Late in 2011 I received a telephone call from Trevor Birney, an independent television producer in Northern Ireland. I had met him once before, when he interviewed me in London in connection with a documentary film on Northern Ireland that he was producing. “Have you made your return trip to Northern Ireland with Andrew?” he asked.
I was surprised by the question, so I paused before answering. “No, not yet.”
“Have you thought about it?”
“No. Not lately.”
“Well, if you’re willing to make the trip now I’d like to make a documentary on it for the BBC. We would locate some of the sixty-one children born in Northern Ireland on the same day as Andrew and try to line up visits with them for Andrew and you. Would you be interested?”
There was another, longer pause. “Gee, Trevor, that would be really nice, but I have to think about that before answering. I don’t know if the time’s right. And I have to talk to my wife and children.”
“Will you do that and call me back?”
“Okay, I’ll talk to them and think about it, and then I’ll call you back.”
The conversation brought back some emotional memories. In one chapter of my book Making Peace, I described the profound effect my son’s birth in 1997 had on me and my work in Northern Ireland:
On Thursday, October 16, Andrew MacLachlan Mitchell was born. He weighed seven pounds fourteen ounces at birth. He was healthy. We were happy. Heather had some problems which required her to return to the hospital a few days later, and this delayed my return to Belfast, but it meant we were able to spend a few more days together.
Late in the middle of one night I sat watching Andrew sleeping. I began to imagine what his life would be like, lived, as it would be, almost entirely in the twenty-first century. I then started to think about how different his life would be had he been born a citizen of Northern Ireland. I wondered how many babies had been born in Northern Ireland on October 16. What would their lives be like? How different would those lives be had they been born Americans? I picked up the telephone and called my staff in Belfast. After getting a routine briefing, I asked them to find out how many newborns had been delivered in the province on October 16. It didn’t take long to get the answer: sixty-one.
For the next several days, the thought stayed with me. It was with me as I got up late on another night to comfort Andrew. Heather and I had such high hopes and dreams for our son. Surely the parents of those sixty-one babies had the same hopes and dreams. The aspirations of parents everywhere are the same: for their children to be healthy and happy, safe and secure, to get a good education and a good start in life, and to be able to go as high and as far as talent and willingness to work will take them. Shouldn’t those sixty-one children in Northern Ireland have the same chance in life that we wanted for our son? Could they get it if Northern Ireland reverted to sectarian strife? There would always be the risk of babies being torn from their mothers’ arms by the sudden blast of a bomb. When a mother sent her children off to school in the morning there would always be the nagging fear of random violence, the chance that she might never again see them alive. Why should people have to live like that? This conflict was made and sustained by men and women. It could be ended by men and women. And I knew those men and women. They were there, in Stormont. I had been with them for a year and a half, and I was now determined to stay with them to the end. I was also more determined than ever that these negotiations end with an agreement. For the sake of those sixty-one children, and thousands of others like them, we had to succeed. All of the doubts I had about my role in Northern Ireland vanished. No matter what, I would see it through, all the way to an agreement.
I felt an overpowering urge to touch my sleeping son. I picked him up and held him close for a long time. He couldn’t hear me, but I told him that for him and for his sixty-one friends in Northern Ireland I was somehow going to get this job done, and when I did I would refer to it as Andrew’s Peace.
I ended the book with these words:
The Good Friday Agreement was, for me, the realization of a dream that sustained me for three and a half years, the longest, most difficult years of my life. After the agreement was approved, I talked with several of the men and women who had negotiated it; we were all overcome with exhaustion and emotion. As we parted, I told them that I have a new dream.
That dream is to return to Northern Ireland in a few years, with my young son, Andrew. We will roam the countryside, taking in the sights and smells and sounds of one of the most beautiful landscapes on earth. Then, on a rainy afternoon (there are many in Northern Ireland) we will drive to Stormont and sit quietly in the visitors gallery of the Northern Ireland Assembly. There we will watch and listen as the members of the Assembly debate the ordinary issues of life in a peaceful democratic society: education, health care, agriculture, tourism, fisheries, trade. There will be no talk of war, for the war will have long been over. There will be no talk of peace, for peace will by then be taken for granted. On that day, the day on which peace is taken for granted in Northern Ireland, I will be fulfilled.1
Over the following decade I visited Northern Ireland often and occasionally made reference to that passage in my book. But I had not considered, in a serious and sustained way, making the trip I had dreamed of. Now, in response to Trevor’s call, I did so. I talked with several friends in Northern Ireland and the United States to obtain a current and in-depth picture of the situation there; most of the comments were positive. I asked some directly if they thought it an appropriate time for the trip. All answered in the affirmative. I talked about it at length with Heather and with Andrew, who was then fourteen, and our daughter Claire, three years younger than Andrew. Heather and Claire were positive, but Andrew was reticent. Unlike his father, who like most politicians enjoys the spotlight of publicity, Andrew prefers privacy; he neither seeks nor enjoys being the focus of attention. But he is also thoughtful of others, so when I told him it would mean a lot to me, he agreed to go.
