House of Wisdom institute organizes a meeting entitled: “the Irish Experience and Evaluation for Forward Thinking Program 2018”
On 19th of December 2018, House of Wisdom for Consultation and Conflict Resolution hosted Mr. Richard Bullick, a former special adviser to the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland and an active member in restoring peace process in Northern Ireland, as an evaluator for Mr. Oliver’s program 2018, with the collaboration of Ms. Isabel, the project manager at Forward Thinking. The meeting witnessed the presence of a group of political elites.
In his speech, Richard went through the Irish experience and the lessons he learned, mentioning that what helped in the peace process was not the genius minds that we had, but that came after trying many solutions that showed that the first stage of consensus was to reach an agreement, which required a lot of work to keep it alive.
Thereafter, he shed the light on the lessons he learned from his experience and how we, as Palestinians, could benefit from those lessons. One of those lessons was the time factor, which he considered as important as the agreement itself. Other lessons he mentioned were the following: Avoiding problems is easier than solving them, reaching an agreement could be more challenging than the continued conflict and the big challenge is not negotiating with others but managing your people. He ended with the last lesson by saying: “the hardest way is that everybody should leave the table satisfied.”
A general discussion was open for questions and inquiries by political participants; some of them asserted what Mr. Richard said while the other part added some points that could be related to the Palestinian cause.
After that, he moved to the other part of the meeting, which was evaluating Mr. Oliver’s program. He then concentrated on the participants’ views who effectively and enthusiastically shared their opinions and evaluations regarding the project. They praised it and followed that with some means that could help in improving the program. They ended that by forwarding some messages to the European Union; hopefully, one day they will be fulfilled.
