Valerie Morgan, October 1995

"The conflict in Northern Ireland has been serious and bitter but the violence has been relatively confined. The figures, however, conceal the differential effects on particular subsections of the population. It has been pointed out that bereavement, for example, has not been shared equally. Some neighbourhoods, families and individuals suffered multiple and repeated losses. Women have been directly affected by the conflict as victims of violence, as bereaved relatives and friends and as the people who have often had to cope with direct and indirect effects of conflict on families and communities. There has been a tendency to use stereotypes of women and men in Northern Ireland. Women are seen as passive or innocent victims of violence, men as the perpetrators, women as peacemakers and conciliators, men as intransigent warmongers, women as pragmatic, problem-solving people keeping track of daily life and men as pursuers of impossible or irrelevant schemes. Recent research, however, has shown that women have not always been innocent, passive spectators, but have actively supported violent and sectarian organisations on both sides of the national divide. It is, nonetheless, fair to say that women have been at the fore in a kind of politics that has helped to limit the effects of the conflict on the fabric of society. This is a form of politics that has laid the foundations for a future in which the two major traditions learn to accommodate each other and to express differences without aggression."

Carmel Roulston, member of the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition's executive committee,
Lecturer in politics in the University of Ulster