BELFAST (HRNW) – Twenty-nine women from political and civic society were honoured on Monday at an event to mark 25 years of Northern Ireland’s Good Friday Agreement that former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said would not have been possible without them.
Clinton, the chancellor of Queen’s University Belfast who in her time as Secretary of State worked with the political parties in implementing the deal, praised the recipients of medals and honorary degrees as “determined, unstoppable forces for peace”.
They included the late Mo Mowlam – Britain’s first female minister for the region who played a key role in the talks while being treated for a brain tumour – and the founders of Northern Ireland
Women’s Coalition, who formed their own political party in 1996 in order to participate in the peace negotiations.
“A quarter century of bloodshed and strife and millennia of embedded sexism had discouraged most women from being in politics, from being in the arena, but not them,” Clinton said opening the conference where current and former Irish, British and EU leaders will speak over the coming three days.