Parish Social School ... Lester Connor Mairead Corrigan Barbara Dever Paddy Doherty Seamus Egan Michael Flatley ... Walt Whitman Mairead Corrigan Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams, from Belfast, Northern Ireland, won the 1976 Nobel Prize for Peace in 1976. The following is an article from The Nobel web site. Mairead visited Sacred Heart. When Egil Aarvik, vice-chairman of the committee presented the postponed 1976 prize to Betty Williams and Mairead Corrigan in 1977, he began his speech with a graphic description of the tragic accident that had occurred the previous August on a street in Belfast in Northern Ireland. A car out of control, its driver an Irish Republican Army (IRA) gunman shot dead fleeing from British soldiers, smashed into a family out for a walk. Two of the children were killed outright, the third was mortally injured, and the mother critically injured. This senseless killing of innocent children produced a wave of revulsion against the violence which had been sweeping Northern Ireland, with Catholic IRA members using murder and terror to drive out the British, Protestant extremists doing the same in response, and many innocent victims killed as a consequence. The movement was led by Betty Williams, a housewife who came upon the scene after she heard the shot, and Mairead Corrigan, the young aunt of the dead children. Aarvik told how the two women led marches in which Protestants and Catholics walked together in demonstrations for peace and against violence. That so many people in Northern Ireland had recognized that violence cannot bring social justice, Aarvik declared, gave hope that this could be "the dawn of a new day bringing lasting peace to the sorely tried people of Ulster." | |
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