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President Obama acknowledged “wounds that haven’t healed" but mostly praised Northern Ireland on Monday in Belfast.
BELFAST, Northern Ireland — President Obama on Monday opened a three-day diplomatic trip to Northern Ireland and Germany not with other world leaders but with young residents of this formerly strife-torn city, urging them to build on the peace that America helped broker 15 years ago.
“For you are the first generation in this land to inherit more than just the and the bitter prejudices of the past. You are the inheritors of a just and hard-earned peace,” Mr. Obama told his audience of more than 2,000 people, many of them teenage students in school uniforms who stood for hours in a chilly morning drizzle to get through security checkpoints into the Waterfront Hall convention center.
Not so long ago, he added, “There was a time people couldn’t have imagined Northern Ireland hosting a gathering of world leaders, as you are today.”
After the address, Mr. Obama planned to head to the Lough Erne golf resort at Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, for the start of the annual meeting of the Group of 8 industrialized nations. There, talk of the war in Syria was expected to dominate the economic and security agenda, as well as a separate meeting on Monday between Mr. Obama and President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, which, unlike other Group of 8 nations, backs Syrian ruler Bashar al-Assad.
But his first stop after arriving with his wife Michelle and daughters Malia and Sasha was Belfast, the capital of Northern Ireland.
Most of those in his audience were young children when the Good Friday Agreement, signed here in April 1998 and approved by voters the following month, brought an uneasy peace after years of armed conflict between Protestants who wanted to maintain Northern Ireland’s union with Britain and Catholics who wanted to join the Republic of Ireland to the south.
Mr. Obama acknowledged there are still “wounds that haven’t healed, and communities where tensions and mistrust hangs in the air.” But mostly he hailed the normalcy in Belfast and the economic growth, despite Europe’s recent hard times, that was evident in the new high rises and developments visible from the glass-walled convention center.
“These daily moments of life in a bustling city and changing country may seem ordinary to you now, which is what makes them so extraordinary,” he told them. “For that is what your parents and grandparents dreamt for you — to travel without the burden of checkpoints or roadblocks or seeing soldiers on patrol. To enjoy a sunny day free from the ever-present awareness that violence could blacken it at any moment. To befriend or fall in love with whomever you want.”
“Understand how extraordinary that is,” he urged them. “For years, few conflicts in the world seemed more intractable, and the world rejoiced in your achievement — especially in America.” The island’s example is a “blueprint” for the world’s other regions of conflict, he said.
With his own domestic politics in mind, Mr. Obama praised Northern Ireland’s Catholic and Protestant leaders, a number of whom packed a balcony, for their power sharing — “as someone who knows firsthand how politics can encourage division and discourage cooperation.” But, he told his young listeners, it is average citizens like themselves who ensure the peace.
“Whether you are a good neighbor to someone from the other side of past battles – that’s up to you. Whether you treat them with the dignity and respect they deserve — that’s up to you. Whether you let your kids play with kids who attend a different church – that’s your decision,” he said. “The terms of peace may be negotiated by political leaders, but the fate of peace is up to each of us.”
And, he added, “the United States of America will support you every step of the way.”
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