After the Struggle – Lessons from Northern Ireland for Post-PKK Peacebuilding Guest: Tim Chapman

IE: Hello and welcome back to another episode of We Can Find a Way. I am Idil Elveriş. Thanks to all listeners who patiently let July and August pass by this year. In July, the episode was in Turkish and August is holidays also for We Can Find A Way. So welcome back again.

This podcast is sponsored by Dr. Paolo Michele Patocchi, Attorney at Law and Arbitrator. I'm grateful for his engagement with alternative dispute resolution in Turkey by participating in multiple conferences, teaching at Bilkent University in Ankara, and now supporting my podcast We Can Find a Way.

This episode of We Can Find a Way is taking place in the wake of the dissolution of the PKK, Kurdistan Workers Party in May 2025. The PKK was a separatist Movement that fought against Turkey and its armed struggle led to 40 thousand deaths in Turkey. So I wanted to speak with someone who had experience about a peace process, who could talk about its possible steps especially about social cohesion after a long period of violence; integration of people who served time in prison and victims rights. So, I spoke with Tim Chapman who is a native of Northern Island and a believer and practitioner of RJ. Indeed, conflict resolvers around the world have been visiting Northern Island to learn what was done there and what can or could have been done better. I asked Tim how to reconcile the benefits of an amnesty with the victims’ expactations. Lastly, we talked about re-integration for people who have been imprisoned during what they call in Northern Island as “the Troubles”. I will be talking about Tim’s CV later but now let’s go for the interview that took place on 29th July 2025.

Hello Tim, thanks for agreeing to talk to me for my podcast We can find a way. It seems like, for any involved in peaceful resolution of the Kurdish issue in Turkey and probably other countries as well, Northern Ireland where you're from, had been a much revered place. People always visiting, comparing thereafter their own issues. Can you describe what in your opinion contributed to these visits and experience sharing in the peace process in Northern Ireland and what works, what can be improved?

TC: Thank you, It's a pleasure to be here. Yeah, I lived In Northern Ireland, throughout what we call the Troubles, the violent political conflict that went on for about 30 years. And during that time, we often thought: “how will we ever get peace?”. Because there seemed to be an irreconcilable difference, you know, that one part of the population wanted to be British and the other part wanted to be Irish. And there's no sort of compromise between those two things. But in the mid-90s, the peace process began very tentatively. I think people just were exhausted by the conflict, and it didn't seem that anybody was going to win through violence. Neither the British or the Republican sort of IRA. You know, they were just sort of, you know, fighting to a standstill, and a lot of people were suffering. I think that's what turned it around and ironically, the peace process was really led and nurtured by the sort of moderate parties, as you would expect, the sort of moderate Nationalist and the moderate Unionist parties, who were politically opposed but were more moderate and had not adopted violence. The irony of that, as soon as the peace process was agreed, the more extreme parties benefited much more than the moderates. And of course, you probably know that the largest party now is Sinn Fein, which is this sort of was the militant Republican party linked to the IRA. And our first minister is Michelle O'Neill, who is from Sinn Fein. So that's been a huge change to say, and there are ex-combatants in the government. And, you know, for some people, that's horrifying. For other people, it shows that the peace process has worked, that people who were enemies in the past, they still are politically opposed, but they don't want to kill each other.

IE: That's progress.

TC: It's big progress. So the drivers, you know, abuses of human rights; inequality; discrimination; lack of esteem between the two communities, you know, and also just what we used to call the democratic deficit of having one large group dominating another, almost as large a group politically. And in terms of, you know, the benefits of society like employment and housing, there was discrimination. So those drivers were removed, the drivers for violence. It didn't resolve the national question. We are still part of Britain, and there are still a large percentage of people in Northern Ireland who would like us to be part of Ireland. That was never resolved, but the underlying drivers that sustained the violence was. And so it's not that violence doesn't happen. It does. But there's a few, what we call dissident groups that have never accepted the peace process. But they're not powerful and they're easily managed by the state. They occasionally commit acts of violence, but nothing compared to what we were experiencing. So that was successful. We reformed the criminal justice system, we strengthened human rights and equality, and we changed the government to a power sharing so that all the major parties were in government together, which, again, has reduced violence, but doesn't necessarily make for good politics. You know, you don't have a united government, and also it sort of sustains, if you like, the Sectarian divide, because you have to have a Catholic party and you have to have a Protestant party. And so there's no incentive for politics to move beyond sectarianism. You know?

