Mairead MaguireFairmichael, p. 28: "Mairead Corrigan, now Mairead Maguire, married her former brother-in-law, Jackie Maguire, and they have two children of their own as well as three by Jackie's previous marriage to Ann Maguire."Abrams (2001) p. 27 "For many years Mairead Corrigan (now Maguire), thirty-three when she received the 1976 prize in 1977, was the youngest in the year of the award, but she has now been matched by Rigoberta Menchú Tum, also thirty-three when she won the prize in 1992." (born 27 January 1944), also known as Mairead Corrigan Maguire and formerly as Mairéad Corrigan, is a peace activist from Northern Ireland. She co-founded, with Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown, the Women for Peace, which later became the Community for Peace People, an organization dedicated to encouraging a peaceful resolution of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Maguire and Williams were awarded the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize.
Early life (1944–1976) Maguire was born into a Roman Catholic community in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the second of eight children – five sisters and two brothers. Her parents were Andrew and Margaret Corrigan. She attended St. Vincent's Primary School, a private Catholic school, until the age of 14, at which time her family could no longer pay for her schooling. After working for a time as a babysitter at a Catholic community centre, she was able to save enough money to enroll in a year of business classes at Miss Gordon's Commercial College, which led her at the age of 16 to a job as an accounting clerk with a local factory. She volunteered regularly with the Legion of Mary, spending her evenings and weekends working with children and visiting inmates at Long Kesh prison. When she was 21 she began working as a secretary for the Guinness brewery, where she remained employed until December 1976.Buscher, p. 32: "Máiread left school at the age of fourteen. She went to business school for a year, taking babysitting jobs to earn money. That year she also joined the Legion of Mary, a Catholic lay organization dedicated to helping the very poor in the Catholic community."
Maguire told The Progressive in 2013 that her early Catholic heroes included Dorothy Day and the Berrigan brothers.
Northern Ireland peace movement (1976–1980)
Maguire became active with the Northern Ireland peace movement after three children of her sister, Anne Maguire, were run over and killed by a car driven by Danny Lennon, a Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) member who had been fatally shot by soldiers of the King's Own Royal Border Regiment (KORBR) while trying to escape the troops. Lennon had been released from prison in April 1976 after serving three years for suspected involvement in the IRA. On 10 August, Lennon and accomplice John Chillingworth were transporting an Armalite rifle through Andersonstown, Belfast, when a foot patrol of the KORBR, claiming to have seen a passenger in Lennon's car point a rifle at themFairmichael, p. 7. "Even if one accepted the official, army version of the incident (that a passenger in the escaping car was seen to point a rifle at the pursuing patrol, that the soldiers then fired 4 shots, killing Lennon) it took two sides to bring the incident about." fired four shots at the vehicle, instantly killing Lennon and critically wounding Chillingworth. The car Lennon drove went out of control and mounted a pavement on Finaghy Road North, colliding with Anne Maguire and three of her children who were out shopping. Joanne (8) and Andrew (6 weeks) died at the scene; John Maguire (2) succumbed to his injuries at a hospital the following day. Alt URL
Betty Williams, a resident of Andersonstown who happened to be driving by, witnessed the tragedy and accused the IRA of firing at the British patrol and provoking the incident. In the days that followed she began gathering signatures for a peace petition from Protestants and Catholics and was able to assemble some 200 women to march for peace in Belfast. The march passed near the home of Maguire (then Mairead Corrigan) who joined it. She and Williams thus became "the joint leaders of a virtually spontaneous mass movement."
The next march, to the burial sites of the three Maguire children, brought 10,000 Protestant and Catholic women together. The marchers, including Maguire and Williams, were physically attacked by IRA members. By the end of the month Maguire and Williams had brought 35,000 people onto the streets of Belfast petitioning for peace between the republican and loyalist factions. Initially adopting the name "Women for Peace," the movement changed its name to the gender-neutral "Community of Peace People," or simply "Peace People," when Irish Press correspondent Ciaran McKeown joined. In contrast with the prevailing climate at the time, Maguire was convinced that the most effective way to end the violence was not through violence but through re-education. The organization published a biweekly paper, Peace by Peace, and provided for families of prisoners a bus service to and from Belfast's jails. In 1977, she and Betty Williams received the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts. Aged 32 at the time, she was the youngest Nobel Peace Prize laureate until Malala Yousafzai was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2014.
After the Nobel Prize (since 1980) Though Betty Williams resigned from the Peace People in 1980, Maguire has continued her involvement in the organization to this day and has served as the group's honorary president. It has since taken on a more global agenda, addressing an array of social and political issues from around the world.
