Building Safe and Resilient Communities: Reflections on DCIF's 2026 Annual Peace Conference

Dublin City Interfaith Forum | 15 September 2026

On Tuesday, 15 September 2026, Dublin City Interfaith Forum (DCIF) convened its Annual Peace Conference in the Oak Room at the Mansion House, bringing together more than eighty faith leaders, community organizations, statutory partners and young people under the theme Building Safe and Resilient Communities. What emerged over the course of the day, through keynote address, practitioner testimony, a film screening, and a participatory workshop, was not simply a set of individual contributions, but a pattern of insight that aligns closely with decades of established scholarship on prejudice, pluralism and social cohesion. This article reflects on the day through that lens.

The Case for Faith Communities as Peacebuilders

The Conference opened from the premise, articulated by the theologian Hans Küng, that there can be no peace among nations without peace among religions, and no peace among religions without dialogue between them (Küng, 1991). That premise ran through the day's structure: a keynote on youth leadership, sessions grounding peacebuilding in theology, education and community policing, and lived testimony, including recorded data on anti-Muslim hate shared by Muslim Sisters of Éire, that gave the day's more theoretical framing an unavoidable human weight.

This pairing of framework and lived experience reflects what the rabbi and philosopher Jonathan Sacks termed "the dignity of difference", his argument, in the work of the same name, that a peaceful, plural society requires not a search for sameness beneath our differences, but a deliberate respect for those differences themselves (Sacks, 2002). Sacks warned that human beings carry an old, tribal instinct to read difference as threat, an instinct he considered dangerous precisely because our futures are now so interdependent. Several of the Conference's own workshop discussions arrived, independently, at a strikingly similar diagnosis.

Naming What Divides

In the afternoon workshop, participants were asked where they had seen racism, hate or exclusion take hold. The answers converged on causes that will be familiar to scholars of prejudice, assumptions made on sight about someone's linguistic fluency, their background, their trustworthiness, based on skin colour, accent or dress; a persistent gap between an incident being experienced as a hate crime and being prosecuted as one; and, cited by a participant working as a prison chaplain, the corrosive role of isolation and seclusion in making hatred possible at all.

That last point deserves particular attention. The interfaith leader Eboo Patel has argued that encounters across religious and cultural difference tend to resolve into one of only a few outcomes: isolation, division, or, in the worst cases, destruction (Patel, 2016). Where Patel's framework becomes genuinely useful is in its insistence that the alternative to these outcomes is not automatic; it has to be built. Pluralism, in his formulation, is not the passive fact of diversity but "the energetic engagement of diversity toward a positive end" (Patel, 2016) engagement that requires deliberate leadership, skill, and structure.

What the Evidence Shows Works

If one finding recurred across every table in the Conference's workshop, it was this: direct personal contact described, more than once, simply as "a conversation over a cup of tea", was named as the thing that genuinely shifts attitudes. This is not merely intuition. It is among the most robustly evidenced findings in the social psychology of prejudice. Gordon Allport's contact hypothesis, first proposed in The Nature of Prejudice (1954), holds that prejudice between groups diminishes through contact of the right kind: contact between people of equal status, working toward common goals, in conditions that are recognized and supported by institutions rather than left to chance. Decades of subsequent research have confirmed the broad strength of this claim, while sharpening its conditions, casual proximity alone does little, whereas, structured, sustained, cooperative contact does a great deal (Pettigrew and Tropp, 2006).

This is, in effect, a description of the Conference's own workshop design: small, deliberately mixed tables, working through shared questions toward a shared output. It is also a description of the initiatives participants pointed to as evidence of what already works in Dublin, ‘Together Safer @ D8’, the Gateway Project's relationship-building between young people and An Garda Síochána, and the cross-sector community response mobilized in the aftermath of recent unrest in the city. Robert Putnam's distinction between bonding social capital, which reinforces ties within a group, and bridging social capital, which builds ties across groups, is instructive here. Putnam and his collaborator David Campbell later showed, through extensive survey research in the United States, that it is precisely this kind of bridging contact, a colleague, a neighbour, a friend of a different faith, that best explains how a religiously diverse society sustains both devotion and tolerance at once (Putnam, 2000; Putnam and Campbell, 2010).

From Principle to Practice

The recommendations that emerged from the workshop, peer-led youth programming, school visits modelled on an approach seen in Edinburgh, partnership with faith bodies including the Catholic Church, advocacy for hate-crime legislation and a wider rollout of bystander training ,are not in this light, a wish list so much as a fairly precise translation of the contact hypothesis and the bridging-capital literature into local, practical terms. Each proposal creates a structured occasion for exactly the kind of equal-status, cooperative contact the evidence identifies as effective, and does so at the point, schools, workplaces, public institutions where Patel's account of interfaith leadership insists that pluralism has to be actively built rather than assumed.

Closing Reflection

DCIF's co-chair, Dr Sheila Curran, closed the day by observing that the hardest borders to change are not the political ones marked on a map, but the ones each of us carries in our own mind and heart. It is a fitting close to a day whose central, evidence-backed lesson was much the same, that safety and cohesion are not simply the absence of conflict, but the accumulated product of ordinary people, in ordinary contact, choosing again and again to cross the distance between themselves and someone unlike them.

Available to download

- Building Inclusive Communities – Address by Dr Johnston McMaster, here

- Educating for Change – Lessons from Northern Ireland, here

References

Allport, G.W. (1954) The Nature of Prejudice. Cambridge, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Küng, H. (1991) Global Responsibility: In Search of a New World Ethic. New York: Crossroad.

Patel, E. (2016) Interfaith Leadership: A Primer. Boston: Beacon Press.

Pettigrew, T.F. and Tropp, L.R. (2006) 'A Meta-Analytic Test of Intergroup Contact Theory', Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(5), pp. 751–783.

Putnam, R.D. (2000) Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Putnam, R.D. and Campbell, D.E. (2010) American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. New York: Simon & Schuster.

Sacks, J. (2002) The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations. London: Continuum.