IE: Just like in the Balkans a little bit.

TC: Yeah, very similar, very similar. That identity becomes more important sometimes than social issues, and that's the weakness of our peace. But I suppose it's a cliché to say that the absence of violence is not necessarily peace. So you can reform a country in a peace process, structurally, like government and laws, and that's all good. And of course, part of the reform, which I'll come back to you, was to introduce restorative justice because it sort of chimed with the times of reconciliation and talking rather than fighting. So you can reform things through laws and policies, but that doesn't necessarily change how people live together. And I think this is what has been neglected in our peace process, or we haven't been so successful at, put it that way. You know, changing the culture, changing the social relations, changing how we bring up young people. Most of them actually are okay, and they're great sense of the future for us. But some feel because their parents were in conflict, why do we not get the opportunity for this glamorous violence? Which, of course, most people now looking back and say there was nothing glamorous or heroic about the conflict. It was quite a dirty war. But, you know, young men particularly think “we should be fighting too”. You know, so those things remain. But we can say that the peace process stopped 99% violence, which was a great thing. I'll come back to the sort of more social aspect. It was successful, but not perfect.

IE: What is really interesting from what you're saying, as an observation, the social relations between the communities in Turkey. Turkey, Kurdish and Turkish, is not that bad, actually.

TC: Oh, that’s interesting.

IE: Yeah, people intermarry, people establish businesses. Of course, there are people who would say, I hate those and I hate those, but in general, it's not like that. So it's quite interesting what you're saying, because previous speakers who have visited Ireland have said, they said to us in Ireland, they haven't resolved anything. They just agreed to resolve it by talking and not by fighting.

TC: That's right.

IE: So it was interesting for them to see how communities built walls right next to each other. Shankil Road, etc. We didn't have anything like that in Turkey. We had other atrocities or other issues obviously, but they were really struck, if I can quote them by that. So thank you for bringing this up.

TC: I mean, I think that's a good symbol of what I'm talking about. While we have made huge progress and Northern Ireland is completely different to what it was 30 years ago, it's a sort of modern society. We had this big golf tournament recently. People came from all over the world. It's a nice place to live. But after nearly 30 years of peace, nobody's suggesting we take the walls down. Those walls are still there. So there is still an insecurity about how we live as neighbors, I would say. It's also a class thing. It's more amongst the more deprived working class areas where there's that sort of insecurity. The middle classes, as you would suspect, are more interested in having a good life and making money and they're willing to live together for those reasons. It's in their material self interest. It's more those people who don't have the advantages and privileges tend to be the ones that feel most insecure and still want to have the protection of walls.

IE: You mentioned restorative justice and you have said it should have been involved in this process. Can you elaborate a little bit more on that?

TC: Yeah, it was part of the process. At one stage, both the Republican and what we call the Loyalists, which is the Protestant side, armed groups decided that they needed to get involved in democratic politics rather than in sort of armed struggle. That meant embracing things like human rights, equality, etc. Respect for others. But at that stage, in the most militant areas where there was a lot of violence, there wasn't a well functioning criminal justice system. There wasn't policing as it should be. You know, you didn't have police officers walking down the street or they were armed cars, very militaristic, because they consider themselves fighting against a terrorist organization and they needed to protect themselves. Police stations still are like this in many areas, not all. They were like forts, huge walls around them, to protect them from people who wanted to send mortars in, bombs and things. So the armed groups had to take up in part law enforcement or at least trying to keep order. Not particularly because they wanted to, but because the community were saying, “look, the police aren't protecting us from crime”. Ordinary crime, I'm talking about theft, burglary, stealing cars. And so the armed groups had to take on the role of and punishment. And that was pretty brutal. We had what we called euphemistically kneecapping. That meant a bullet through your knee as a punishment

IE: So that you would be limping.

