have the European networks that we’re attached to. We sent someone recently to Finland to a women’s organisation there. We find we get a lot of invitations now to conflict societies like Guatemala, South Africa, Israel and Palestine, Bosnia, Kosovo and places like that because women are trying to make contact with women in other conflict situations. So that’s quite useful.
Linda: And have you managed to bring any of those organisations over to Northern Ireland?
Monica: Yes. You have groups passing through Northern Ireland on a daily basis. And there’s a business in conflict, if you know what I mean. We cannot actually attend every meeting that we get requests for; we would never get any work done if we spent all our time talking to people who come. However there is a group coming from Bosnia who we will be hosting. There’s a group meeting today which I’m going to in about ten minutes which is a community foundation, a large one, called The Northern Ireland Voluntary Trust; for the next two days politicians and civic society will be talking to each other — it’s the first meeting of its kind. The Trust is trying to get people who could think differently about how politics could be done in the future, particularly in relation to civic society.
Did you know that we’ve got a civic forum? The Women’s Coalition got into the Agreement the establishment of a civic forum. It’s a 60-member body which will be made up of women’s groups, disability organisations, ethnic minority organisations, NGOs, civic bodies, trades unions, businesses, farmers, sports and victims’ groups. It will be an advisory/consultant body to the Assembly and it will have its own staff and its own resources.
Linda: That’s really good. People here won’t even know that that exists. Presumably information’s going to have to be flowing back and forth, so the civic forum can look at the discussions that are going on in the assembly?
Monica: We were the ones who proposed that and got it into the Agreement. It’s one of the major institutions that must be established, along with the Assembly, the North-South Council and the British-Irish Council. The civic forum is the fourth institution — it’s not the fourth in priority, it’s one of four. It’s seen as equivalent to all of those others. It will have its own chair and people will sit on a rotating basis. Each of the sectors will be asked to start their own process of elections so that hopefully in a few years’ time they will have an electoral process, but initially representation is probably going to be through umbrella groups working right through co-ordinating groups and the nominating group. Now that’s become a big issue about who gets to sit on the civic forum. They’ve all got to start working in their own sectors to make sure that the people who sit on it are as representative as possible. And no politicians are allowed to sit on it; it has to be civic society. It doesn’t mean that members of political parties can’t, because it would be unfair to exclude people who were members of parties, it just means that if you have been successful in recent elections, then you are ineligible.
Linda: Thank you very much indeed. Good luck with it. We’ll probably want to come back to you again and see how it’s going.