The Peace People, who emerged 30 years ago this week, blazed briefly with an intensity akin to that around today's celebs but had limitations that soon became obvious. The idea that a purely emotional outburst might end the conflict died with their mass appeal.
But there was no gainsaying the emotion, no wonder that it was so strong.
The year 1976 was an awful one, August already bloodied by loyalist killings of two Catholics, the death of a Protestant shot in an IRA attack on a bar, an INLA killing of a soldier, an IRA killing of a soldier, when on the 10th the Maguire children and 23-year-old Danny Lennon died together in a few minutes on Belfast's Finaghy Road North.
Anne Maguire and her three children out for a walk - six-week-old Andrew, two-year-old John and eight-year-old Joanne - were struck by a car driven by Lennon, a dying IRA-man shot minutes earlier by a soldier.
Andrew and Joanne died instantly, John the following day. (A few years later, Anne killed herself.) Grief for her little nephews and niece and her dreadfully-injured sister pushed the angelic-faced Mairéad Corrigan in front of a camera.
Horror brought the very different Betty Williams racing from her television to Corrigan's side, phone calls of support to both from all over the North, instant plans for protest marches.
Next day a 31-year-old Catholic in Derry, Michael Quigley, died in hospital from gunshot wounds, apparently caught in crossfire between the IRA and soldiers. Only his family remembers him. On August 14th a soldier in Whitecross, south Armagh, shot and killed 12-year-old girl Majella O'Hare, claiming that he had fired at a (non-existent) gunman. The Maguire children's deaths sparked a phenomenon. Majella O'Hare's death had little resonance.
When Irish Press journalist Ciarán McKeown joined Williams and Corrigan shortly afterwards, with his vision of creating "community politics", the "peace women" of media-invention became a diverse "movement". The three leaders knew their fledgling cross-community support would not weather denunciation of the British army, the official security forces. There was no protest march through tiny Whitecross. Angry republican supporters, and others, said the movement was essentially pro-British.
To get the bulk of disobliging comments out of the way in one go, it might be as well to say here that many reporters in the 1970s and 1980s often remarked on an uncomfortable feature of the "peace people". Why in general were they hard to like? This was pondered off-air and out of print. It would have shocked viewers, readers and audiences, and left the ponderers open to vitriol from journalists busy polishing haloes.
The republican complaint that the Peace People blamed the IRA for the entire Troubles was not entirely true, but although Corrigan, Williams and McKeown evidently wanted all violence to end, the IRA was clearly their prime target. If you voiced scepticism about this approach, it was equally clear that you were on the wrong side: a Provo or "crypto-Provo". Like many others The Irish Times declared editorial support, but carried attempts at analysis. In one piece I remember writing that asking questions of the Peace People was like squeezing jelly. As a City Hall rally gathered days later Betty Williams spotted me and shouted "f***ing Provo" - as she also called others elsewhere. (A year or so later she apologised to me, confessing that she didn't understand Ciarán's manifestos herself.)
The year had begun with the loyalist killing of six south Armagh Catholics and the Kingsmill "Massacre" of 10 Protestant workmen. A protracted IRA ceasefire had disintegrated into unacknowledged but clearly identifiable sectarian killings. But the UDA remained legal, and unionist politicians at best tended to deliver limp "whoever is responsible" condemnations of loyalist violence.
No more than those before and after them, the Peace People did not end the conflict, or help to end it. That distinction falls to the IRA, who 17 years after the emergence of Corrigan and Williams, in the words of Gerry Adams "sued for peace".
As well they might, since the IRA was responsible for most of the deaths. But many saw the wrong guys looking for praise, and getting it. The grudging response, still audible, has more than an echo of the many peace groups whose focus on the IRA masked the stubbornness of loyalist violence.
By the time the Nobel Peace Prize was showered on Williams and Corrigan, their group was already splitting, moral force gone, and with it any prospect of an early peace. They developed no clout in republican west Belfast, south Armagh, mid-Ulster. The best that can be said of the Peace People is that for a time they gave individuals a sense of purpose and created some lasting friendships between Catholics and Protestants. In 1976, that was no mean feat.