Through the looking glass: memory, myth and policing the past (original) (raw)
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Historical dialogue and memory in policing change: The case of the police in Northern Ireland
Memory Studies, 2016
This article explores the complex relationship between organisational change and historical dialogue in transitional societies. Using the policing reform process in Northern Ireland as an example, the article does three things: the first is to explore the ways in which policing changes were understood within the policing organisation and ‘community’ itself. The second is to make use of a processual approach, privileging the interactions of context, process and time within the analysis. Third, it considers this perspective through the relatively new lens of ‘historical dialogue’, understood here as a conversation and an oscillation between the past, present and future through reflections on individual and collective memories. Through this analysis, we consider how members’ understandings of a difficult past (and their roles in it) facilitated and/or impeded the organisations change process. Drawing on a range of interviews with previous and current members of the organisation, this a...
This paper critically examines the changing attitudes within post-conflict Irish republicanism towards policing in Northern Ireland. Drawing on extensive PhD research, including a comprehensive literature review of both archival and documentary data from the Extraordinary Sinn Fein Ard Fheis on policing in January 2007 as well as original data from interviews conducted recently, this paper interrogates how those Irish republicans who endorsed policing in 2007 have used the transitional justice mantra of 'never again' to buy into policing in Northern Ireland in a manner that they never have before. Whilst aware of the fact that some within the wider Irish republican constituency have not 'bought into' policing and indeed continue to present military resistance to policing in Northern Ireland, the thrust of this paper is to examine the role of memory in facilitating a process of 'moving on' between those once deemed the 'suspect community' and those who policed them in ways that often contravened human rights standards.
Positing that the Irish republican narrative on policing and the rule of law can be conceptualised in 4 distinct phases; rejection, Ulsterisation, disbandment and critical engagement this paper charts the transformation of Irish republican attitudes towards policing and the rule of law that eventually culminated in the formal endorsement of policing at the Sinn Fein Ard Feis in January 2007. Located in the wider transitional justice debate on how to deal with past wrongs, this paper critically evaluates how a new 'never again' discourse born out of the past policing experiences of the 'suspect community' in Northern Ireland frames the current relationship between mainstream Irish republicanism and policing in Northern Ireland. Evaluating the problematic legacy that 'conflict style' policing left in Irish republican communities, this paper examines how past experiences of policing are now being used by Irish republicans in their bid to create an inclusive and accountable police force in Northern Ireland in order to use this as a stepping stone on which they can build towards their ideological goals. Interrogating the inherent tension in trying to address past wrongs perpetrated by policing agents whilst building a 'new beginning' to policing in unison with these same agents, the paper examines the victim centric approach that has shaped Irish republican narratives of the continued failure to effectively deal with past policing in Northern Ireland. Examining the regressive impact caused by issues such as collusion, the continued use of 'stop and search' powers against anti-policing republican elements and the work and composition of the Historical Enquiries Team (HET) , this paper highlights the obstacles that stand in the way of a fuller reconciliation between Irish republicans and policing and the rule of law in Northern Ireland.
The issue of policing in Northern Ireland was both highly contested and of the foremost political salience for all the political parties involved in the peace process, and also for their communities. Prior to the peace process, on no other matter other than the constitutional stats itself was there such a complete and apparently unbridgeable divide between the two communities as there was on policing. Based on this reality and the subsequent proposals to ‘remake’ policing in Northern Ireland, commentators from across the political spectrum have portrayed the peace process as being built upon the basic premise that nationalists agreed to local power-sharing in the context of a constitutionally reformed UK, while in return they were given reforms in the areas of civil and human rights, including policing. This perspective has the effect of reducing the transformation of policing in Northern Ireland to the status of a concession to nationalists; it was forcefully resisted by unionists, but finally agreed once all sides believed that they had secured their constitutional preferences. Contrary to the view of policing as a lower-order concession, this chapter argues that the negotiations on policing were not at one step removed from the core disputes on sovereignty and state power; rather, the transformation of policing, as much as the new institutions of government, reflected the consociational character of the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and its institutionalised linkages between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.
Discourses of Political Policing in Post-patten Northern Ireland
Critical Criminology
This article critically examines discourses of political policing in contemporary Northern Ireland (NI). Recognising the post-conflict and post-reform climate that policing now occurs within, it argues that these environmental factors have conditioned discourses of policing that are directly tied to how legitimate political opposition to the political status quo in post-Good Friday Agreement (GFA) NI is policed. The article asserts that political policing discourses have taken a new trajectory that departs from traditional ethno-nationalist interpretations of the issue to instead reflect a broader structuralist interpretation of state-police power relations. It concludes with the argument that political policing discourses have evolved to reflect common class-based disillusionment with the post-GFA state across the political divide that sees the matter rooted in police protection of a system of devolved governance that has failed to tackle structural exclusion and socio-economic deprivation.
Irish Journal of Sociology
Debates about the past in Northern Ireland still remain hotly contested, and in over twenty years since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, an agreed account of the 'truth' about events and actions during the conflict remain as polarised as ever. Yet Southern's book presents a potentially unique (and seldom told) insight into the views and experiences of a key actor in the conflict-the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and officers who served in the organisation. Yet aside from providing some very necessary police officer perspectives as part of the wider conflict narrative, the book also leaves itself open to questions around the robustness of perspective used, in many cases, to unquestionably justify the role of the RUC.
Journal of Human Rights Practice, 2016
Through the prism of Northern Ireland, this article explores the function of existing and proposed archives within societies emerging from conflict, and highlights their potential in adding complexity to understanding conflict and challenging dominant narratives. The article outlines how, despite progress since the Northern Ireland peace accord in 1998, efforts to deal with the past and human rights violations have been piecemeal and politically contested. In the absence of a comprehensive approach to the past, testimony gathering, initiated 'unofficially' at a community level, has provided opportunities for individuals' experiences of the conflict to be documented and acknowledged. The recent Stormont House Agreement (2014) seeks to establish an Oral History Archive as a central repository for individuals to 'share experiences and narratives related to the Troubles'. The article discusses the challenges in developing this 'official' archive, and the problem of reconciling competing historical narratives of the past. This is contrasted against the growth in bottomup 'storytelling' or testimony work. The article argues for supplementing the official process with wider testimony gathering processes directed by and located within community contexts. It is argued that the deliberate juxtaposition of contrasting horizontal or intercommunity narratives held by different local parties may allow for the emergence of a more complex and inclusive narrative of the past, rather than attempts to impose a shared vertical narrative, which is subject to either further con-testation or uncomfortable compromise.