After working for a time as a babysitter at a Catholic community centre, she was able to save enough money to enroll in a year of business classes at Miss Gordon's Commercial College, which led her at the age of 16 to a job as an accounting clerk with a local factory.

[19] Betty Williams, a resident of Andersonstown who happened to be driving by, witnessed the tragedy and accused the IRA of firing at the British patrol and provoking the incident.

In 1993 she and six other Nobel Peace Prize laureates tried unsuccessfully to enter Myanmar from Thailand to protest the protracted detention of opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi.

[42] In April 2019 Maguire collected the 2019 GUE/NGL Award for Journalists, Whistleblowers & Defenders of the Right to Information on behalf of Julian Assange who was at the time imprisoned by the United Kingdom.

[15] In 2015, Maguire spoke with Democracy Now in a sit-down interview titled, "No to Violence, Yes to Dialogue", which included two other Nobel Peace Prize Laureates, Jody Williams and Leymah Gbowee.

[44] Maguire voiced strong opposition to the U.N. sanctions against Iraq, which is alleged by some to have resulted in hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths,[45] calling them "unjust and inhuman", "a new kind of bomb", and "even more cruel than weapons".

[46] During a visit to Baghdad with Argentinian colleague Adolfo Pérez Esquivel in March 1999, Maguire urged then-U.S. President Bill Clinton and British Prime Minister Tony Blair to end the bombing of Iraq and to permit the lifting of U.N. sanction.

[49] In New York, Maguire was reported to have marched with 10,000 protesters, purportedly including families of 9/11 victims, as U.S. war planes were already en route to strike Taliban targets in Afghanistan.

[53] Around this time, Maguire held a 30-day vigil and began a 40-day liquid fast outside the White House, joined by members of Pax Christi USA and Christian church leaders.

"They say this is for his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and co-operation between peoples", she said, "and yet he continues the policy of militarism and occupation of Afghanistan, instead of dialogue and negotiations with all the parties to the conflict.

[61] Speaking at the Carl von Ossietzky Medal Award Ceremony in Berlin in December 2010, Maguire imputed criminal accountability to President Obama for violation of international law.

[63][64] In May 2009, following a visit to Guatemala, immigration authorities at the Houston Airport in Texas detained Maguire for a number of hours, during which time she was questioned, fingerprinted and photographed, and consequently missed her connecting flight to Northern Ireland.

[65] In late July that same year, Maguire was again detained by immigration authorities, this time at the Dulles International Airport in Virginia, on her way from Ireland to New Mexico to meet with colleague Jody Williams.

[67][68] In a 2013 interview, she omitted any mention of her 1984 trip to Israel, saying that "I first went to Israel/Palestine at the invitation of Rabbis for Human Rights and the Israeli Committee against House Demolitions" and "was absolutely horrified" at Palestinians' living conditions.

[78] At a joint press conference with Mordechai Vanunu in Jerusalem in December 2004, Maguire compared Israel's nuclear weapons to the Nazi gas chambers in Auschwitz.

Although Israel had insisted that the yacht would not be permitted to approach Gaza, then-Prime Minister Ehud Olmert ultimately capitulated and allowed the ship to sail to its destination without incident.

[96] After the incident, Maguire said she did not feel her life was in danger as the ship's captain, Derek Graham, had been in touch with the Israeli navy to assure them that there would be no violent resistance.

She was refused an entry visa by Israeli authorities on the grounds that she had twice in the past tried to run Israel's naval embargo of the Gaza Strip and that a 10-year exclusion order was in effect against her.

Fatmeh El-Ajou, an attorney for Adalah noted, "We believe that the decision to refuse entry to Ms. Maguire is based on illegitimate, irrelevant, and arbitrary political considerations".

[15] In October 2012, Maguire traveled to New York City to serve on the Russell Tribunal on Israel/Palestine alongside writer Alice Walker, activist Angela Davis, former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney, and Pink Floyd's Roger Waters.

"[110] After her work on the Russell Tribunal was completed Maguire said that the experience had "opened the mind, and deepened the understanding of all those present to the facts of the ongoing injustice which the Palestinians are daily suffering under Israeli siege and occupation.

The RToP's findings and conclusions challenge Governments and civil society to have courage and act by implementing sanctions, BDS etc., thereby refusing to be silent and complicit in the face of Israel's violation of International Laws.

The RToP was brilliant, informative and decisive, reminding us that all our Governments, and we the people, have a moral and legal responsibility to act to protect Human Rights and International Law and we cannot be silent when injustice is being done to anyone, anywhere".

[111] In March 2018, Maguire and two Nobel peace laureates Shirin Ebadi and Tawakkol Karman visited Rohingya camps in Cox's Bazar and shared opinions on the crisis.

It pursues dialogue, seeks reconciliation, listens to the truth in our opponents, rejects militarism, and allows God's spirit to transform us socially and politically.Mairead Maguire is a proponent of the belief that violence is a disease that humans develop but are not born with.

[130] Alex Maskey of Sinn Féin charged that at the time of the Troubles, the Peace People movement was hijacked by the British government and used to turn public opinion against Irish republicanism.

[137] Rob Fairmichael writes of "gossip of fur coats" and concludes that the prize money controversy was perceived by the public, in the context of the Peace People's eventual decline, as specifically problematic.

[139] Eliaz Luf, the deputy head of the Israeli foreign mission to Canada, has argued that Maguire's activism plays into the hands of Hamas and other terrorist organisations in Gaza.

""[142] The Post argued that if Maguire and others "truly desire to improve the lives of Gazans, they should send their humanitarian aid in coordination with Israel," pressure Hamas "and the other radical Islamists who control the Gaza Strip to stop senseless ballistic attacks on Israeli towns and villages, kibbutzim and moshavim," and "insist that Hamas provide Gaza's citizens with a stable, responsible leadership that respects human rights and religious freedom, as well as that it accept the UN-recognized right of the Jewish people to self-determination and political sovereignty in their historical homeland."

"[144] Gideon Levy strongly defended Maguire in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz in October 2010, calling her "the victim of state terror" after Israel refused to allow her to enter the country and kept her detained for several days.