The “Most Distressful Nation:” History, Myth, and “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland (original) (raw)
Bruised but Unbroken: Cultural Responses to the Irish Troubles
2018
Music and art can be very effective mediums for individual expression, both in personal life and for political thought. It is something that many people can relate to, can reach the heart more directly than mere words, and carries a wide range of unspoken meaning and significance without being reduced to clumsy language. Where words arc useful to express ideas, music and art can often convey emotion more effectively and can be very effective in inspiring action or shaping thought. For this reason, these mediums have been and arc often used to engage with or reject political discourse with great effect. One particularly potent example of this sort of discussion may be seen in the music and art used to comment on the Irish Troubles. This allows the historian to understand more about the complexities of this conflict by feeling the unspoken Young 2 assertions that are not immediately visible through words alone. It may also reveal something about how people thought about themselves, each other, and their histories and identities. The period of Northern Ireland's social and political conflict, known as "the Troubles," has a very long and complicated history, involving animosities about class, ethnicity, religion, and politics going hack for centuries. At its core, the Troubles were a conflict over political status and national identity between republicans wanting union with the Republic of Ireland and loyalists wanting to slay in the United Kingdom, with very old tensions and resentments sometimes spilling over into violence and both fccJingjustified for doing so. 1 It is generally said to have begun with the Battle ofthe Bogside on August 12-14, 1969 and ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 199R. But, even that designation is unclear and debatable. During this period, the violence between the opposing pararnilitaries, police forces, and civilians attracted international attention. Historical Context The origins of the conflict are often considered to go back to the Plantation of Ulster in the seventeenth century, when English and Scottish settlers were granted land by the Crown in the northeast with the aim of establishing a Protestant foothold in the area. This led to economic, social, and religious conflict between the populations as each feared and distrusted the other, sometimes breaking out into violence and reprisals which would only deepen the rift. By the nineteenth century, some politicians began to advocate greater independence fo r Ireland in order 1 Not everyone who wanted separation or union fell into these categories. Actually, most people did not; combatants were the visible minority. Non-violent suppmicrs oflrish unification or of staying with the United Kingdom were often called nationalists and unionists respectively, and the fact that a person might support one of these ideas did nol mean that they necessarily supported the violent expression of it. There were also other varic.:tics of these ideas, such as Ulster nationalism (supporting a Nmthern Treland independent from both the Republic and United Kingdom).
Narratives of Identity in the Northern Irish Troubles
This study examines the manners in which individuals and organizations used historical narratives to justify images of themselves and of the other, contributing both to the outbreak of the Troubles and the difficulty in resolving the conflict. The role of cultural identity formation through symbolic interpretation creates a backdrop that colors struggles over access to political and economic resources and assists in either fomenting conflict or fostering the peaceful resolution of differences. Despite the relative success of the Good Friday Agreement, I argue that many of Northern Ireland’s identity narratives persist and continue to provide a fertile ground to interpret new conflicts through the old lens of identity conflicts. Understanding the construction of these identity narratives and how they contributed to the conflict may provide avenues for identity reconstruction, which may assist in making Northern Ireland’s peace more durable. (Forthcoming in Peace & Change, October 2014.)
The Toxic Legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles
RUSI Newsbrief, 2019
The 50th anniversary of the day that British troops first deployed to Northern Ireland offers an opportunity to reflect on the legacy of Operation Banner, and whether the security forces contributed to the troubles or prevented them.
‘Cold beads of history and home’: Fictional Perspectives on the Northern Ireland Troubles
This essay explores several novels by contemporary Northern Irish writers with a view to how The Troubles are represented in their pages. Major inspiration for my methodology comes from Hayden White's writings and, to a certain extent, from Linda Hutcheon's notion of historiographic metafiction. Especially, I endorse White's argument that real events do not present themselves to perception in the form of well-made narratives, therefore historiography always, and necessarily, must resort to strategies of representation borrowed from literary discourse. Historical fiction, in turn, though epistemologically unreliable, is capable of addressing unresolved ethnoreligious and political issues in the hope of increasing our scope for understanding each other. In Northern Ireland's heterogeneous culture, this is made possible by juxtaposing a variety of perspectives on its shared historical experience.
