Ciaran Mckeown
Campaigner who co-founded the Peace People movement
CIARAN MCKEOWN, who has died aged 76, was a journalist, and co-founder in 1976 of the Northern Ireland “Peace People” with Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams.
The three came together after the deaths in August 1976 of three young children, Andrew, Joanne and John Maguire, killed by an out-of-control IRA getaway car in West Belfast after its driver had been shot dead by British soldiers. Their mother, Anne Maguire, was badly injured and later took her own life.
On the day of the tragedy, Mairead Corrigan, the children’s aunt, went to on television to make an impassioned appeal for the killing to stop. Two days later she, Betty Williams, a local woman who was among the first on the scene of the tragedy, and Mckeown, Belfast correspondent for The Irish Press, formed Peace People.
It was Mckeown who wrote the Peace People Declaration that promised: “We dedicate ourselves to working with our neighbours, near and far, day in and day out, to build that peaceful society in which the tragedies we have known are a bad memory.” As the movement’s chief strategist he organised rallies across the province which attracted thousands from both sides of the sectarian divide. Membership soared to more than 100,000.
Although the movement did not bring conflict to an end, it arguably led to a reduction in the levels of violence and many trace the origins of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement to the events of 1976. The movement also established clandestine escape routes to help the desperate flee the violence and by 1980, according to Mckeown, had resettled about 600 people.
In 1978 Mckeown became the first person from Northern Ireland to address the General Assembly of the United Nations, when he delivered a speech on behalf of the International Fellowship of Reconciliation.
However, the Peace People came to be regarded as a women’s movement and Mckeown’s contribution tended to be undervalued. He had missed out on the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize awarded to his co-founders, though a grant from the Ford Foundation funded a small salary for him to
become full-time editor of Peace by Peace, the group’s newspaper.
But the movement soon lost momentum. The leadership broke up amid accusations of personal profiteering by the Nobel laureates and Mckeown fell out with the group’s new leaders. “There was a tremendous loss of trust, and then externally the damage was huge,” he recalled. The group’s programme, he said, “all just went like snow off a ditch”.
The son of a teacher, Ciaran Mckeown was born in Londonderry in 1943 into a Roman Catholic family, and brought up in Belfast. He considered becoming a priest and joined the Dominican novitiate for a short time before reading Philosophy at Queen’s University Belfast, where he became the first Catholic to be elected president of the student council. He was elected president of the Dublin-based Union of Students in 1969.
In 1970 Mckeown became a reporter for The Irish Times, subsequently moving to The Irish Press as their Belfast correspondent, a job from which he stepped down after co-founding the Peace People.
After resigning as editor of Peace by Peace in February 1980, Mckeown found it impossible to find another job in journalism, so he retrained as a self-employed typesetter. He published his autobiography, The Passion of Peace, in 1984. However he later resumed his journalistic career, working at various times for The Irish News, as political correspondent and leaderwriter for The News Letter in Belfast, and as the “Piper of Peace” columnist for the local edition of the Daily Mirror.
In 1968 he married Marianne Mcveigh. She predeceased him and he is survived by their six daughters and a son.
Ciaran Mckeown, born 1943, died September 1 2019