Troubles In Ireland Research Articles

‘Inhospitable it would be’: rivers of unbelonging in Willie Doherty’s Secretion

ABSTRACT In Ghost Story and Secretion, the Northern Irish artist Willie Doherty depicts landscape as haunted. Both films register the presence of ghosts through a malodorous ooze: a residue of repressed secrets whose return disturbs the living. These miasmic flows literalize the seepage between ‘concentrationary histories': the interrelation between particular histories of institutional violence. Doherty's haunted topographies explicitly connect the Breitenau and Dachau camps with Northern Ireland's Troubles and Abu Ghraib. Haunting, understood here through the uncanny, and Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok's theory of encryption, embodies concentrationary memory's focus on narrating the seepage between histories and the camp’s continued threat.

Niall Gilmartin and Brendan Ciarán Browne. Refugees and Forced Displacement in Northern Ireland's Troubles: Untold Journeys Migrations and Identities. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022. Pp. 256. $130.00 (cloth).

Niall Gilmartin and Brendan Ciarán Browne. Refugees and Forced Displacement in Northern Ireland's Troubles: Untold Journeys Migrations and Identities. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2022. Pp. 256. $130.00 (cloth).

Civil society, solidarity and collective action: Conflict-related displacement in Northern Ireland's Troubles, 1969–1974

This article examines the extraordinary stories of how thousands of active citizens and citizen groups forged sustained levels of collective action to coordinate and manage the evacuation and shelter of those forced from their homes and communities during Northern Irelands Troubles. Based on in-depth interviews, the articles originality resides in its unique insights into the first-hand narratives of fear, refuge, and movement caused by mass displacement that have hitherto been largely side-lined from the history of the Troubles. Furthermore, it argues that the herculean task of organising evacuations, journeys and refuge centres by civil society had less to do with Putnam's pluralist concept of social capital and was instead rooted in ideals of solidarity, collective identity and social action. In the case of Northern Ireland's mass displacement between 1969 and 1974, the solidarity and collective response of civic society was premised upon ethno-cultural ties and identities but also derived from a spectrum of critical perceptions of the state; perceptions ranging from inept at one end to outright complicit at the other.

A Kist o’ Whistles

A Kist o’ Whistles

Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground by Susan McKay

Reviewed by: Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground by Susan McKay Chris Arthur Susan McKay Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground Belfast. The Blackstaff Press. 2021. 346 pages. war photographer Robert Capa famously said, "If your pictures aren't good enough, you aren't close enough." The outstanding quality of the word-pictures drawn in Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground relies on the author's practice of getting close enough to people to see the detail of their lives, rather than presenting us with distant generalizations. But proximity alone would not guarantee a book of this caliber. For that, you also need the author's skill as an empathic listener and lucid writer. Susan McKay expertly coaxes a variety of voices to tell their stories and presents these to readers with impressive clarity. The book is based on interviews conducted between 2019 and 2021. McKay traveled all over Northern Ireland to take soundings from one sector of the country's populace. She wanted to get a sense of how Protestants think of themselves and what they want, in the context of a milieu where old allegiances have been strained by the legacy of the Troubles, Brexit, the pandemic, renewed worries about a possible united Ireland, and loss of faith in politicians caused by the Renewable Heat Incentive scandal. (The Renewable Heat Incentive scandal was a shockingly mismanaged green-energy scheme that lost a colossal amount of public money and ultimately led to the collapse of the Northern Ireland Assembly—the devolved legislature for Northern Ireland. An account of what happened—uncovering political and administrative incompetence and duplicity on a scale that's hard to credit—is given in Sam McBride's masterpiece of investigative journalism, Burned: The Inside Story of the "Cash-for-Ash" Scandal and Northern Ireland's Secretive New Elite [2019].) Northern Protestants shows the poverty of those simplifying stereotypes that are too often the currency of media reports. Commentators who lack McKay's skills, and her intrepid determination to seek out enlightening face-to-face encounters, tend to present Northern Ireland in crudely dualistic terms: Protestant-Unionist-Loyalist versus Catholic-Nationalist-Republican. The impression given is that within each tribal bloc there is an obdurate uniformity of opinion. McKay repeatedly demonstrates how fatuous such a picture is. "Northern Protestant" is far from being a homogeneous singularity. Thinking within this group is neither fixed nor predictable. Her book, together with its older sibling, Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People (published in 2000, with a new edition brought out last year to coincide with the second volume's appearance), provides a sensitive mapping of how Protestant mind-sets have changed, and responded to change, over the last several decades. The books compile a record of the raw oral literature of the moment. Susan McKay offers an always sympathetic, often surprising, but not uncritical portrait of her people. The books have more than local relevance. Reading them at this juncture in European history gives a particular edge to her insights about the impact of violence. She talks to many survivors, relatives, and descendants of those killed and maimed in Ulster's thirty years of sectarian conflict. Long after the immediate lethality of terrorist bombings and shootings, lives are still disfigured by these acts of savagery. Over 3,500 people lost their lives in Northern Ireland's Troubles. This is a tiny number compared to casualties in Ukraine. It is terrible to think how far into the future this war will cast its blighting shadows. As millions of distraught, displaced, bereaved, and injured people struggle to pick up the pieces of their lives, one hopes that those who listen to, record, and tell their stories will be as skillful in this art as Susan McKay is. She provides a master class in how to listen and has a fine sense of when to put people's own words on the page, when to paraphrase, what is best juxtaposed with what, when the author herself needs to comment and when to stand back. As a result, readers receive a powerful sense of the variety of ways, some admirable, some decidedly not, in which individuals cope—or fail to cope—with challenging, often desperate circumstances. We...

