Mairead Maguire co-founded, with Betty Williams and Ciaran McKeown, the Women for Peace, which later became the Community for Peace People, an organization dedicated to encouraging a peaceful resolution of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
59 Facts About Mairead Maguire
2.
Mairead Maguire attended St Vincent's Primary School, a private Catholic school, until the age of 14, at which time her family could no longer pay for her schooling.
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Mairead Maguire volunteered regularly with the Legion of Mary, spending her evenings and weekends working with children and visiting inmates at Long Kesh prison.
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Mairead Maguire told The Progressive in 2013 that her early Catholic heroes included Dorothy Day and the Berrigan brothers.
5.
Mairead Maguire became active with the Northern Ireland peace movement after three children of her sister, Anne Mairead Maguire, were run over and killed by a car driven by Danny Lennon, a Provisional Irish Republican Army fugitive who had been fatally shot by British troops while trying to make a getaway.
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Joanne and Andrew died at the scene; John Mairead Maguire succumbed to his injuries at a hospital the following day.
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In contrast with the prevailing climate at the time, Mairead Maguire was convinced that the most effective way to end the violence was not through violence but through re-education.
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In 1981 Mairead Maguire co-founded the Committee on the Administration of Justice, a nonsectarian organisation dedicated to defending human rights.
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Mairead Maguire is a member of the anti-abortion group Consistent Life Ethic, which is against abortion, capital punishment and euthanasia.
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Mairead Maguire has been involved in a number of campaigns on behalf of political prisoners around the world.
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Mairead Maguire was a first signatory on a 2008 petition calling on Turkey to end its torture of Kurdish leader Abdullah Ocalan.
12.
Mairead Maguire was selected in 2003 to serve on the honorary board of the International Coalition for the Decade, a coalition of national and international groups, presided over by Christian Renoux, whose aim was to promote the United Nations' 1998 vision of the first decade of the twenty-first century as the International Decade for the Promotion of a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence for the Children of the World.
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In 2006, Mairead Maguire was one of the founders of the Nobel Women's Initiative along with fellow Peace Prize laureates Betty Williams, Shirin Ebadi, Wangari Maathai, Jody Williams, and Rigoberta Menchu Tum.
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Mairead Maguire supported the Occupy movement and has described WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange as "very courageous".
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Mairead Maguire has earned a degree from the Irish School of Ecumenics at Trinity College Dublin.
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Mairead Maguire works with various interchurch and interfaith organizations and is a councilor with the International Peace Council.
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Mairead Maguire is a Patron of the Methodist Theological College, and of the Northern Ireland Council for Integrated Education.
18.
Mairead Maguire is an outspoken critic of US and British policy in the Middle East, particularly in Iraq and Afghanistan.
19.
Mairead Maguire has been personally critical of US President Barack Obama's leadership.
20.
Mairead Maguire said in a 2013 interview that ever since her 40-day fast and arrest outside the White House in 2003, "whenever I now come into America, I'm always questioned as to what my background is".
21.
In 2015, Mairead Maguire spoke with Democracy Now in a sit-down interview titled, "No to Violence, Yes to Dialogue", which included two other Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, Jody Williams and Leymah Gbowee.
22.
Mairead Maguire discussed the desire "to end militarism and war, and to build peace and international law and human rights and democracy".
23.
On 17 March 2003, St Patrick's Day, Mairead Maguire protested the war outside the United Nations Headquarters with, among other activists, Frida Berrigan.
24.
Around this time, Mairead Maguire held a 30-day vigil and began a 40-day liquid fast outside the White House, joined by members of Pax Christi USA and Christian church leaders.
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Mairead Maguire expressed disappointment with the selection of US President Barack Obama as winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
26.
Mairead Maguire condemned what she considered Obama's deliberate refusal to meet with the Dalai Lama, calling it "horrifying".
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Mairead Maguire came then as part of an interfaith initiative seeking forgiveness from Jews for years of persecution by Christians in Jesus' name.
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Mairead Maguire's second visit was in June 2000, this time in response to invitations from Rabbis for Human Rights and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.
29.
Mairead Maguire has at times been fiercely critical of the State of Israel, even calling for its membership in the United Nations to be revoked or suspended.
30.