TC: Yeah

IE: Forever.

TC: Exactly. Those who believe in harsh punishments, I can tell you, because I lived through it, it didn't work. I was a probation officer at the time. And those people who were punished using bullets could not wait to get back to crime, to defy the IRA or the UVF or whoever did it. So they realized that obviously, shooting young people through the knee is a breach of human rights, child abuse. So they had to start looking for something different. And they found restorative justice, amazingly. And so they developed local restorative justice projects. Now, that was quite a radical thing to do because at that time, there was what I would call a “culture of violence”. Violence was seen as the solution to almost any problem. And this is what happens in war, I think. People sort of cannot see beyond violence, so they have to start educating their own constituencies that might be better in a new society to talk rather than to fight, rather than inflict violent punishments. And of course, restorative justice fitted that. There is now very thriving, what we call community based restorative justice. And these are projects in local working class areas that are run or staffed by local people, well trained, very experienced. Often they're ex prisoners, ex combatants.

Although as time goes on, we haven't really had organized violence for nearly, you know, 25 years or so. So a lot of the sort of people who came out of prison wanting to make peace have died or retired, you know, so we're getting a new generation. I was recently training in what was previously a very militant Republican area. There's hardly any of the ex IRA working there now. And they're in fact employing Protestants, the other side, in their own projects. So that's where Northern Ireland is changing on the ground.

The point I'm making is during the peace process, restorative justice had a role in trying to educate a community that had been under a lot of stress from the violence for many years and has accepted that was the way it was into non violent conflict resolution, into human rights, into respect for each other. And so it had a very positive social, educational role in those communities, weaning them off that sort of instinctive, violent reaction to any problem. And they have prospered. Previously, they were treated with great suspicion by the government because they were ex prisoners.

IE: Well, it was also started by IRA, I guess, if I understand you correctly.

TC: Yeah. IRA and the equivalent on the other side.

IE: Sorry, yeah, UVF.

TC: Yhey were ex prisoners. They were people who in the past would have been considered terrorists or certainly subversives, but now they were embracing peace. They were embracing peaceful means. I did a lot of research in this area and I remember one IRA leader, I said, “how did you sort of talk to your previous comrades who were committed to the violent struggle?” And he just said, well, I used to ask him this question. “Can you shoot poverty? Can you put a bomb under poverty and destroy it? We need to change our thinking”. Violence is not a solution to every problem. Issues like poverty, inequality, etc. cannot be dismantled through just bombs and violence. It needs social action, not military action and political action. That was the sort of thing that they were doing. They were re-educating their community and that was very necessary. That something that government can't do. You need local people who have credibility on the street to help lubricate the process of change for everyone.

IE: You still get a lot of people visiting. Are people more interested in conflict resolution or the peace process? I'm getting a feeling that even the peace process people are more interested in the process itself rather than the restorative justice aspect of it.

TC: Yes. I think there's sort of two schools, if you like. There's one is transitional justice.

IE: Right.

TC: How does the society move from division and violence into a more democratic structure and process? And so that's the formal side of it. And that I think Northern Ireland has a good reputation for.

IE: Right.

TC: Formal peace building. Looking at the structures of government and governance and people's rights and what laws should be passed, etc. And that's very, very important, as I say. But there's another level which is the world in which ordinary people live, as I put it, which is different from the system, the government system, the economic system. It involves people's values, it involves their relationships to each other and it involves sort of the word I would use is socialization. How young people are brought up in a new society. Because during the trouble, young people were living in a sort of very violent but also exciting society. I've spoken to young people. It was quite exciting to see riots going on and to be able to go out and throw stones at the police and petrol bombs. There was a buzz to it. And for a while after the peace process, there was this phenomenon called “recreational rioting”. So literally, using social media, a group of, say, a gang of Protestants would contact a gang of Catholics and say: “Friday night, can we meet at 10 o' clock? And have a riot?”

IE: Beat up each other

TC: Yeah, when I was young I used to play cowboys and Indians. It's like the thing. And they would. And they were..

