Derry, Northern Ireland
Mark Durkan has spent much of his life navigating Northern Ireland ‘s difficult path from conflict to peace. A native of Derry, he was deeply involved in the negotiations and implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, later serving as Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland and as a member of Parliament.
Throughout his career, Mark has championed the idea that peace is more than a political settlement. While agreements can create the conditions for change, he believes reconciliation is sustained by the everyday work of communities, artists, educators, and ordinary citizens who choose connection over division. Drawing on decades of experience, he speaks about the challenges of addressing painful histories, building trust, and creating shared spaces where people can re-imagine a common future.
Today, through his work with the John and Pat Hume Foundation and other civic initiatives, Mark continues to encourage dialogue, understanding, and the belief that lasting peace is built one relationship at a time.
Derry, Northern Ireland
“Those of us who negotiate agreements may be the landscapers, planting the trees. But when you’re talking about growing peace and reconciliation, it’s the people who do the gardening year in, year out after that.””
On the sense of mutual adjustment:
“There comes a point where you notice that other people’s language has slightly changed and that maybe they’re no longer quite arguing for the same thing they were arguing for, that their arguments are more just about questioning what it is you’re suggesting. And you find in turn that your answers are moving to maybe embrace some of their concerns or build them into how you’re answering things.
So it’s that sense of mutual adjustment. When people talk about the need for people to sit around the table, and of course when there’s no talks everybody laments the fact that there isn’t mutual engagement. But mutual engagement, as we found in Northern Ireland, can go on and off in different forms and it can go on a long way without necessarily a meeting of minds.
It’s when you get to that situation that the mutual engagement is leading to a mutual adjustment, where people are recognising that other people aren’t out to solve things without you or against you, and that we’re able to move our thinking in a way that takes on board more of your concerns and ideas and frontloads them into the concepts that we are proposing.”
On making peace real:
“Yes, political decisions can be hugely important and hugely enabling, but the people who then make things really happen are coming in at other levels.
I’m someone who was involved in the negotiation of the Good Friday Agreement. I was involved in its implementation in terms of getting the institutions established. But I’m very conscious that those of us who are negotiating agreements and managing processes at a political level, we’re maybe the landscapers and we’re maybe planting the trees.
But when you’re talking about then growing peace and reconciliation, it’s the people who do the gardening year in, year out after that. The people who are there to pull the weeds of difficulties that always emerge. People who are there to plant new seeds. People who are there to do the cutting and pruning that needs to be done.
And of course it’s the pollinators as well. People who work at all sorts of levels in the community, in the arts and in the economy, all part of making sure that peace means better ways and better days in all sorts of ways.”
On convergence over conversion:
“What I found working with John (Hume) during those years, whenever people didn’t maybe fully realize that he was involved in different channels of dialogue at the same time, was that John’s sense, to my interpretation, was our process was going to be, if it worked, if we could get an inclusive talks process, it would actually be an exercise in convergence rather than conversion.
So he wasn’t going to change unionists into being nationalists. He wasn’t going to change physical-force republicans into not being traditional Irish republicans.
But you could create conversations and conditions that could allow people to feel that they could express and pursue the integrity of their own position without either having to prosecute a campaign of violence on the one hand, or without having to deny rights and democratic expression to others on the other hand.”
On how truth can lead to reconciliation:
“The fact that all of that effort did culminate in the Saville Report, albeit it took a very, very long time, but the Saville Report basically set aside the original verdict of Widgery and saw the British Prime Minister of the day, David Cameron, acknowledge that the killings of the people in Derry on 30 January 1972 were unjustified and unjustifiable.
And that truth on one day led to an act of reconciliation the following day. Protestant church leaders came to the Bogside, to the site where Bloody Sunday took place.
The fact that the truth was confirmed and affirmed based on judicial findings and then fully confirmed and endorsed and articulated at the highest political level in Westminster by the Prime Minister, that then freed people to say, ‘Well, sorry, we didn’t know. Now we understand. Now we know.’
So difficult truth can lead to reconciliation in ways that people underestimate at times.
Don’t be afraid of letting the truth out. The truth, if truth is used in a way where people value it to appreciate where other people have come from, what other people have gone through, and to show an appreciation themselves of that… truth can bring an emancipation of all sorts of possibility.”
On progress and politics:
“”Progress hasn’t been as fast as I would have liked it to be, but the fact is progress has been made.
Progress is made by people coming along with good ideas, people working in the cultural arena, people working with a thought about tourism, people working with a view to economic investment and uplift and creativity, and that’s all part of transformation.
Sometimes some of us who have been involved in politics make the mistake as though everything is politics and everything is down to political decisions. Yes, political decisions can be hugely important and hugely enabling, but the people who then make things really happen are coming in at other levels.”
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