Never a stranger to Northern Ireland over the last 30 years, former US Senator George Mitchell, who led the Good Friday Agreement negotiations, came to Belfast on Wednesday to pass the torch on to a new generation.
“A handful of hopefuls can create change. Hope then meets hope, and that hope creates an overwhelming wave,” the statesman told hundreds of young people gathered in the Whitla Hall in Queen’s University Belfast.
The students had been brought together from schools across Northern Ireland and in the Republic by Narrative 4 and Politics in Action, which run programmes in schools to encourage young people to be active citizens.
Still mentally as sharp as ever, the 91-year-old Mitchell, once the Majority Leader of the United States Senate during much of the presidency of Bill Clinton, has coped with a variety of illnesses over recent years and is now in reflective mood.
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“My life has been shaped by my experience here, the difficulties, the sorrows, the tensions, and the joys. There are certain inalienable truths. One of them is the march of time,” he told an audience for whom the future is still unwritten.
“I have been among the lucky ones. It has been said that a long life isn’t good enough, but a good life is long enough. I’ve been blessed with both a good and a long life,” said the former Maine senator.
Speaking at a dinner in Hillsborough Castle on Monday, Mitchell saw hope, not pessimism, in the future, having heard one student, Chloe Martin from Fanad, Co Donegal, spell out her hopes and dreams for the future.
“If you are a representative of all of the young people of this island, North and South, then we are all going to be in much safer hands than we think,” the American statesman told Ms Martin.
Unlike the students in the Whitla Hall, the majority of Mitchell’s story has been written, but he shared the lessons learned, particularly “the belief that nothing is insurmountable, given the will of the human spirit to believe in the possibility of one another.
“Ideas once considered outrageous or extreme soon become the bread of our days,” he said, noting the decades where people in Northern Ireland “believed that peace was not possible”.
In a time of cynicism about politics, Mitchell told his young charges to believe in the power of politics to change: “Here, I met, worked with, and was inspired by some great men and women.
“They were flawed, as we all are. They made mistakes, as we all do. But when faced with the greatest challenge of their lives, they rose to greatness themselves. It was the honour of my life to be part of their efforts,” he said.
Urging young people to be involved deeply in the society in which they live, Mitchell warned that the peace so hard won in 1998 must be protected and that change, if change there be, should be gradual, not dramatic.
“A contemplation of the future must occur. We must think about where we are going and how we will get there. Done well, the results will light up the world. Done poorly, a darkness could plunge down again,” he said.
“The work is constantly unfinished. We must acknowledge the past, but not become beholden to it. It is our job to be continually new in the process of peace.”
Like most of those in the Whitla Hall, West Belfast poet Zara Meadows, a Protestant born off the Shankill Road, was not alive when Mitchell laboured for so many years in Stormont Buildings a few miles away.
“Myself, and all of my friends, were not born for that event, and I think a lot of us wait to see a lot of the benefits from it,” Meadows said, before reading some of her poetry to the gathering.