IE: But they weren't hurting each other. Right? I mean it's…

TC: Well, they could have. Yeah, they would been fighting and they would not serious hurting but you know, they would be throwing stones at each other and getting into sort of fisticuffs. But it was just what… What young men like to do sometimes, you know.

IE: Manhood.

TC: Exactly. Proving that they're heroes. Interesting, you were saying, you know: “why do people come over?” I just recently organized a study trip for a group of people from the Ukraine because again, a bit like yourself, they see Northern Ireland as a post conflict society. And it's very interesting and yet not surprising because we were doing the same. They are thinking ahead about when the war with Russia is over, how do we put our society back together again? Because it has a really damaging effect on the fabric of society.

They're saying there are people coming back from the front in the war and they're committing crimes. And I understand that after the wars in Afghanistan, in Iraq, I remember reading research to say that something like 20- 25% of the prison population in England were veterans because they can't cope. They've been living in this sort of violent battle rage with comrades and support and now they are discharged back to civilian life. And they don't know how to cope. They don't know who they are. So you get high levels of domestic violence, a lot of of addiction, alcoholism, just to deal with the trauma of what they've been through. And that can be destabilizing for a community.

That Ukraine were looking at these issues and I took them to visit the community based restorative justice projects which they were, you know, impressed with as a way of a community trying to stabilize itself and trying to improve relations and also to help young people grow up without this sort of glamorization of as you sort of say, manhood and violence. Probably their fathers never told them the truth about how horrible it is and how traumatizing it is. You know, it's not a great lifestyle.

I was working with this community based project in the Falls Road, a Republican area in Belfast. They were saying increasingly they're getting ex combatants coming in saying “I can't cope anymore”. Now this is 20 odd years after the peace process, probably 30 years since they were involved in violence. But we sort of forget that combatants can be traumatized by what they've done or what they've seen, not just what has happened to them. You know, and some of them, you know, are having flashbacks and nightmares and.. and they're, you know, using alcohol or drugs to deal with it and their life is sort of falling apart. So, one of the things I would be saying is in terms of reintegration is there needs to be a sort of organized and well thought out way of helping people with the, the post conflict trauma. Because you can sort of sit in a bar with your comrades and talk about, you know, the war and everything and you get support and you can have a laugh. But slowly, you feel more and more isolated. That doesn't work anymore. You know, you've got to, there's something deeper that's going on inside you. So there's that. That's not necessarily restorative. I mean, they are trying to restore themselves, but it's not necessarily restorative justice. These restorative projects in local communities are increasingly working with veterans with their mental health, the community based things. They've become really quite professional projects and will deal with things like sort of polarization. We, like the rest of Britain, are getting caught up in this sort of anti-immigrant and so community based restorative projects are trying to reduce that polarization. They're not making it political, they're just saying there's harm going on on both sides and we need to be involved in trying to resolve that and restore some sort of peaceful way of living together.

IE: This is despite the fact that Northern Ireland has much, much less immigration than other parts of Britain.

TC: It's the lowest level of immigration and yet, there are elements that feel insecure about that now. There are political elements that are stirring it up, there's no doubt. But young men who are feeling, “oh, I don't have a decent job, you know, nobody respects me”, you know, they get a thrill out of game. “Let's have a riot against the immigrants, let's go and burn a house down”. My research now, this was some time ago into young men and violence. I found that their ideology was very thin. It was 70%, wanting the excitement of a riot rather than really thinking they're involved in some sort of political struggle and just enjoying being able to hate another group of people in society and blaming them for everything that goes wrong. So I think community based restorative justice can help with those sort of things.

I did some work with prisoners. There was an amnesty just after the peace agreement. I was working at Ulster University and we were approached by the government to see if we could engage with political prisoners because they had traditionally always refused to engage in sort of rehabilitation or education programs because they didn't consider themselves to be ordinary criminals. Now at that stage, the Republicans were protesting so they didn't want to see us. But we went to the Loyalist part of the prison. We spoke to the, the group of them and then did one to one interviews. And so, twelve signed up for this. And the program was really just not to try and de-radicalize or to rehabilitate but just to get them to talk about their experience because they were in prison for political violence and now, there was peace. What were they going to do when they got released? And so we talked about that and it was very, very interesting.

