Troubled Generations? (De)Constructing Narratives of Youth Experience in the Northern Ireland Conflict

Abstract

This article explores how youth experiences of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ have been dominantly imagined within post-conflict memory. Tracing representations of the young as innocent targets or potentially endangering combatants, it concentrates on those imaginaries which characterise individuals who grew up in the conflict as the members of ‘troubled generations.’ Drawing on oral history interviews with those who grew up in Belfast during the 1970s and 1980s, it addresses how such representations may obscure the broader ‘messiness’ of everyday youth experience in popular memory and in doing so contribute to a hierarchy of the ‘speakable’ and the ‘hearable’ which affects the articulation of memories at a personal level. The article concludes by suggesting scholars pay closer attention both to how dominant memory discourses may de-limit the complexities of lived experiences of violence, but also the (de)constructive potential of personal narratives spoken alongside, through, and in excess of, dominant historical imaginaries.