Peter McBride
Senior Strategic Advisor, International Conflict Resolution and Community Trauma Expert
Peter is The Director of The Cohen Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies located at Keene State College, New Hampshire. Having worked in Northern Ireland for most of his career, he is a post conflict/atrocity mental health specialist with a wide range of skills and experience in the development of mental health and wellbeing services after community experiences of ethnically motivated violence, atrocities and genocide. He has worked on the influence of trauma on the capacity of individuals, groups and communities to engage in peace-making and reconciliation processes, concluding that the characteristics of the experience of trauma - specifically large group experience - mitigates against successful reconciliation processes. He has most recently worked with USAID in South Sudan training frontline staff on the role of trauma in atrocity prevention, and works regularly with the Auschwitz Institute for The Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocity in their international training programmes. He was the founder, 20 years ago of Carecall, now called Inspire Workplaces, which is the largest provider of workplace wellbeing services in Ireland. Peter was Group CEO of Inspire for the past 10 years until 2019. Peter has held multiple public chairmanships including two government roles, one dealing with openness and transparency across the health service following the hyponatremia inquiry, the other dealing with the legacy issues of the Magdalene laundries and Mother and Baby Homes. He was the chair of NICVA, and Million & Me - a BBC Children in Need initiative to improve the mental health of young people across the UK. Peter is a well-known conference and public speaker on these issues both locally and internationally.
Workshop One - Peter McBride - Prepared for peace, Ready for war – how trauma affects communities.
Peter McBride has been working with communities that have experienced violence for over 35 years, in Northern Ireland and internationally. His work focuses on the impact protracted periods of violence has on how large groups or communities behave, specifically the barriers it raises to creating meaningful peace. As time goes on, and the living memory of violence recedes, the “muscle memory” of violence and trauma remains embedded and protected in community identity, ready to be reactivated should the perception of threat return. Finding ways of dealing with this is essential to the creation of meaningful peace after conflict.