We adopted a restorative approach and asked classic sort of questions that you might, you know, like: “what do you consider to be your victims?” And they would say: “well, we don't have victims, we have enemies. We kill our enemies, they're not victims”. And then we say: “what do you consider your personal responsibility?” And they said: “Well, we don't have personal responsibility. We're part of an army. You know, I'm ordered by my commanding officer to go and kill somebody. It's not like I decide to do it. It's not like, it's personal. You know, you do it because you're part of a political struggle”. We worked with them for nearly two years, meeting them about once every two weeks in their cell block. And over that time they began to shift in their… Because they could see

IE: Narrative change?

TC: Yeah, their past political narrative wasn't relevant to the society they were going to go out to. And that was frustrating to them. But they used to talk about “we're going around in circles”. And gradually, then we said, “you know, what we've been doing is sort of a restorative process with you. Would you be interested in learning that?” So, we actually did with them our certificate course in restorative justice. And I think of those twelve, six completed it, when I say completed it, did the assignments and passed the certificate. The others did the course but didn't really want to do the hard work of writing essays and things like that. So it was interesting. And I mean, I would say there was a couple of them. Didn't make any difference to them. One guy left the prison and didn't go back to political violence, but he became a drug dealer.

IE: Wow.

TC: Yes. So I don't know if that's success. And that is one of the things that happened, particularly since the peace process,because actually the war kept a lot of drugs out of Northern Ireland. But once that was released, then we became just like any society. And some of the paramilitaries were thinking, well, we have international connections; we have guns; we have organization. We could shift our business from politics to drug business. And that's what's happened. Either actually dealing with the drugs or acting almost like in protection. They'll say to well known international or organized crime, we will protect you if you give us so much money.

IE: Commission.

TC: Yeah, commission. So it's become a bit gangster-ish. But that's only a minority. Most ex prisoners and ex combatants have gone back to sort of lawful life, although at some, as I said earlier, psychological damage. But these prisoners, you know, were very interesting. We got to know them very well. One night a year or two later, I was in Belfast. I was having a nice meal with some academic colleagues. I was walking back to my car to go home and I passed this group of people on the sort of sidewalk. It was a group of people handing out hot soup and sandwiches to the street homeless. And I was maybe 20 meters past when I heard sort of “hey”. And I turned around thinking, this will be a homeless person. I'm gonna see if I can give him some money. This guy ran up and said: “did you not recognize me, Tim?”. It was one of the ex-prisoners.

IE: Wow.

TC: Actually, one of the interesting prisoners because although he had terrible political viewpoints, from my point of view, he was open to learning. You know, he was so honest about his own views, but he was really listening to anything. And he just said: I've never really considered these issues. I wrote a chapter in a book and I called it chapter “No one has ever asked me these questions”. And that's a quote from him. He said: “Tim, I have grown up in the Shankill Road, which is a Protestant area, 50 years, and we never think about these issues. We never think of the questions you're asking us”. He said: “did you not recognize me?” And I said: “No, I didn't. I'm sorry”. He said: “Well, I've got out of prison, as you can see, I've got a job, I'm back with my family”. And he said: “You know, you used to talk about if you harm people, you need to do some reparations. Well, this is my reparation two or three nights. I come down late at night and we feed the homeless”. I said. “Wow, that's amazing”. And he said: “You'll understand this when I say it. I'm my own man now”. And what he was saying is, I'm no longer part of an organization that tells me to go out and kill people. I make my own choices, which was what we were trying to do. You can imagine how good I felt after that. So, I think restorative justice can have a role to play. It is not the solution to everything, but I think for a society that is readjusting after a period of violent conflict, it's a useful way to get people to think in a new way and to think it is better to talk than to kill each other.

IE: So you have been through this disarmament process and as you have mentioned, people have been out and we know that there's been an early release and even an amnesty, although it probably wasn't called an amnesty for those convicted of violent crime or terror crimes. Can you tell us what to expect from an amnesty? How can it help a peace process, especially when you consider the victims who have lost their families, their loved ones to that type of conflict?

