Leaving Troubles Behind

Two homeowners in Belfast, Northern Ireland, find common ground through a shared Habitat experience.

Since 1994, Habitat for Humanity has established itself in Belfast and throughout Northern Ireland not only as a house builder, but even more importantly as a peace-builder, interpreting a decent, affordable house not so much as an end in itself but as the means to a much larger end of unity and accord.

Never has that been better exemplified than in the experience of Michelle Hamilton and Jennifer Crockard, Catholic and Protestant respectively.

The two women, both Habitat homeowners, grew up amid the Troubles and have seen firsthand the hostility and violence that can so thoroughly infect a community.

“I decided I wasn't going to get caught up in all of that,” Crockard says, sitting on the sofa in Hamilton's home in the staunchly Catholic neighborhood of Ligoniel.

Hamilton and Crockard met on a Habitat build site in the Protestant neighborhood of Ballysillan, a mere stone's throw from Ligoniel. They worked hand in hand then, and they walk, figuratively, hand in hand still. Each watches the other's children; they take vacations together—to Scotland last year—watch movies together. Even more revealing, perhaps, is that their young children look at one another not as Catholic or Protestant first, but as friend and neighbor.

“It's so important to take people as they come,” says Hamilton.

“It doesn't matter to me who or what people are,” Crockard echoes. “A person can embrace an identity, but still think beyond the walls of a particular community.”

In Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants live in close proximity—in Crockard and Hamilton's case only a half-mile at the furthest point—but entire worlds divide them in terms of personal interaction. So each time Hamilton and Crockard visit in their respective neighborhoods, they bridge a divide that decades of hostility have carved in the hearts of people throughout the region and particularly in a city where some of the more intense conflict surfaced during the Troubles.

By coming together in true friendship, Hamilton and Crockard personify the very purpose for Habitat's work in Northern Ireland.

“Habitat talks shop and then does shop,” Crockard says. “It doesn't pick sides, and it regenerates communities by giving people hope.”