A People's Peace Prize

On a clear, cold night last week, the twin-towered red brick fac,ade of Oslo's city hall flickered in the glow of torches borne by thousands of demonstrators. Inside, an audience of more than 1,000 jammed the auditorium. To a standing ovation, Betty Williams, 33, and Mairead Corrigan, 32, co-founders of the Ulster Peace Movement (TIME, Sept. 6) arrived to accept the Norwegian People's Peace Prize.

The award, sponsored by Norwegian newspapers and civic groups as a grass-roots parallel to this year's Nobel Peace Prize,* drew an outpouring of $324,000 in donations from Norway and around the world. Her voice trembling, Williams announced that the money would go to a children's center in Belfast's gutted slums. "When I look at sound and happy Norwegian children," she told the audience, "I think of the boys and girls of Northern Ireland, children used to war, to nerve medicine and sleeping pills, and I ask: 'God, forgive us for what we have done.' " Speaking at times in broken Norwegian, Ciaran McKeown, 32, the former newsman who has emerged as the peace movement's chief adviser, added: "You help us pay the price for peace and together we'll win."

Nearly four months after it was launched--in response to the death of three children crushed by the runaway car of an IRA militant shot through the heart by a British soldier--the peace movement has grown into a potentially powerful political force. Braving death threats, verbal abuse, and occasional violence from extremists, tens of thousands of Ulster Protestants and Roman Catholics have joined weekly marches and rallies calling for an end to the bloodshed. More significant, the movement is sprouting organizational roots. Enjoying broad support from Ulster's churches and with a flourishing magazine, financial backing and 100 activist groups, it has been felt in virtually every community in the province. The movement's Belfast office is papered with letters and telegrams of support. "We are not here to provide the climate for a new political initiative," McKeown told 10,500 backers in London's Trafalgar Square last week. "We are the political initiative."

Blood Brothers. Such a prospect stirs suspicions and concern among Ulster's traditional politicians--both Protestant and Catholic. Their worry: McKeown's vision of an "ideal democracy" organized "from the bottom up" could clash with what essentially will have to be a political and constitutional solution. Some also fear a crippling backlash of cynicism should the peace movement, like others before it, falter after a headline-grabbing series of rallies. "I have no great faith in it," says a leading Catholic politician. "The people of Ulster are not all blood brothers, as the movement says. They are still killing one another." True enough: since the start of September, 63 people have died in 170 bombings and 440 shootings, a roughly "normal" rate of violence.

At week's end the movement staged the last in a series of symbolic rallies --a climactic gathering on the banks of the river Boyne in Eire. There, in 1690, William of Orange defeated the Catholic King James, assuring Protestant dominion over Ulster. If Williams, Corrigan and McKeown could find ways to ease Ulster's three centuries of communal hatred, they may be back in Oslo again next year--to receive the Nobel Peace Prize itself.

But meanwhile, as Yeats had it, "peace comes dropping slow." Last week gunmen wounded four men outside a Catholic church in Belfast.

* For which no acceptable candidate was found by the February deadline--six months before Ulster's peace movement began.

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