TC: Yeah, this is we call this our legacy issues, the legacy of the conflict. And this has been the weakest part of our peace process. I find it very disappointing because it is about victims and we sort of pretend that we care about victims of violence, but actually, I'm not sure we do. We sort of pay lip service to it. But I find this generally in society. We're sort of sympathetic towards somebody who's been a victim but we don't have a lot of patience or time for them. This has been the big weakness. Firstly, there was early release of prisoners which was negotiated as part of the peace process and made sense because they had been in there because of the political struggle. And if peace was declared, then, why are we imprisoning them? If we have peace, they're not going to go back to war. And that proved true in 90% of the cases. Most of them were ordinary people who, for one reason or another, decided that they wanted to fight for Ireland or fight for Britain. Once that was resolved, then they had no reason to fight again. But a lot of people were not happy with it, and particularly victims.

IE: And we're not only talking about victims who have been victimized by the groups, but also by the government, I guess, government forces. Right?

TC: Exactly. I'll come back to that when we talk about amnesty. I was lucky. I went to many funerals during the conflict. Friends or sometimes, you know, a brother of a friend of mine. And you felt very sad. But do you know the difference between that and the grief of losing somebody who is close to you? I never experienced that. Nobody close to me was ever killed or badly injured. I knew many people that were killed, but. So I cannot put myself in that position. But there is no doubt those who were in that position felt betrayed by the early release of people who had killed their father or their son or their brother or their sister. But most people just thought, “Oh well, let's be pragmatic about it. This was necessary to appease the armed groups”.

Then, the next issue that came up was amnesty, for those who had never been brought to justice. Now this primarily was motivated by the government because they wanted to protect their personal armed services who had broken the law in the course of their duties. They had killed innocent civilians, they had made bad mistakes. So they were feeling politically, particularly for English people, they didn't want to see members of the British army being prosecuted for illegal acts. Certainly the last government was very sympathetic to that and decided to call an amnesty. Of course, what they discovered, legally you can't have an amnesty just for one part of the conflict that goes against human rights and various international statements of policy. So they had to declare an amnesty for everyone. So that meant that nobody was happy. All victims, whether you're a victim of the IRA, victim of the UVF or a victim of the British Army, you're feeling the person whose, you know, caused me such grief is not going to be brought to justice. Again, it was a pragmatic thing to do, but there wasn't a single political party in Northern Ireland that supported it. It was imposed on it by the British government. Now the Labour government is reviewing it. We're not sure what they're going to do, but they said they'll change this law. It's not been implemented yet.

IE: What do you mean if it hasn't been implemented?

TC: The arrangements that were to be set up there was to be a sort of truth recovery mechanisms. You know, a lot of people actually, because Northern Ireland's a very close knit society, a lot of people are pretty sure they know who killed their dad. And they may even see this person walking along the street

IE: Waiting for the bus in the same station?

TC: Exactly. Because there is never been sufficient evidence to prosecute. Or now with a peace process, there's insufficient motivation to go after people who committed crimes 30- 40 years ago. But for the victim, it's still alive in their heart. So nobody supported it. Not politically and openly. I think probably there were some paramilitary organizations were glad that there was going to be an amnesty. But it's one of the recurring themes that is very relevant to restorative justice in that if you're involved in restorative justice, you realize how much victims are actually marginalized by politics. You know, every politician will claim sympathy for victims, but there's very little political action that improves victims’ situation. And the criminal justice system really is only concerned with the perpetrator rather than the victim. And that unfortunately, has happened here, that 27 years after the peace process, victims have still not been really attended to in Northern Ireland. And I think that's just a reality of politics and I think it's shameful. So that is the danger of amnesty and early prisoner release. I think, particularly amnesty, if somebody has never been brought to justice. There was an idea that we would bring people to justice, but they were only maybe serve like two years, even if there was a token justice. And you might have got some victims who would have gone along with that. But it's just a very unsatisfactory situation now for victims. And that is the legacy that we haven't really grasped. And I think a lot of politicians are saying a lot of these victims are going to die soon anyway. So let's just let time take its course. You know, that's the cynical way of looking at it. I don't know if they actually do think that, but that's what people think.

