🌍 International Badass: Mairead Corrigan

Mairead Corrigan watched three of her sister's children get killed by a car in Belfast on August 10, 1976. The driver was an IRA member shot dead by British soldiers during a chase — his car, out of control, mounted the pavement and killed Anne Maguire's children: Joanne, aged eight, John, aged two, and Andrew, six weeks old. Anne survived. She never recovered. She died by suicide in 1980.

Mairead was at the scene. She watched it happen. And rather than let that atrocity calcify into one more entry in Northern Ireland's ledger of sectarian violence met with more sectarian violence, she did something the Troubles made genuinely dangerous: she organized across the line.

Within days she co-founded the Community of Peace People with journalist Ciaran McKeown and Betty Williams, a Protestant woman who had witnessed the crash. In a Northern Ireland carved into hard, violent, mutually hostile communities where crossing sectarian lines could get you killed by your own side, they organized joint Catholic-Protestant peace marches that drew tens of thousands of people — first in Belfast, then across Northern Ireland, then in Dublin and London. The marches were met with hostility from paramilitaries on both sides who correctly identified mass popular demand for peace as a threat to their operational relevance.

The IRA called them traitors. Loyalist paramilitaries threatened them. Elements of both communities who had organized their entire identities around the conflict treated ordinary people demanding an end to it as the enemy. Corrigan and Williams were physically attacked at some marches. They kept going. In 1976, both women were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — one of the fastest Nobel recognitions in the prize's history, awarded while the work was still actively happening and actively dangerous.

The Peace People movement didn't end the Troubles — that took until the Good Friday Agreement in 1998, another twenty-two years of death and negotiation. What Corrigan and Williams did was demonstrate, at a moment when the violence felt total and permanent, that there was a substantial population on both sides of the sectarian divide that wanted out of the cycle and was willing to say so publicly at personal risk. That demonstration matters. Movements need proof of concept. The Peace People were proof that ordinary people in Northern Ireland wanted something different badly enough to march for it through threats and violence.

Corrigan has continued working in conflict zones and peace initiatives internationally for decades since — visiting prisoners, opposing nuclear weapons, advocating for Palestinian rights, showing up in places where showing up costs something. She has never been particularly interested in the comfortable version of peace activism.

She stood at the wreckage of her sister's children and decided the answer was not more wreckage. In Belfast in 1976, that decision required more courage than most people will ever be asked for.

"Peace is not just the absence of war. It is the presence of justice."

This week's international badass buried three of her sister's children, then walked across every line Belfast had drawn in blood to demand an end to the drawing.