In January 1980, after a prolonged battle with depression over the loss of her children in the 1976 Finaghy Road incident, Maguire's sister Anne died by suicide. A year and a half later, in September 1981, Mairead married Jackie Maguire, who was her late sister's widower. She has three stepchildren and two children of her own, John Francis (b. 1982) and Luke (b. 1984).
In 1981 Maguire co-founded the Committee on the Administration of Justice, a nonsectarian organisation dedicated to defending human rights.
She is a member of the anti-abortion group Consistent Life Ethic, which is against abortion, capital punishment and euthanasia.
Maguire has been involved in a number of campaigns on behalf of political prisoners around the world. In 1993 she and six other Nobel Peace Prize laureates tried unsuccessfully to enter Myanmar from Thailand to protest the protracted detention of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi. She was a first signatory on a 2008 petition calling on Turkey to end its torture of Kurdish leader Abdullah Öcalan. In October 2010, she signed a petition calling on China to release Nobel Peace Prize laureate Liu Xiaobo from house arrest.
Maguire was selected in 2003 to serve on the honorary board of the International Coalition for the Decade, a coalition of national and international groups, presided over by Christian Renoux, whose aim was to promote the United Nations' 1998 vision of the first decade of the twenty-first century as the International Decade for the Promotion of a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World.
In 2006, Maguire was one of the founders of the Nobel Women's Initiative along with fellow Peace Prize laureates Betty Williams, Shirin Ebadi, Wangari Maathai, Jody Williams, and Rigoberta Menchú Tum. The Initiative describes itself as six women representing North and South America, Europe, the Middle East, and Africa who decided to bring together their "extraordinary experiences in a united effort for peace with justice and equality" and "to help strengthen work being done in support of women's rights around the world".
Maguire supported the Occupy movement and has described WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as "very courageous". She has also praised Chelsea Manning. "I think they've been tremendously courageous in telling the truth", she has said, adding that "the American government and NATO have destroyed Iraq and Afghanistan. Their next targets will be Syria and Iran".
Together with Desmond Tutu and Adolfo Pérez Esquivel, Maguire published a letter in support of Chelsea Manning, saying: "The words attributed to Manning reveal that he went through a profound moral struggle between the time he enlisted and when he became a whistleblower. Through his experience in Iraq, he became disturbed by top-level policy that undervalued human life and caused the suffering of innocent civilians and soldiers. Like other courageous whistleblowers, he was driven foremost by a desire to reveal the truth".
Maguire has also earned a degree from the Irish School of Ecumenics at Trinity College Dublin. She works with various interchurch and interfaith organizations and is a councilor with the International Peace Council. She is also a Patron of the Methodist Theological College, and of the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education.
In April 2019 Maguire collected the 2019 GUE/NGL Award for Journalists, Whistleblowers & Defenders of the Right to Information on behalf of Julian Assange who was at the time imprisoned by the United Kingdom.
United States Maguire is an outspoken critic of U.S. and British policy in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan. She was also personally critical of U.S. President Barack Obama's leadership. Her activism in the U.S. has occasionally brought her into confrontations with the law.
After initially accepting an invitation to a 2012 Nobel summit in Chicago, she changed her mind because the event was hosted by the U.S. State Department, "and to me the Nobel Peace laureates should not be hosted by a State Department that is continuing with war, removing basic civil liberties and human rights and international law and then talking about peace to young people. That's a double standard".
Maguire said in a 2013 interview that ever since her 40-day fast and arrest outside the White House in 2003 (see below), "whenever I now come into America, I'm always questioned as to what my background is".
In 2015, Maguire spoke with Democracy Now in a sit-down interview titled, "No to Violence, Yes to Dialogue", which included two other Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, Jody Williams and Leymah Gbowee. Maguire discussed the desire "to end militarism and war, and to build peace and international law and human rights and democracy".
Iraq and Afghanistan Maguire voiced strong opposition to the U.N. sanctions against Iraq, which is alleged by some to have resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths, Alt URL calling them "unjust and inhuman", "a new kind of bomb", and "even more cruel than weapons".Abrams (2003), pp. 94, 99. During a visit to Baghdad with Argentinian colleague Adolfo Pérez Esquivel in March 1999, Maguire urged then-U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to end the bombing of Iraq and to permit the lifting of U.N. sanction. "I have seen children dying with their mothers next to them and not being able to do anything", Maguire said. "They are not soldiers"..
In the aftermath of al-Qaeda's attacks on the U.S. in September 2001, as it became clear that the U.S. would retaliate and deploy troops in Afghanistan, Maguire campaigned against the impending war. In India she claimed to have marched with "hundreds of thousands of Indian people walking for peace".Abrams (2003) pp. 95–96 In New York, Maguire was reported to have marched with 10,000 protesters, purportedly including families of 9/11 victims, as U.S. war planes were already en route to strike Taliban targets in Afghanistan.