Reclaim the Enlightenment was the initiative of Eamon McMahon who went on to become our first chair. In 2017 He argued that we should re-focus on Belfast?s enlightenment era as a trigger to progressive initiatives in the present. He suggested that the time was ripe for such an initiative below the level of politics. He was persuasive: he approached a number of people who had a history of community activism and all of them agreed to join him on the first committee of RTE. Eamon died in 2022 but his legacy lives on.