Why we exist

The violence ended. The division didn’t.

In 1976, Wilmington was paying attention to Northern Ireland. The Troubles — the long conflict between Catholic and Protestant communities — were at their height, and in towns like Belfast, Portadown, and Derry the two communities increasingly lived separate lives: separate schools, separate neighborhoods, separate churches, separate sports. It was the kind of crisis that most people watched from a distance and felt helpless about.

Charles and Josephine Robinson didn’t watch from a distance. Charles was a founding member of Pacem in Terris — Latin for Peace on Earth — an interfaith peace organization founded in Wilmington in 1967 by clergy and community leaders who believed that local people had a responsibility to work on global problems. In 1976, Pacem in Terris partnered with Canon Kerry Waterstone of the Church of Ireland to bring the Ulster Project to Delaware. The idea was simple and ambitious at the same time: take twenty teenagers from Northern Ireland — ten Catholic, ten Protestant — and pair them with Wilmington teens for a month. Put them in the same houses, the same cars, the same service projects. Let the distance collapse on its own.

An alum of that very first project, fifty years ago, told us their group came to the airport in the middle of the night — tensions at home were that high.

It worked. That first summer, twenty Northern Irish teens came to Wilmington, were matched with local families, and went home having made friends across a line that, back home, you did not cross. Trust and peace broke out, one teen friendship at a time. The Robinsons and Pacem in Terris had answered a question that most people weren’t even asking: what can one city do?

Delaware has been answering it every July since.

Ulster Project Delaware is now the oldest continuously running Ulster Project in the United States. Since 1976, more than 710 Northern Irish teenagers and 136 adult leaders have made the trip from Portadown, Banbridge, and Coleraine to spend a July in Delaware. Nearly 1,500 teens in total — on both sides of the Atlantic — have been through the program.

The Good Friday Agreement ended the violence in 1998. It didn’t end the division. Peace isn’t only the absence of conflict — it’s whether neighbors actually know each other, and in Northern Ireland most still don’t. Only about 8% of children attend integrated schools; the rest go to schools that are almost entirely Catholic or almost entirely Protestant. Nine in ten people in social housing live in communities divided along the same line. A teenager can turn sixteen having never had a real conversation with someone from the other community — not out of hostility, just distance nobody built a bridge across.

That’s the gap this project still closes, and it closes in the least dramatic way imaginable — two fifteen-year-olds sharing a bathroom for four weeks, arguing about music, taking turns on dishes. Peace agreements get signed by governments. The habit of trusting someone you were raised to be wary of has to be learned by people, one at a time, young enough for it to hold.

Half a century later the work isn't winding down. Between a generation that has no memory of the Troubles and neighborhoods still divided street by street, the Ulster Project spurs peacebuilding more than ever.

Fifty Julys on, we still need exactly one thing to make it happen.