Tough women's fight for peace in Northern Ireland

The civil rights movement was just beginning in Northern Ireland when Gemma McCartney was a toddler.

At 41, she is the oldest of the battling McCartney sisters who, over the past five weeks, have revolutionised Republican politics by demanding that the IRA men who murdered their brother Robert in January be brought to justice.

The five sisters' calm faces and their sensible pronouncements since 33-year-old Robert, a forklift truck driver, was knifed to death outside a music pub in Belfast city centre, have turned a beam of common-sense light into the murky and ambiguous shadows of Republicanism in Northern Ireland.

Gemma, Paula, Donna, Catherine and Claire are asking questions that have been unasked for 40 years and go to the heart of the arguments behind the violence of Irish Republican politics.

Not for them the IRA's desperate offer to shoot those involved - an offer that reinforced the notion of an organisation in a PR tailspin.

For the first time Sinn Fein, the IRA's political arm, has been forced to accept that Catholics have a right to use the police and court system of Northern Ireland to achieve justice.

All five sisters, together with Bridgeen Hagan, mother of Robert's two children, have already been to Dublin to appear at the Sinn Fein annual conference as its leader Gerry Adams' guests and to meet Irish political leaders in the Dail.

Next week they will travel to Washington to be President George W. Bush's guests at the St Patrick's Day reception that has become an annual meeting place for the movers and shakers of Irish politics, Catholic and Protestant.

Peace talks are always held under the cover of the celebrations, which allow Protestant and Catholic politicians to meet on neutral territory.

This year the sisters will usurp a place in the reception line-up that Adams has jealously guarded for a decade.

When the peace process broke down in December over Unionist anger at the IRA's failure to decommission its weapons in public, Sinn Fein was on the verge of agreeing to talks that might have led it to choose members of the Northern Ireland Police Authority. But the party still had a long and difficult way to go.

It still refuses to encourage young Catholics to join the police. This week it handed over the names of those suspected of killing Robert McCartney to the Police Ombudsman, Nuala O'Lone, knowing she would pass them on.

It is a dramatic shift for an organisation that still believes the Northern Ireland Police Service is predominantly a Protestant force, instinctively hostile to the Catholic community.

The sisters are part of a long tradition of tough women who have altered the face of Irish politics - the best-known internationally are the two Nobel Peace Prize-winning "Peace Women", Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams.

The difference between the McCartney sisters and Corrigan and Williams is that they appear able to take the IRA and Sinn Fein on inside their citadels, in no small part because they are instinctive Sinn Fein supporters. They spent five hours talking to IRA men last week - because they already knew them and could talk to them on their own terms.

Corrigan was from the Catholic community, but was a Catholic fundamentalist, and Williams was a Protestant. Both were apolitical.

The McCartney sisters are part of the Republican movement and their brother's death was, indisputably, at the hands of IRA members. Corrigan and Williams led their peace marches in the 1970s after Corrigan's sister Anne's three children were killed when an IRA man, being fired on by British soldiers, crashed his getaway car into them. In the Republican community many blamed the British Army for the deaths.

The McCartney sisters epitomise much that has happened in working-class Catholic Northern Ireland since the civil rights marches of the late 1960s and the dramatic improvement in Catholic education and opportunity that has resulted from the ensuing greater equality between Catholics and Protestants.

Their accents reflect their upbringing in one of the most difficult of Belfast's many difficult areas.

Shorts' Strand is in the shadow of the Shorts' Brothers works in Belfast's docklands. Its inhabitants, however, were excluded from skilled work in the docks until 10 years ago.

It is a tiny area, crushed up against the east bank of the River Lagan at the end of the Newtonards Rd.

Its 3000 Catholic residents, traditional Sinn Fein voters, live under threat from the 60,000 working-class Protestants whose homes crowd down on them.

The headquarters of the Ulster Defence Association, the biggest of the Protestant paramilitary organisations, is only a few hundred metres beyond the so-called peace line - the brick wall that protects the Catholic community from Protestant attack. The big Catholic ghettos are west of the river.

The sisters have 20 children between them. With the exception of Catherine, who looks what she is - a politics and history teacher - they look like working-class women. But they were already on their way out of the ghetto before their brother's death.

Gemma, who has two children, is a nurse. Paula, 40, also a mother of two, is reading women's studies at Queen's University. Donna, 38, has four children and runs her own confectionery business, while Claire, 26, who has two children, is a classroom assistant. Catherine has four children.

The determination of the five to seek justice for their dead brother, refusing the summary justice at the point of a gun that local IRA leaders offered, has already forced fundamental change.

What else might they achieve, particularly if politicians back off from trying to hijack their popularity and turn it to their own ends?

The Peace Women suffered immeasurably when Roy Mason, then the British Northern Ireland Secretary, offered them his seal of approval.

Notably the McCartneys have so far evaded the attention of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Paul Murphy, the Northern Ireland Secretary, has damned the IRA offer to assassinate their brother's killers but has not met the sisters.

The five are well aware of the pitfalls. As Claire put it, "We are not naive. We know a lot of the political parties are backing us for their own agendas."

Their protests, which started with a rally in Shorts Strand, were not planned. With elections due in Britain and in Ireland soon, the McCartney effect is one to watch.