Still giving peace a chance: in 1970 a cleaner in Belfast's Gasworks had a dream - of Northern Ireland's women working together for peace.

In 1970 a cleaner in Belfast's Gasworks had a dream--of Northern Ireland's women working together for peace. Twenty-seven years on, they're still at it. Kristen Tiedje and Mary Lean went to meet them.

It's Saturday evening in Harryville, Northern Ireland, and the congregation of the Catholic Church of Our Lady is arriving for Mass. The streets around the church are lined with armoured police vans, and across the road, behind the police cordon, a crowd of Protestant loyalist protesters is shouting abuse and singing raucously. The church is a Catholic island in this staunchly Protestant district of Ballymena. The demonstrators have been here every Saturday since September, in retaliation for an incident involving Presbyterian churchgoers in the predominantly Catholic village of Dunloy. Tonight--February 1--is relatively quiet, but there has been violence in the past.

As the worshippers emerge after the service, many pause to thank a handful of women--and a few men--who have gathered in the forecourt to support them. Like the demonstrators, these observers are here every week. They are led by a young mother from Ballymena, Judith Byrne, and a retired social worker from Dunloy, Perry Lambert--members of Women Together for Peace, an organization which dates back to 1970.

Byrne and Lambert were each spurred into action by the IRA bombing of Canary Wharf in London in February 1996. The event brought the IRA's 18-month ceasefire to an end and plunged people in Northern Ireland into despair. `It was as if every family had suffered a bereavement,' says Byrne.

She heard the news as she set out to take her oldest child to cubs. `I felt physically sick,' she says. `I had had twins born during the ceasefire--the boy's named Oliver, from the olive of peace.' Lambert was at a youth theatre performance, sponsored by the police and other local bodies. `When the news came through, there was total silence and then everybody, including the policemen, started to cry.'

Within three days of the bombing, Women Together had 6,000 people on the streets of Belfast, brandishing paper doves of peace. Two weeks later they helped to coordinate the northern end of an island-wide vigil, in which over 100,000 took part. Byrne and Lambert each heard of the rallies through the media and rang Women Together's office. Within a few weeks they found themselves members of its council.

When the Harryville stand-off erupted into violence some months later, the two women organized a candlelight procession. The Mayor and some councillors took part, as did several Presbyterian ministers. On another occasion some of the top brass of the Orange Order--the standard bearer of Protestant loyalism for 300 years--turned out to support the Catholics' right to worship where they wanted.

Women Together's action at Harryville is typical of its work from its earliest days. In June 1970, Ruth Agnew--a Protestant, mother and part-time cleaner at the Belfast Gasworks--dreamt repeatedly that Jesus was telling her to get women together to work for peace. She made contact with a Catholic woman, Monica Patterson, and together they launched the organization. Within three months, groups had sprung up all over Belfast and were separating gangs, defending their neighbours, clearing up after bombings and breaking boycotts. After each killing--and there have been over 3,000 since the Troubles began--two women, one from each community, would visit the bereaved family with flowers.

Today Women Together has some 300 members and is best known for the rallies and vigils it has organized to give visible expression to people's longing for peace. It continues its work with the bereaved. It has pressed, successfully, for increased support for victims and each Christmas calls on sympathizers to place a lighted candle in their window in memory of those who have died. It is also installing `friendship seats' in parks in memory of all the victims. It is important, says Coordinator Anne Carr, to `make people remember the human cost of the Troubles'.

Women Together's members know this cost only too well. Carr herself is a Protestant married to a Catholic. Soon after she met her husband, loyalist gunmen came looking for him at his parents' house in Belfast. The next day the family moved out of the home where they had lived for the last 25 years and moved in with an uncle in the country. To this day, some 20 years after her marriage, Carr's parents and parents-in-law have never met.

Women Together's Life Vice-President, Pat Campbell, has been involved for 22 years. Five years ago her youngest son, Philip, was shot dead--simply because he, a Catholic, was selling fast food from a van in a Protestant area. He started school in August 1969, the year the Troubles began. `There was a whole lifetime that child had lived and died and never knew what it was to live in a just and peaceful society,' she says. She and her husband Gerry used money given at Philip's funeral to launch the friendship seat project.

She has also coordinated the making of three colourful `peace quilts', from panels sewn by women in Northern Ireland and abroad. Women and children have been encouraged to express their longing for peace in art and words too, through poster and poem competitions in schools and letter-writing campaigns. Last year 3,500 children sent letters via Women Together to people they thought could influence the peace process--from Ian Paisley to the Pope and Yassir Arafat.

There's more to Women Together, however, than goodwill and aspirations. The organization is not afraid to grapple with hard political issues--and has just organized a symposium on the North Report, commissioned after a stand-off between loyalist marchers and Catholic residents in Drumcree led to widespread rioting last year. Anne Carr has taken part in working dinners with the British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and points out, with some amusement, that she left school at 15.

Nor does Women Together pretend that peace can come without deep healing in individuals. `Peace is people choosing to live differently,' proclaims its publicity. It runs `talking circles' and `listening circles', where women of the different communities can meet--often for the first time--and talk in small groups of six or eight. Each session ends with a symbolic moment, when participants light and dedicate a candle or hang a paper dove on a tree of hope.

`People want to understand why they feel the way they do and to be able to say they feel hurt,' says Anne Carr. `One exchange can make such a difference.' In an article in the Belfast Telegraph last September, she wrote, `Until we acknowledge ... how we got to where we are, the past wrongs, the deep grief and hurt and vulnerability that so many people on all sides feel and start apologizing for the part each and every one of us played in that shared past, we can't even contemplate a shared vision for the future.'

She has no doubt that the women are the hope of the side in Northern Ireland. `It's they that have kept society going at the most difficult times.' But it can take courage to get involved. Some members would be at real risk if their neighbours knew they were part of Women Together.

`It is frightening to stand up and identify yourself, especially in this society,' says Judith Byrne. While she and Perry Lambert have received unexpected support for their stand at Harryville, there has also been abuse. `If you take the moral middle ground, you come in for sticks and stones,' says Lambert. `If we could get fear out of the equation, Women Together would be one of the biggest organizations in Northern Ireland.'