The Chroniclers of Violence in Northern Ireland: The First Wave Interpreted

Abstract

Perhaps the only undeniable blessing to evolve from the recent troubles in Northern Ireland has been miniboom in the publishing industry. Seldom have so many, written so quickly, on a subject understood by so few—and turning, one assumes, a decent profit for their effort. Traditionally contemporary modern Ireland has attracted the occasional coffee-table volume or the nearly annual The Irish, potted “sociology.” Until quite recently, few scholars have ventured into contemporary affairs—those events after the revolutionary years of 1916–1921—and almost none of the tools of social science have been put to use on Irish society. Thus the latest commentators found a truly virgin field, bereft of valid experts, congenial to anecdote, fashionably violent, amusingly Irish and if not fit for the coffee table certainly attractive in the market-place. The result has been a twofold outpouring: first of those who would chronicle in print what had been for the British audience nightly fare on the television and second of those more committed or more daring who would interpret, analyze, explain and predict. The former, however ill-prepared, sought to write history, however superficially, while the latter sought to make it by rearranging the past to buttress their vision of the future. Neither the observers nor the participants have in print as yet produced a single definitive work nor in fact a very satisfactory plain tale of events—much less a revelation into the nature of the conflict in Northern Ireland. The attempts of this first wave to date, however, offer some insights into the Northern Ireland problem, into the nature of Irish and British scholarship and, perhaps, into the future that awaits the most distressful Six-counties.