A 45-year-old art dealer from Dublin has remortgaged his house in the Coombe to begin his own crusade for peace in Belfast and rid the city of the weapons of war.
The "One Stick One Stone" initiative was launched last night with a ceremony involving Catholic and Protestant children at a sectarian interface between the Falls Road and Shankill Road in west Belfast.
Mr Paul O'Kelly, who has taken time out from his job at the Oisin Art Gallery on Westland Row, said he would be at the Townsend Street peaceline each day for at least a week to "exchange weapons for dreams. We're going to be here every day until my cash runs out."
An Israeli army bomb expert, Mr Yoav Baumgarten, flown into the North especially, will be on hand to deal with any dangerous objects produced. However, Mr O'Kelly said he did not foresee his initiative, to which multimillionaire Mr J.P. McManus is understood to have given a cash donation, as an obstruction to the work of Gen John de Chastelain's decommissioning body.
"If we can lead up to a situation where we then call him [the general] in officially, we're delighted. This is more ground-level work but we will be prepared to graduate up to and include anything we can handle."
Mr O'Kelly said his friends encouraged him and told him his role as "champion pest of the Dublin art world" would prove a useful skill for organising the event. The papers for remortgaging his house were filed last Friday and he hopes it will yield a further £14,000 to finance the initiative.
A photograph of pipe bombs in a newspaper earlier this month and reports on the recent violence motivated Mr O'Kelly, son of the late RTE journalist, Mr Kevin O'Kelly.
"I became terrified what would happen if I didn't do it and terrified what might happen to me if I did do it. But sometimes you need a little bit of madness and a little bit of naivete to pull off something like this," he said.
During the ceremony, 12year-old Sean Kelly from Ardoyne symbolically handed over a baton he had made for street fighting while James Taylor (13) from the Shankill handed over a large rock such as those he would have thrown during street violence.
Father Gerry McCloskey of St Peter's Cathedral and Canon Barry Dodds of St Michael's parish walked with the boys to the peaceline where the weapons were handed over and a white dove was released to the beat of Lambeg drums. Community workers Ms Liz Groves and Baroness May Blood also gathered to show their support.