Reconciliation Efforts Recognized
Belfast Award to Dunfey Family
You will meet those who are working to come to grips with destructive energies, as they attempt to turn them towards creativity-even if in doing so their own hands sometimes get burnt. ...Most of those people have ancestral origins in Ireland, North and South, and have contributed mightily to building peace and reconciliation... We salute you all.
On the occasion of the visit of delegates from the Worldwide Ireland Funds Conference to Belfast, the Dunfey family was honored by the communities of Belfast in recognition of their contribution to peace and to the Ireland Funds. In his remarks at Belfast City Hall, Jackie Redpath, chief executive of the Greater Shankill Partnership in Belfast, expressed heartfelt gratitude in honoring the Dunfey family for their years of community support and personal involvement with reconciliation in Northern Ireland.
"Their children rediscovered their roots and from the early 1970s they have re-engaged with the island of their origins. We here from Belfast, who have come to know and love them, have been enhanced in our search for peace by their unswerving support, friendship and guidance.
We looked for something to sum up their achievements in Northern Ireland. It was quoted at Robert Kennedy's funeral, w hich we know will have a particular piquance for the family. 'A man (or a family) does not show his greatness by being at one extremity but rather by touching both at once.' The Dunfey family has done just that, whether geographically from Ballyferriter to Belfast; politically across the whole spectrum of parties; or community-wise from the Shankill to the Falls."
Baroness May Blood, Greater Shankill Partnership, and Martin O'Brien, Committee on the Administration of Justice, presented the Dunfey family with a specially commissioned globe of the world in Waterford crystal, which was placed in the Heritage Museum in Ballyferriter, County Kerry, origin of the Dunfey familyís roots. Accepting the award, Jack and Bob Dunfey remarked, "It is an honor and privilege to continue paving the path to peace with all of the good people of Northern Ireland."