Here is part of what Byron Bland, associate director of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation, told participants of the HOPE Forgiveness Project last month:

Human communities are possible because of two attributes we have.

Whenever people live together, they bump up against each other. So part of what makes life possible for humans is the ability for forgiveness. It’s the one free act as human beings we can do.

Life is irreversible. What happens, you can’t take back. There are various things I can do [if I’ve done something wrong]. I can apologize if I’m sincere about it. I can say I’m sorry, but ultimately we put this thing back together when you forgive me.

Second, life is unpredictable. You don’t know what’s going to happen in the next minute, and in the face of that unpredictability, we as a community cannot live together because we just don’t know what’s going to happen.

So what allows us to create communities are promises. We’re able to make promises to one another. We need to promise to build a better future.

There are Catholics, there are Protestants. What I suspect many of you are going to encounter is a community that will say, “This is our event. You think this is your event, but let me tell you, this is our event, too, and that this event right here in our lives is what we have used to divide communities, to create our identities, and in many cases to build our leadership.”

So the community story is “Catholics killed my son or daughter, Protestants killed my son or daughter.” Part of what you’ve done this week is to change that story a little bit, because what you’ve found out is that there are individuals who did that. Those individuals were Catholics or Protestants, but it wasn’t all Catholics or Protestants who did this.

If I’m a social leader or a political leader in Northern Ireland, I think it’s absolutely irresponsible and immoral for me to say, “I’m going to forgive on behalf of you. I’ve decided I’m going to forgive what happened to you.”

I don’t think I can do that, I don’t think I should do that. That’s your business, because it’s happened to you.

I think it’s also immoral for me to tell you, “Look, you’ve got to forgive if we’re going to have peace.”

An enemy is someone connected to violence, not just an adversary, competitor or rival. How do former enemies that have used death to divide come together to create a promise together that is trustable? I don’t know the answer, but that’s part of the work I do. I try to find common language so that former enemies can begin to have conversations

• Project helps survivors on both sides of Northern Ireland conflict to forgive