These books, based on doctoral theses, represent the fresh interest among postgraduates in the early years of state building on the island of Ireland. Both works are well researched and contain impressive documentary evidence. Bryan Follis deals with the preparations for and consolidation of the Northern Irish state based mainly on sources from within the new administration. On first glance Follis' work is a neutral and fascinating insight into the problems of setting up a government in a torn society. However, a major deficiency of his work is revealed by its bibliography which contains virtually no recent works on Nationalists. His discussion of the republican position relies heavily on coloured accounts by contemporaries. For the IRA campaign we are referred to W. A. Phillips' work dating from 1926, and a lot of his discussion of the republican perception of Northern Ireland goes back to Dorothy Macardle's book first published in 1937, while events in the Civil War are accounted for by Ronan Fanning's booklet on Independent Ireland, disregarding much more comprehensive monographs. These defects in its bibliography are unfortunately not coincidental, but expose an often subtle but sometimes blatant unionist perception of developments and a serious disregard for the position of Nationalists living within the six counties. In Follis' view Northern Ireland was to be a " Unionist State for a Unionist People " in which there was no place for Catholics who were disloyal by definition. The first fleeting reference to Catholics appears on page thirty-six and a serious treatment of their position has to wait until the conclusion. This denial of the Catholic presence in Northern Ireland is further witnessed by labelling all IRA activity in the North as an invasion from outside. Follis consistently and uncritically equals the interest of northern Unionists with that of the new state. He admires and identifies with the unionist leadership who displayed an "iron will" and under Craig's "resolute leadership" made the surprising establishment of a stable state possible. Any less than admirable behaviour on the part of the unionist leadership is defended by their assertion that they had to be radical to control their grass roots. However, no source material is presented to account for the mood of ordinary Unionists. All reports of rising pressure come directly from the Northern government itself. It is remarkable that a publisher feels obliged to warn the reader on the dust jacket for the biased nature of the work: "if a particular standpoint emerges at its conclusion it is the result of an extremely lucid piece of research ". This book is indeed based on sound scholarly research of much relevant source material, and correctly challenges some of the unsubstantiated criticisms of the Northern Ireland Government. However, Follis' particular standpoint is unfortunately not limited to his conclusion which is in fact quite balanced, but permeates his language and most of his argument. If given recognition such a bias, which cannot be avoided by any historian, is not necessarily a problem, but in this case it leads to a one-sided assessment of the available evidence and many unfounded conclusions. The fact that the author uses imprecise terminology is confusing but only a minor irritant. When, for instance, he labels the thousands of catholic workers which
The pre-1969 historiography of the Northern Ireland conflict: a reappraisal
Irish Historical Studies, 2015
This article contributes to the the mapping of the 'pathways of transmission' of the Northern Ireland 'problem' by drawing attention to three problematic aspects of John Whyte's appraisal of the pre-1969 historiography, in Interpreting Northern Ireland (1990): that the work of T. W. Moody and J. C. Beckett and their fellow historians before 1969 was 'lightweight' and 'bland'; that they effectively ignored Ulster's history of sectarian rioting until Andrew Boyd's book Holy war in Belfast (1969) brought it 'back into the consciousness of historians'; and that the 'external conflict paradigm' was 'dominant' in their discourse. These are examined in sections II-V. The content of the pre-1969 historiography is examined in section I and a preliminary reappraisal is offered in section VI.
Northern Ireland’s Interregnum. Anna Burns’s Depiction of a (Post)-Troubles State of (In)security
Text Matters: A Journal of Literature, Theory and Culture
This paper aims to present the main contours of Burns’s literary output which, interestingly enough, grows into a personal understanding of the collective mindset of (post)-Troubles Northern Ireland. It is legitimate, I argue, to construe her fiction (No Bones, 2001; Little Constructions, 2007; Milkman, 2018) as a body of work shedding light on certain underlying mechanisms of (post-)sectarian violence. Notwithstanding the lapse of time between 1998 and 2020, the Troubles’ toxic legacy has indeed woven an unbroken thread in the social fabric of the region. My reading of the novelist’s selected works intends to show how the local public have been fed by (or have fed themselves upon) an unjustified—maybe even false—sense of security. Burns, in that regard, has positioned herself amongst the aggregate of writers who feel anxious rather than placated, hence their persistence in returning to the roots of Northern Irish societal divisions. Burns’s writing, in the above context, though imm...
Against Ethnicity: Democracy, Equality, and the Northern Irish Conflict
Journal of British Studies, 2018
The study of the Northern Irish Troubles is dominated by ethnic readings of conflict and violence. Drawing on new scholarship from a range of different disciplines and on fresh archival sources, this article questions these explanations. General theories that tie together ethnicity with conflict and violence are shown to be based on definitions that fail to distinguish ethnic identities from other ones. Their claims cannot be taken as being uniquely or even disproportionately associated with ethnicity. Explanatory models specifically developed for the case of modern Ireland do address that weakness. Yet, this article contends, they rest upon the fallacy that the Catholic and Protestant peoples are transhistorical entities. Political ideas, organizations, and actions cannot be reduced to fixed group identities. This article argues instead that the Troubles centered on a political conflict—one over rival visions of modern democracy. The pursuit of equality, the core value of democracy...