Derry, Northern Ireland
Chris McDonough is a community development worker based in the Fountain/Bishop Street interface area of Derry, where he works to bridge divides between Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods through peacebuilding, regeneration, and youth engagement.
Raised in a family shaped by both nationalist and republican traditions, Chris combines deep knowledge of Northern Ireland’s history with a practical commitment to reconciliation and social equity. His work focuses on addressing the lingering trauma and tensions of the Troubles by fostering dialogue, shared understanding, and cross-community relationships—especially among young people.
Passionate about justice, identity, and democratic change, he believes lasting peace comes not from suppressing differences, but from learning to respect and understand them.
Derry, Northern Ireland
“People are so institutionalized that they can’t even see their own prison walls.”
On peace and identity:
“Peace to me means actual reconciliation. In this country it means I have a real issue with things about shared spaces where one cannot identify which side of the community they’re from in a shared space. So you can’t wear sporting symbols into a pub. We’ll never have true reconciliation here unless we truly appreciate each other’s identity.”
On community development:
“I’ve learned I don’t have all the answers. I no longer say I work in peace building, I say that I work in community development and I sprinkle on peace building because people are at a point of time where peace building doesn’t mean anything to them anymore. They feel that we have peace now because it’s not a kinetic war anymore. This is not peace, this is a long detente. So I’ve learned that maybe I have a difference of opinion on what we’ve actually achieved since the Good Friday agreement. Maybe older people believe that this is as far and as best as we can hope for. I don’t believe that. We can go further and it’s up to people like myself and our political class and our communities to try and push that forward.”
On the romanticism of conflict:
“There was a degree of romanticization about it. You know, well we were forced to do this and it was great. We got one over on the Brits and all this. We were strong. We were together. We faced it down.
Well I’m not so sure that 30 years removed from it, that you’re still saying that this was a great community to the point where you’re so institutionalized that you can’t even see your own prison walls.
There’s no romanticism of the Troubles anymore. There might have been in the past but not the kids today. There’s not not that sort of level of viewing everybody as heroes that there may have been in the past or not accepting the hurt or loss of the other side for want of a better way to express it.”
On the ongoing journey of healing:
“So it’s going beyond just the Catholic and Protestant thing. Now there’s a lot more dynamic peace building, now there’s a lot more stakeholders involved and there’s a lot more people to satisfy, so it’s well enough a very fine tightrope to guarantee. This is sort of getting all those people happy and on board and wanting to move forward. There’s different asks from those different communities, so some of those are competing asks or competing wants and wishes. It gets complicated in a hurry.
What I’ve discovered is people are very good at individualizing or personalizing the struggle of what they’ve suffered themselves. If you understand the wider picture that makes that process easier but some people are still stuck in the individualism or the personalization of what occurred to them and the Troubles.
I have learned that there are many varied perspectives of what happened here that go beyond my own. I have learned that I have blind spots that I have to address about certain opinions that I hold…”
On the restorative model of Rwanda:
“Rwanda after the genocide really sort of got to me because Rwanda was addressed in two ways. We had the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda, which was sort of the international legal system that became involved and they would take all the leaders and they would try them in international courts.
But then sort of the low-level guys were tried in things known as gacaca courts. Gacaca courts were basically a local council of people, like a jury of your peers that lived in a township. You basically got together and you went in like a normal courtroom and you told these people what you’d be involved in and what you had done. And they passed sentence on you, and that would be to go to like a prison camp for X amount of years.
And then basically when you had served the years or maybe even earlier, they would bring you back to the gacaca court and you would speak again to those people and they would then decide whether or not you had come to a point where they were happy enough to say, right, you can now rejoin society because we feel that you are rehabilitated to a certain extent or some of that prejudice or some of that anger has been removed or maybe you’ve come to terms with the gravity of what you had done. So gacaca courts really spoke to me.”
To read the introduction to this series, follow this link.
The Troubles: Finding a Path Toward Healing in Northern Ireland
To listen to our podcast, follow this link or find us on the platform of your choice.
A Peace of My Mind on Buzzsprout
Credits:
Interview and photos: John Noltner
Field production: summer interns Kate West, Sawyer Garrison, and Kaitlin Imai
Audio engineering: Razik Saifullah