President Barack Obama made his first official visit to Northern Ireland on Sunday to speak at a gathering in Belfast prior to the start of the G8 Summit, according to the BBC.
During a speech in front of 1,800 students and adults at the Waterfront Hall, a glass-fronted building that would have been a terrible idea to build back in Belfast's era of bombings, President Obama spoke about how Northern Ireland is a "blueprint" for how to achieve peace for areas in conflict, reports the Globe and Mail.
President Obama said that Northern Ireland was "part of an island with which tens of millions of Americans share an eternal relationship."
The conflict between Ireland and Northern Ireland started to come to an end 15 years ago with the Good Friday Accords. Since then the Irish Republican Army has disarmed and militant Protestant groups have been disbanded. Although Belfast's "peace lines" - barricades that divided everything from neighborhoods to playgrounds - are still standing the progress toward peace within the Northern Irish capital has been immense, according to the Globe and Mail.
President Obama spoke about how successfully keeping the peace is the job ordinary citizens, not just political leaders, and how important it is to keep calm when that peace is tried.
"The terms of peace may be negotiated by political leaders, but the fate of peace is up to each of us," President Obama said. "Whenever your peace is attacked, you will have to choose whether to respond with the same bravery that you've summoned so far or whether you succumb to the worst instincts, those impulses that kept this great land divided for too long. You'll have to choose whether to keep going forward, not backward."
The audience that President Obama was speaking to was made up of both Protestant and Catholic school children, children who would normally never be mixed together because of the way things have been kept segregated in Belfast.
"If towns remain divided - if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can't see ourselves in one another, if fear or resentment are allowed to harden - that too encourages division," President Obama said. "It discourages co-operation."
The conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland was compared to the U.S. civil rights movement by President Obama as he reflected upon how his parents would not have been allowed to marry in some states, according to the Globe and Mail.
"But over time, laws changed, and hearts and minds changed, sometimes driven sometimes by courageous lawmakers, but more often driven by committed citizens," President Obama said.
Although at no time during his speech did President Obama specifically mention Syria, whose conflict will be at the heart of the G8 talks, but the conflict that has resulted in over 90,000 deaths so far was strongly alluded to, according to NBC News.
"Beyond those shores right now in scattered corners of the world there are people living in the grip of conflict, ethnic conflict, religious conflict, tribal conflicts," President Obama said. "And they are groping for a way to discover how to move beyond the heavy hand of history - to put aside the violence...And they're wondering perhaps if Northern Ireland can achieve peace we can too. So you're their blueprint to follow."