‘And so began the Irish Nation’: Nationality, National Consciousness and Nationalism in Pre-modern Ireland by Brendan Bradshaw (review)

Book Review ‘And so began the Irish Nation’: Nationality, National Consciousness and Nationalism in Pre-modern Ireland, Brendan Bradshaw (Surrey and Burlington: Ashgate, 2015), 318 pages. In the Irish parliament of 1536, legislation was passed which marked the introduction of the Reformation in Ireland, and the designation of the Church of Ireland as the Church ‘as by law established’. In 1969, almost fifty years ago, an article by Brendan Bradshaw on that parliament appeared. Thus began an academic output which has revolutionised our understanding of sixteenth century Ireland, largely by focusing on the political thought of those reformers from within the older colonial community, subsequently known as theAngloIrish . The high point of that local reform tradition, Bradshaw has shown in his book The Irish Constitutional Revolution of the Sixteenth Century (1979), was the act for the kingly title of 1541. The constitutional status of Ireland changed from that of medieval lordship, effectively embracing the Pale and, in a much weaker sense, the great dynasties of Ormond and Desmond, to that of kingdom, covering the entire island, and including all the inhabitants as subjects of the English king. Almost as a by-product of that research, Bradshaw produced a groundbreaking study of one of the Reformation’s consequences, entitled The Dissolution of the Monasteries in Ireland under Henry VIII (1974). To these book-length studies may be added several seminal articles, including an exploration of the outbreak of the Kildare rebellion of 1534. This body of work, rooted in the approach of the Cambridge scholar G R Elton to the Tudor state, served to integrate the study of mid-sixteenth century Ireland into the mainstream of historical research and publication. As editor of five edited essay collections, Bradshaw contributed to the study of the emergence of the British state, leading to a reconfiguration of its early modern history by bringing the interplay between the constituent kingdoms into sharper focus. The year of Bradshaw’s first publication, 1969, marked the outbreak of the Northern troubles in Ireland. Among the groupings involved in the decades of violenceweretheIRA,drawingonahistoricsenseofnationalistgrievanceanda militarist republican genealogy. For professional historians, revulsion at the IRA campaign led to a questioning of the nationalist historical tradition. A process Studies • volume 106 • number 424 493 Book Review: Winter 2017/18 of deconstruction got underway. ‘Revisionism’ entered public discourse. In an article in 1989 (reproduced in this book), Bradshaw offered a wide-ranging critique of the ‘revisionist’trend in recent Irish historiography. Thus, in addition tohisspecialistworkontheTudorworld,asecondstrandemerged:thearticulation and defence of a nationalist view of Irish history. The present volume reflects both of these fields of interest. Of the fourteen essays (twelve already published, and two new pieces), nine are articles on particular historical topics, while the remaining five are reflections on the writing of Irish history. The locus classicus of Bradshaw’s case against the revisionists is in his article published in the professional journal Irish Historical Studies in 1989. While acknowledging the achievements arising from the professionalising of Irish history since the 1930s, Bradshaw challenged some dimensions which he detected in the direction this professionalisation had taken. Specifically, the tacit assumption of neutrality on the part of the historian: while enjoining objectivity, Bradshaw disputes that real neutrality is possible; the pursuit of neutrality (ultimately futile on his account) leads to an anodyne presentation which deepens the cleavage between the professional historian and the public who are interested in the story of their community. He noted a tendency to ignore or downplay catastrophe (for the early modern period he mentions land expropriation, large-scale violence against indigenous people, religious and ethnic discrimination), and a corresponding propensity to normalise disasters (for example, the Famine). In response to this deconstruction of the Irish nationalist tradition, Bradshaw seekstoassertitshistoricalcontinuity,anditsemergenceinthepoliticalthought of local reformers in the sixteenth century. These drew on classical notions of love of patria or homeland, current in the Renaissance, and built on a form of proto-nationalism among the colonial political group in the late middle ages. Bradshaw sees the integration into a single Irish nation of the descendants of the Anglo-Normans with the older Gaelic community as the fruit of shared dislocation at the hands of the new Elizabethan colonial elite...