It was one of the most enjoyable weeks of my life. After two days of filming in New York, we traveled to Northern Ireland. It was in March, spring break at the schools Andrew and Claire attended, so I warned them to bring sweaters, raincoats, and umbrellas; I knew from experience that the weather would be cold and windy and wet. To my amazement, and to our children’s delight, the weather was clear and sunny for the entire week, with not a drop of rain. Although it was occasionally cool and windy, we thoroughly enjoyed the crisp and clear days. By coincidence, school vacation coincided with St. Patrick’s Day. As a result most of Northern Ireland’s political leaders were in the United States. Over the past few decades American presidents have hosted receptions on St. Patrick’s Day to which the prime minister of Ireland and a host of other politicians, north and south, regularly flock. It is one of the peculiar ways in which, on occasion, “being Irish” means more in the United States than in Ireland.
But that had no effect on our visit. We were there primarily to meet with the families of children born on October 16, 1997, and to visit the Northern Ireland Assembly. Trevor and his producer, Michael Fanning, arranged visits to four families; they were as diverse as Northern Ireland itself. The Robinson Family is Catholic; they live on a farm in the rural western county of Fermanagh. The parents, Martin and Mary, welcomed us into their home as though we’d known each other all our lives. Their son Conor graciously showed Andrew around the farm. The Robinsons welcomed and supported the Good Friday Agreement; they believed it ended years of discrimination and created a new sense of community. From Fermanagh we traveled to a suburb east of Belfast, to meet the Best family. Peter is an architect, Heather a teacher. Their son, Alexander, took Andrew to visit his school, which in many ways is similar to St. Bernard’s, the school Andrew then attended. The Bests are Protestants who supported the Agreement, believing that it would help to move Northern Ireland away from the violence of its past. We then traveled to County Down, where we met the Stephenson family. They were warm and gracious in their welcome. As a police officer, Ian is in constant danger; understandably that has affected their view of the Agreement. They believe that it inappropriately rewarded bad behavior and has not resulted in a durable peace. Their daughter Lucy, born on the same day as Andrew, and their other children took Andrew to a local recreation center, where he participated in archery lessons. The children had a good time, as did their parents.
In the twenty-two months of negotiations at the Stormont Estate, site of the Northern Ireland Assembly, I had grown indifferent to its beauty and majesty. As the iron gate swings open you drive in and start up a slowly rising hill, exactly one mile long, to the impressive granite Parliament building, set at the top of the hill. Now, for the first and only time in my life, I took that drive with my wife and children. My indifference vanished. I asked the driver to slow down so we could take in the scene for a few seconds longer. The sky was blue, with a few clumps of heavy white clouds, but it was windy, so we didn’t pause long when we got out of the car at the foot of the broad stairway leading to the front entrance. After a brief welcoming ceremony Heather and Claire were whisked off on a tour of the building while Andrew and I were ushered into the visitors’ gallery of the Northern Ireland Assembly, the democratically elected body that governs the people of Northern Ireland. The impressive exterior of the building is surpassed by the inspiration of its interior, especially the Assembly Chamber, in the beauty of the royal blue leather benches and the dark wood paneling. We were conspicuous as we took our seats; there was no one else in the gallery, and several well-intentioned attendants made a fuss over my return. We listened as a government minister reported to the members on a conference he had attended in Brussels. It was as dry as dust and as boring as only a government report can be. I recalled the words I had spoken to the delegates at the peace negotiations fourteen years earlier: “We will watch and listen as the members of the Assembly debate the ordinary issues of life in a democratic society.” This, finally, was happening. And my son was there to share the moment with me. I was silent but very emotional.
A half hour passed; to me it seemed an instant, but not to Andrew. He leaned toward me and whispered, “Dad, this is really boring. Can we go now?” I smiled, hugged him, and said, “Of course.” As we stood I said to him, “I know it’s boring to you, but that’s the point. To me, it was soothing, like music to my ears.”
Our last visit was the most emotional. We traveled to Omagh to meet with Claire Gallagher and her family. The fifteen-year-old girl has become a tall woman of thirty. Her hair was short, and she no longer had large patches covering her empty eye sockets. Her face still bore the scars of that terrible day of the car bombing in 1998, but her spirit was as strong as ever. She was accompanied by her father and mother, her loving husband, Ryan Bowes, and two beautiful small children, Oran, four years old, and Connor, two. As much as anyone could, given what she had lived through, Claire led a normal and happy life. It took time for her to accept the reality that she would never see again, but she adjusted and graduated from the Northern Ireland equivalent of high school. Although she had several college scholarship offers from institutions outside of Northern Ireland, she chose to stay closer to home, so she attended and graduated from Queen’s University in Belfast. She then married Ryan and had two children, all the while improving her skills in serving others who are blind. She now works as an eye care liaison officer at the Royal Institute of Blind People. As she had when we first met, on that sweltering night in Omagh fifteen years earlier, she reached out for my hand and held it as we talked. As calm and methodical as she had been then, she told me about her fifteen-year journey to her current life. It is a tale of power and emotion, of how a person deals with the most unexpected and terrible of tragedies. Surely she had periods of sadness, regret, even depression over the misfortune of timing and the severity and awful nature of her injuries, but in our meetings she never let those emotions show. Calm, steady, consistent, Claire is a shining exemplar of the strength of the human spirit, an inspiration to me and to many others, in Northern Ireland and the world. My admiration for her was one of the factors that led Heather and me to name our daughter Claire on her birth in 2001.