Media threat to Peace Movement

THE Peace Movement in Northern Ireland, born spontaneously out of tragedy and grief, is perhaps being destroyed by the media who made it.
It was described as the last desperate chance for peace in Northern Ireland soon after the first huge march and rally held in Andersontown on August 15, a few days after the deaths of the three little McGuire children in Belfast.
Last week a BBC Panorama report, "Who's behind the Peace Movement?" accused it of being a dangerously emotional movement.
The day before it was shown, the three co-founders, Mrs Betty Williams, Miss Maraid Corrigan (an aunt of the dead children) and Mr Ciaran McKeown, a journalist, were physically attacked when they attended a meeting in the strongly republican Turf Lodge area of Belfast to protest at the death of a 13-year-old boy who died after being hit in the head by a plastic bullet fired by a British soldier.
People who had previously supported them, turned on them for condemning the paramilitary organisations but not acts of violence perpetrated by the British Army.
Since its conception, the Peace Movement has lacked an identifiable Protestant leader. Betty and Maraid caught the imagination of the media, who built them up into international "superstars".
While they bathed in the limelight of the world's Press, television and radio, the daily toll of death, devastation and destruction in Northern Ireland has continued to rise.
People in the ghetto areas of Belfast are becoming increasingly restless and are beginning to resent them jetting off to America and Britain, where rallies to pray for peace in Northern Ireland are planned for Cardiff, Newcastle, Manchester, Edinburgh, Bristol and London.
Ciaran McKeown, who has just been appointed editor of Fortnight Magazine, is the brains behind the Peace People, as they like to call themselves. He recently gave up his job in the Belfast office of the Irish Press to work for the Peace Movement, for whom he wrote the Peace Declaration and booklet "The Price of Peace" which explained the philosophy behind the movement.
Ciaran told The a few days ago that they were not a "petticoat movement" as some of the media have tried to portray them, and they had "hard and difficult work ahead". He had "real hope" for the future of the Peace Movement because, as he put it, "there is no other way".
At the moment, this movement, which so many people have pinned their hopes, face formidable challenges from para-military groups, its own supporters, and the media. If it fails to meet these challenges many more innocent people will die.
Peter Jennings