By Cathy Bollaert
Community relations and reconciliation work in Northern Ireland has reached a crossroads. That is the challenge at the heart of Rethinking Community Relations: Faith, Belonging and Reconciliation in Contemporary Northern Ireland, which is a new scoping study led by Contemporary Christianity in partnership with Clonard Monastery and Youth Link NI, supported by the Community Relations Council through the CR/CD Small Grants Scheme.
Drawing on eight workshops with 85 participants, the report asks a timely question: If current approaches no longer reflect how division is lived and experienced, are we willing to shift?
The study does not suggest that people have given up on reconciliation. In many ways, the opposite is true. Participants spoke with honesty about the need for a more just, connected and credible society. But they also described frustration with approaches that feel repetitive, unclear or disconnected from everyday reality. While sectarianism remains important, many participants, especially young people, described racism, hostility towards migrants, inequality, gendered insecurity and political polarisation as central to how division is experienced today.
One of the report’s most challenging messages is that reconciliation cannot be renewed by language alone. Participants pointed to the gap between what institutions say and what people experience. They spoke about belonging as uneven and conditional, shaped by safety, power, class, race and gender. They also challenged approaches that separate relationship-building from justice. In everyday life, people do not experience legacy, exclusion, poverty, racism and insecurity as separate issues. They overlap and compound one another. Reconciliation work loses credibility when structural injustice is treated as secondary, or when dialogue is expected to do the work that policy, institutions and funding structures have failed to do.
A key sentence in the report states that “the study suggests that reconciliation work is not failing because of lack of commitment, but because of structural misalignment.” Herein lies the real challenge. Too often reconciliation is treated as a short-term outcome rather than ongoing work. Too often justice and reconciliation are separated. Too often engagement is invited without clear evidence that it will influence anything.
In response, the report identifies five shifts needed to renew community relations and reconciliation work: from outcome to ongoing holistic practice; from polite talk to authentic practice; from parallel agendas to integrated justice; from assumed belonging to active inclusion; and from talk to impact. Together, these shifts call for a more honest and integrated approach, one that connects past harms with present injustices, takes structural inequality seriously, and ensures that participation can lead to visible change.
Framed at the public launch around the question “Are we willing to shift?”, this report is a challenge to all of us: faith leaders, practitioners, policymakers and funders alike. The question is not whether reconciliation still matters. The question is whether we are willing to let it change shape so that it remains meaningful in the world people are actually living in.
Further info
Read the report Rethinking Community Relations: Faith, Belonging and Reconciliation in Contemporary Northern Ireland.