Political action doesn't understand those sort of psychological and social effects of conflict. They do their job. We need a political settlement. We've got peace. We're not killing each other. But there's a lot of legacy issues, a lot of things that are unfinished business that continue to disturb society. And we have terrible levels of mental illness in Northern Ireland. In Britain, we have the highest level of prescribed drugs for mental illness. And there's an intergenerational effect, too. So it takes a long time, if you've gone through a lot of violence, to recover as a society, never mind as an individual.

IE: Let us come to best practices in reintegration, some of which you have mentioned. I guess they have found their own way only after they have been introduced to restorative justice, like this guy distributing soup. Any other ideas that you can recommend for these people to find a place in society?

TC: The sort of things that happened is most of the armed groups set up their own sort of support services. And I think that's very useful. You know, what I have discovered is that if you've been in a conflict, it's very difficult to talk about it to people who haven't been in that conflict. In fact, I had an interesting experience. Wasn't long after the peace process. I was at.. lecturing at Ulster University and I was teaching a restorative course. And in that restorative course, there were both militant Republicans and militant Loyalists and police officers.

IE: Wow.

TC: Sitting in a circle, learning about restorative justice. And it was coming up to Christmas, and I said: “After the lecture, who'd like to go for a Christmas drink? There's a nice pub near the university”. So we went in and we had a little side room, we had a few drinks, and as we had a few more drinks, everybody became less inhibited. What I noticed was that former enemies, Republican, Loyalists and Police, talked to each other in a much more relaxed way than the rest of us because they'd been through the same thing. Even though they were enemies, they understood the horror and everything about being in conflict and losing your friends and. And they started singing each other songs as they had a few more drinks. This, I think, is a common phenomenon, that it's necessary to be with people who've had the same experience in order to sort of talk about it. It's more difficult to explain things to people who have not had that experience. So I think that's a positive thing.

Now, the negative side of that is if you're in getting support from a group of partiers at PKK or whatever, and I've had conversations with X, sometimes I think that whole war was a waste of time. We just killed each other and what did we get? What was achieved by it? It's very hard to have that sort of conversation. “You're being disloyal to the cause” and say that “you've got to show solidarity”. And yet for some human beings, they need to say, I really do have my doubts about the struggle or our strategy or the people that we killed that we really shouldn't have killed, or the people who in our community that were killed, who shouldn't have been, you know. So I think there needs to be another outlet for people. There should be services set up.

There's a great Irish legend that I sometimes tell to young men. I'll tell you very quickly, just the short version. It's about Chulainn, who was a hero of Ulster, which is the province I'm in. There's four provinces of Ireland. Northern Ireland is in the province of Ulster. And Chullain was a young boy, but even when he was very young; very strong; very aggressive; very good at sport. And anyway, he was told he was sitting in the school and the Druids, as they were called, were telling them that it is written that today is an auspicious day. Anyone who goes and fights for Ulster will be remembered for all time. So Chullain says: “Right, I'm gonna go”. And he goes to the king, and the king gives him a chariot and some armor and sword and spears. And off he goes to fight these two enemies of Ulster who've never been defeated. And he cuts off their heads, puts them on the spears of the chariot, really riled up, battle rage. And he's galloping back on the chariot to his home, and they can see he's in this rage. And the king sends the women out. This is where it gets a little bit rude. He asks the women to expose their breasts. And this confuses Chullain. And when he's confused, then the men jump on him because they knew he needed to be taken by surprise. And the men jump on him and they have this big barrel, big vat of iced water. So they put him into the vat, and the water immediately with his rage begins to boil. So they have to put him in another one. It's only in the third vat that he cools down. And then he's taken to the court and honored as a hero. When I tell that to young men, they immediately get it that after a battle you need some process to cool down in order to re-enter society. If you go straight from this or being in a war back to society, there's still a violence in you. There's still a rage that's hard to put aside. So I think society needs to provide opportunities for young men or older men to be able to cool down after a war and reintegrate into society. So I think there can be prisoners or ex prisoners organizations, ex armed, ex combatants, veterans organizations that can be very useful. Now there may be specialists, sort of trauma counseling that should be offered. And then, you know, more pertinently, just jobs to get people back into work. A lot of ex prisoners studied restorative justice and became restorative practitioners. But that doesn't cover everybody. That's just a minority. Many of them, that they want to give something back to society. They'll never admit, maybe guilt, but they do know that they've been through something that's been quite destructive. So a bit like my friend John, who works for the homeless, they often get involved in sort of community work, social work, that sort of thing. Restorative circles or healing circles could be facilitated by ex combatants where people just get a chance to talk. You know, my practice at the moment is with people who've been abused by the Catholic Church, by priests, and we have healing circles. And when I talk to them, they say it's great to be in a room with people who've been through the same thing that you don't have to explain.

