Remembering the Troubles: Contesting the Recent Past in Northern Ireland - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0268101744 ISBN 13: 9780268101749

Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017

Synopsis

The historian A. T. Q. Stewart once remarked that in Ireland all history is applied history―that is, the study of the past prosecutes political conflict by other means. Indeed, nearly twenty years after the 1998 Belfast Agreement, "dealing with the past" remains near the top of the political agenda in Northern Ireland. The essays in this volume, by leading experts in the fields of Irish and British history, politics, and international studies, explore the ways in which competing "social" or "collective memories" of the Northern Ireland "Troubles" continue to shape the post-conflict political landscape.

The contributors to this volume embrace a diversity of perspectives: the Provisional Republican version of events, as well as that of its Official Republican rival; Loyalist understandings of the recent past as well as the British Army's authorized for-the-record account; the importance of commemoration and memorialization to Irish Republican culture; and the individual memory of one of the noncombatants swept up in the conflict. Tightly specific, sharply focused, and rich in local detail, these essays make a significant contribution to the burgeoning literature of history and memory. The book will interest students and scholars of Irish studies, contemporary British history, memory studies, conflict resolution, and political science.

Contributors: Jim Smyth, Ian McBride, Ruan O’Donnell, Aaron Edwards, James W. McAuley, Margaret O’Callaghan, John Mulqueen, and Cathal Goan.

About this title

About the Author

Jim Smyth is professor of Irish and British history at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author or editor of a number of books, including, most recently, Cold War Culture: Intellectuals, the Media, and the Practice of History.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Few societies fetishize remembrance and commemoration with the insistence and strenuous partisanship of “Northern Ireland” (no agreed upon term is available). Where else is there needed a Parades Commission to adjudicate the routes of annual marches marking historic anniversaries (and territory), viewed by participants as an affirmation of tradition and by opponents as sectarian provocation? Even before the Troubles, when wall murals tended to be confined to depictions of King “Billy” on his white horse crossing the River Boyne, “Ulster” graffiti when not directed towards his holiness in Rome enjoined the citizenry to “Remember” either 1690 or 1916. With the almost ending of “the north’s” thirty years’ war, the trauma still raw in a still deeply divided society, remembering the Troubles entails, depending on who you believe, either confronting the past in the name of resolution and reconciliation or a continuation of the conflict by other means. Taking the Good Friday Agreement as baseline the processes of remembering took off right away, officially, for example, in the shape of the Saville Inquiry into the events of Bloody Sunday, 1972. First announced in January 1998, some three months before the Belfast Agreement (as it is also known) was reached, Saville, which issued its report in 2010, turned out to be the longest, most expensive judicial inquiry in history, costing, according to one estimate, almost twenty times as much as the 9/11 Commission.

Remembering the Troubles was always part of the Troubles as new dates were steadily added to the commemorative calendar: 9 August, for instance, marking the introduction of internment in 1971. But since 1998 public debate over the recent past has intensified. Demands for further judicial inquiries into still controversial episodes persist, such as the cases of the alleged collusion of British security services in the Dublin-Monaghan bombings in 1974, or in 1989 in the Loyalist assassination of solicitor, Pat Finucane. Plaques, memorials, and murals proliferate, and from 2005 to 2014 Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI) Historical Enquiries Teams continued, not without controversy, to investigate unsolved murders. Not only is no end in sight, in 2012 all this activity, argument, and campaigning converged with the so-called decade of centenaries, stretching from the hundredth anniversary of the Ulster Covenant in 1912 to the end of the civil war in 1923. Public appetite, north and south, for the politics of remembrance, and their prominence in contemporary political culture, is illustrated by a random sampling of headlines from the Irish Times in the first months of 2012. These include “[Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Owen] Paterson Warns of Centenaries Being ‘Hijacked’” (3 February); “North Needs to Confront Past Quickly, Says D[irector] P[ublic] P[rosecutions]” (3 February); “Remembering in NI Need Not Be Divisive for Communities” (2 March); “Time to Meet Challenge of Finding Way for Historical Reflection on This Island” (20 March); “Grant of £900,000 to Address Troubles Legacy” (18 April); and “Oireachtas Seeks Bombings Inquiry” (18 May). Or moving forward―again randomly―to 2013, the Irish Times reported, “British Government Trying to Distance Itself from North’s Past―MP” (10 September); “Ahead of Haass Talks Amnesty International Complains of Failure to Deal with Past in Northern Ireland” (11 September); “Relatives Seek Review of UK Decision on Omagh Inquiry” (12 September); and “Efforts at Reconciliation in North Hampered by Myths about the Troubles” (21 November). Oragain, no sign of resolution had emerged by 2015: “North Caught in Tangled Web ‘Dealing’ with the Past” (15 October); “Victims of the Troubles Promised ‘Legacy’ Issues Will Be Addressed” (14 December); and so on and on.

In Ireland, remarked ATQ Stewart, all history is applied history.The past is present. It is therefore not surprising that versions of what happened during the Troubles conflict. The British Army’s Operation Banner and the Provisional IRA’s Long War plainly offer different narratives. Good history must stick to the rules of evidence, but it can never be either quite definitive or entirely objective, especially in a case like the Troubles, where rival interpretations are fiercely disputed and the myth of the intellectual detachment of the professional historian is even more threadbare than usual. The essays in this book thus embrace a diversity of perspectives: the Provisional Republican version of events, as well as that of its Official Republican rival; Loyalist understandings of the recent past, as well as the British Army’s authorized for-the-record account. Other contributors look at the importance of commemoration and memorialization to Irish Republican culture, and at the individual memory of one of the noncombatant majority swept up in the conflict.Ian McBride opens, however, with an early draft of history on the (contested) meaning of it all.

(Excerpted from introduction)

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0268101744
• ISBN 13: 9780268101749
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 218
• Editor: Smyth Jim