“That signing was not just emotional, it was exhilarating and inspiring,” he said.

The former staffer for Boston Mayor Ray Flynn now lives in Belfast in Northern Ireland.Ĭostello said, decades later, it’s still a reminder that peace cannot be taken for granted.

The day of the signing, Frank Costello was working in the Clinton administration. “I wish we didn't have to keep learning the lessons of the Good Friday agreement today, when you look around the world and even here with systemic racism and all kinds of stuff, there are still so many divisions in our society,” Kane said. On April 10, 1998, Kane remembers he felt relieved. “We’re all humans, we all have the same problems, we have the same issues, the same joys.”īrian Kane, now the executive director of the MBTA Advisory Board, worked at Boston College’s Irish Institute when the Good Friday agreement was signed -an institute created in 1997 to continue the peace-building process. Getting people to see that we’re all humans,” he said. “This stuff can work: Pulling people together. While at the center, they worked on community programming for children and other vulnerable populations.ĭorchester had undergone its own experience with tension among different racial and ethnic groups, and Walczak recalled that history made it an innovative spot for Catholics and Protestants to work together. “You realize just how rare it is to have a successful peace interaction., to have peace break out and be able to be sustained for 25 years,” said Bill Walczak, who co-founded the Codman Square Health Center in Dorchester.įollowing the agreement, the center was selected as a site as part of an international project to bring together Catholic and Protestant leaders from the Irish island. Joe Kennedy III named envoy to Northern IrelandĪrchdiocese, Dorchester residents rebuke city councilor’s anti-Protestant remark Why Brexit's back in the news: Britain and the EU struck a Northern Ireland trade dealĮx-Rep.

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