IE: Yeah.

TC: And that's a bit like what I was talking about, that even sometimes ex enemies can talk easier than to their own community about conflict. We find these people who were victims of when they were children of abuse by Catholic priests. We have them in a circle and they can feel much more relaxed, much safer with people who've been through the same things. And they just find that so, you know, healing is the only word I can think that they can sort of release and talk about things that maybe they couldn't talk to other people in the community about. Again, I would really recommend it, but I'm not sure we're doing that much.

IE: I guess structures, laws, political issues are very much under scrutiny. And it's probably a little bit up to restorative justice practitioners or victims’ rights movements, if you will, to stress the need for that type of activities or just to point out to the need.

TC: I think so, because the modern politics is about reform, reform of governance, reform of the criminal justice system, human rights, et cetera. All very necessary, but it neglects the sort of relational and cultural things. I mean, I suspect, knowing nothing about this, that in Kurdish society and in Turkish society there are traditional ways. I think I would go there, I would explore that. What were the traditional ways of talking about hurt, harm, conflict that will tell us those indigenous things that were pre modern society

IE: Before all these institutions have taken away their conflict from them.

TC: Exactly. I mean, that's a sort of very restorative idea, you know, and I know nothing about that. But I suspect there are things that are to be learned from

IE: yes, yes.

TC: traditional Turkish or Kurdish and they may be similar, I don't know. How society heals as well as how does the law, how does the government create peace or at least the cessation of violence, if not peace.

IE: Thank you.

TC: It's been a pleasure.

IE: It's been a pleasure for me too.

In this episode, my guest was Tim Chapman. He had a lengthy career in the Probation Service in Northern Ireland, rising to a senior management position. He spent ten years as a lecturer and course director of the Master's Program in Restorative Practices at the University of Ulster. He now teaches as a visiting professor at the University of Sassari in Italy and at the University of Strathclyde. He also offers training, research and consultancy in restorative justice. He has conducted training in restorative justice theory and practices from foundation level to specialist training throughout the world. Tim has published widely Ineffective Probation Practice, Youth Justice, and Restorative Justice. He's currently writing a book based upon his research into victims experience of restorative justice and has completed research into the oral histories of victims of clerical child sexual abuse.

He has been a board member and chair of the European Forum for Restorative Justice. Tim has developed, designed and co-facilitated training courses with women who have lived the experience of restorative justice and sexual violence and domestic abuse. He continues to practice and is leading a major restorative justice program addressing institutional sexual abuse.

So that's it for now. Please contact me if you want me to address a conflict subject that I have not yet covered here, or know a conflict resolution specialist who does something that may be of interest for conflict resolution practitioners. As always, I would like to conclude by saying please follow this podcast its website, which is www.wecanfindaway.com. The website contains a transcription of the episode. Please like it, share it and also please like the excerpts I share in the Instagram account of We Can Find a way in LinkedIn or Bluesky. We Can Find a Way is in many platforms including YouTube, Apple and Spotify. As always, I'd like to close by thanking musician Imre Hadi and artist Zeren Goktan who allowed me to use their music and photograph in the podcast. Thank you and hope to meet you in the next episode in October.