Concomitantly, Mairead Maguire has said that she loves Israel and that "to live in Israel for Jewish people, is to live in fear of suicide bombs and Kassam rockets".
31.
Mairead Maguire has been a vocal supporter of Mordechai Vanunu, a former Israeli nuclear technician who revealed details of Israel's nuclear defence program to the British press in 1986 and subsequently served 18 years in prison for treason.
32.
Mairead Maguire flew to Israel in April 2004 to greet Vanunu upon his release and has since flown to meet with him in Israel on several occasions.
33.
At a joint press conference with Mordechai Vanunu in Jerusalem in December 2004, Mairead Maguire compared Israel's nuclear weapons to the Nazi gas chambers in Auschwitz.
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In January 2006, close to Holocaust Memorial Day, Mairead Maguire asked that Mordechai Vanunu be remembered together with the Jews that perished in the Holocaust.
35.
Mairead Maguire firmly denied comparing Israel to Nazi Germany in an interview with Tal Schneider of Lady Globes in November 2010.
36.
On 20 April 2007, Mairead Maguire participated in a protest against the construction of Israel's separation barrier outside the Palestinian village of Bil'in.
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Mairead Maguire was reported to have inhaled large quantities of tear gas.
38.
In October 2008, Mairead Maguire arrived in Gaza aboard the SS Dignity.
39.
In March 2009, Mairead Maguire joined a campaign for the immediate and unconditional removal of Hamas from the European Union list of proscribed terrorist organisations.
40.
On 30 June 2009, Mairead Maguire was taken into custody by the Israeli military along with twenty others, including former US Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney.
41.
Mairead Maguire was on board a small ferry, the MV Spirit of Humanity, said to be carrying humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, when Israel intercepted the vessel off the coast of Gaza.
42.
Mairead Maguire further said that "the tragedy is that the American government, the UN and Europe, they remain silent in the face of the abuse of Palestinian human rights, like freedom, and it's really tragic".
43.
On 28 September 2010, Mairead Maguire landed in Israel as part of a delegation of the Nobel Women's Initiative.
44.
Mairead Maguire was refused an entry visa by Israeli authorities on the grounds that she had twice in the past tried to run Israel's naval embargo of the Gaza Strip and that a 10-year exclusion order was in effect against her.
45.
Mairead Maguire fought her deportation with the help of Adalah, an NGO devoted to the rights of Palestinians in Israel.
46.
At one point during the hearing, Mairead Maguire reportedly spoke up, saying that Israel must stop "its apartheid policy and the siege on Gaza".
47.
Corrigan-Mairead Maguire was deported on a flight to the UK the following morning, 5 October 2010.
48.
Mairead Maguire pointed out that on her 2008 Gaza trip she had been invited to speak "to the Hamas parliament".
49.
In March 2014, Mairead Maguire tried to arrive to Gaza through Egypt, as a part of activist delegation which included the American anti-war activist Medea Benjamin.
50.
In 2016, Mairead Maguire attempted to break Israel's naval blockade of the Gaza Strip along with 13 other activists on board the Women's Boat to Gaza, until they were stopped by the Israeli Navy approximately 40 miles offshore.
51.
Mairead Maguire complained that she and the activists were "arrested, kidnapped, illegally, in international waters and taken against our wishes to Israel".
52.
Mairead Maguire has more than once suggested that Palestinians are more interested in peace than the Israeli government.
53.
Mairead Maguire is a proponent of the belief that violence is a disease that humans develop but are not born with.
54.
Mairead Maguire believes humankind is moving away from a mindset of violence and war and evolving to a higher consciousness of nonviolence and love.
55.
Mairead Maguire has written a book, The Vision of Peace: Faith and Hope in Northern Ireland.
56.
Mairead Maguire has received numerous awards and honours in recognition of her work.
57.
In 1998 Mairead Maguire received an honorary degree from Regis University, a Jesuit institution in Denver, Colorado.
58.
Mairead Maguire was presented with the Science and Peace Gold Medal by the Albert Schweitzer International University in 2006, for meaningfully contributing to the spread of culture and the defence of world peace.
59.
Eliaz Luf, the deputy head of the Israeli foreign mission to Canada, has argued that Mairead Maguire's activism plays into the hands of Hamas and other terrorist organisations in Gaza.