Documentary on tormented peacemaker will have Irish premiere at Film Fleadh

“Just as one alcoholic is in the best position to help another, one divided society is in the best position to help another,” remarks alcoholic and peacemaker Pádraig O’Malley, in The Peacemaker, a compelling documentary that will have its Irish premiere at next week’s Galway Film Fleadh.

Dublin-born Pádraig, who is Distinguished Professor of International Peace and Reconciliation at the University of Massachusetts Boston, emigrated to America in the early 1970s after winning a Fulbright scholarship to Harvard to study economics, which he hated.

Now in his mid-70s, he’s the subject of The Peacemaker, directed by American James Demo, which portrays a complex man who works compulsively for world peace while his own life seems tormented.

Central to Pádraig’s career has been The Plough and the Stars, the Boston pub where he once drank and which has helped fund his peacemaking work across the globe – it was where his involvement with conflict-resolution began, via his work for Northern Ireland.

In 1975, at the height of the Troubles Pádraig invited all the parties in the North to Boston to talk to each other. This documentary, made last year, features archives from the 1970s and interviews with people including Jeffrey Donaldson and the late Martin McGuinness about that ambitious event which, according to Pádraig, involved large quantities of alcohol and Valium.

“Drinking was almost a prerequisite” to working in Northern Ireland, he says. It helped him to bond with people on both sides and do deals in a way that he couldn’t have otherwise.

Later, in the 1990s, Pádraig lived in South Africa and became friends with Nelson Mandela. Despite his alcoholism, his placemaking work continued and he nurtured Mandela’s role in helping Northern Ireland’s various factions move towards the 1998 Good Friday Agreement.

These days, Pádraig doesn’t drink alcohol. But he’s totally work-obsessed and while visiting a doctor to discuss his fears about memory-loss, he reveals that he takes large doses of Clonazepam for the anxiety he develops when he isn’t working.

But he’s rarely idle and The Peacemaker follows him across continents as Pádraig visits conflict zones all around the world, in his ongoing campaign for peace.

A former girlfriend Marcia Murnihgnan helps organise his life back in Boston – theirs does not look like an equal relationship, and while she refers to his “fantastic, self-deprecating humour”, it’s not on display as he barks at her.  She does also remark that his obsession with the “dark side of human nature is a reflection of the inner turmoil he has lived with his whole life”.

For more, read this week’s Galway City Tribune.