“I am afraid. Afraid of the land that I live in… I have never known peace.”

Excerpted from a poem entitled “No Hope for Tomorrow,” written during the Troubles by Karyn Woods, from Northern Ireland, when she was fourteen years old.

 

On Thursday 5 May, eighteen years after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement a new cohort of voters here will be handed the opportunity to vote for the first time. Unlike Karyn Woods, who wrote the poem above, this ‘Good Friday Agreement Generation’ has known only peace.

This week, US President Barack Obama made headlines with a controversial intervention into the ‘Brexit’ debate, calling for Britain to vote to remain a member of the European Union in 23 June’s referendum.

In a question and answer session with young people in London, Obama also made a poignant point on Northern Ireland. Praising the peace process here as a “story of perseverance”, he stressed the need for young leaders here to forge a shared identity.

Previously, on his famous visit here ahead of the G8 summit in June 2013, he had warned of wounds that have not yet healed and walls that still stand.

In his remarks this week he spoke of the importance of children nowadays going to school together, “having a sense of we are all in this together as opposed to it is us against them”.

As a community of people, with the Good Friday Agreement every one of us has the right to a vote on the future of Northern Ireland’s constitutional status should a referendum arise. Together, periodically, we elect 108 MLAs to represent us at the Stormont Assembly under a proportional representation voting system

These are legal rights which bring us together as one community of equals. Beyond this, however, social references to apartness, of “communities” or “the other side of the community” are often utilised.

To forge a true community or union of people, and a shared sense of identity will entail more than legal requirements and acts of symbolism.

Significant compromises and gestures have been made by political leaders in the past, and more may be made in the future, but the identity challenge which Obama cited will continue to entail a real willingness to facilitate the sharing of ideas, spaces and resources in everyday life.

In recent months we have seen half a billion pounds of funding dedicated to shared and integrated education across Northern Ireland, allocated under the Stormont House and Fresh Start agreements. With further efforts at facilitating shared education will come more hope and opportunities.

For such a small place on the map, it is the further and higher education institutions in Northern Ireland that have long facilitated the first contact between a member of one “community” with a member of another “community”.

The politicians who signed the Good Friday Agreement brought peace to the land we live in. Now it is up to a new generation who have never known war to lead one community to forge one identity. This will require perseverance and hope for tomorrow.