‘Ready to speak, but will anyone listen?’ Truth Recovery, Unionists and Social Memory

Abstract

In this chapter I retrace my main theoretical argument: namely, that in the absence of agreed processes of truth recovery following the protracted conflict in Northern Ireland, many unionists now increasingly define themselves as oppositional or peripheral, and will attempt to resist anything which they perceive to be the manipulation and distortion of social memory because of the fear of imposed, manufactured history by their political opponents. Unionist resistance to recollections of political violence is primarily influenced by their trepidation about the potential elision of their biographies of suffering (cf. Feldman, 2004). In this chapter — again based on detailed ethnographic research — I argue that unionists in Northern Ireland can be persuaded to participate in truth recovery processes, but that their involvement will be contingent upon the creation of a framework for dealing with the past that can accommodate some form of dialogical, rationally established and morally assessed ‘truth’ (cf. Ricoeur, 2001).