Giving Compass' Take:

• The Smithsonian covers the current situation in Northern Ireland, a decade after Protestants and Catholics agreed on a peace treaty, and how the community is adjusting to this hopeful new reality. 

• The recent global economic crisis has hit the Republic's economy hard and slowed development momentum in Northern Ireland, how does this effect their progress in peace? 

• Here's a look into other peaceful programs that address childhood trauma in the classroom after Ireland’s violent history.

The crime that still haunts Don Browne took place on a cold, damp evening in February 1985 outside a housing development in a working-class neighborhood of Derry, Northern Ireland. That night, Browne says, he handed over a cache of weapons to fellow members of a Catholic paramilitary unit. The gunmen whom he had supplied pulled up to a row house where Douglas McElhinney, 42, a former officer in the Ulster Defense Regiment—the Northern Ireland branch of the British Army—was visiting a friend. As McElhinney was about to drive away, a member of the hit squad killed him with a sawed-off shotgun.

For his role in the murder, Browne, now 49, was sentenced to life. At the time a member of the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), a breakaway faction of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), he was sent to Long Kesh Prison outside Belfast. He spent more than 13 years behind bars. Then, in September 1998, he was released under a settlement signed by Britain and the Republic of Ireland: the Good Friday, or Belfast, Agreement, which had been endorsed by Sinn Féin—the IRA's political wing—and most other Catholic and Protestant parties in Northern Ireland. At first, Browne had difficulties adjusting to the outside world. He was terrified to cross streets because he couldn't judge the speed of cars. He had also lost social skills. "If I asked a woman out for a cup of coffee, was I being a pervert?" he recalls wondering.

Read the full article about peaceful measures in Northern Ireland by Joshua Hammer at Smithsonian