Microlevel Dynamics of Violence: Explaining Variation in Violence among Rural Districts during Northern Ireland's Troubles

Violence varies in intensity across intrastate political conflicts. This study suggests that interactions between local state agents and nonstate radicals affect the intensity of violence. When contention develops in a community and nonstate actors radicalize, whether or not some local state agents deviate from their institutional role as providers of law and order to support radicals is a crucial feature that explains how some communities experience more violence than others. This argument explains the different trajectories of violence in two neighboring rural districts during the 1971–76 period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The major implication of the study is that these interactions affect not only the intensity of violence in particular communities but also the breadth, length, and end of violence in the overall intrastate conflict.

Other Spaces of the Empire: A Colonial Hotel in J.G. Farrell’s Troubles

Abstract Focusing on the hotel imagery and, more precisely, the hotel Majestic featured in J.G. Farrell’s 1970 novel Troubles, this article provides a spatial contextualization of the historical downfall of the British Empire. In an attempt to establish the concept of the “colonial hotel”, this particular type of hotel is theorized as a fictional means of questioning the sustainability of the imperial project of colonialism. The theoretical framework for considerations of the Majestic in Troubles as a representative of the “colonial hotel” concept is based on Foucault’s heterotopology, as well as on the concepts of liminality and dislocation taken from postcolonial studies. Reading Troubles as an allegory of the Troubles in Ireland and, more broadly, a symptom of the disintegration of the British Empire, the article shows that the hotel, modelled after the historical concept of the Anglo-Irish big house, provides a proper setting where the deconstruction of the binary oppositions of colonial discourse can be played out. While the Majestic represents a mirror-image of the imperial centre, or rather a dislocated centre, its destruction is brought about by its tendency towards constancy and perpetuation of the illusion of grandeur. Similarly, the British Empire refuses to acknowledge the socio-political and historical changes of the early twentieth century and denies the existence of interstitial spaces between its firmly defined structures, whereby it inevitably meets its end.

‘Hawks Turn to Doves': The Response of the Post-revolutionary Generation to the ‘New' Troubles in Ireland, 1969–1971

This article explores how Frank Aiken's (1898–1983) later political career was shaped by his experiences during the Irish revolutionary period (1916–1923). One of the central arguments is that it was Aiken's experience of the internecine violence of the civil war which led him to exercise more caution (relative to the new generation of Fianna Fáil ministers) in dealing with the outbreak of the ‘new’ Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1969. Aiken's experience of UN diplomacy is compared with that of his successor Patrick Hillery, and his role both inside and outside the cabinet, in shaping official government policy towards Northern Ireland at the start of the Troubles, is examined against that of the new post-revolutionary generation, many of whom broke from Aiken's stance on armed struggle, failing to appreciate the consequences of a new civil war erupting north of the border.

Northern Ireland: the reluctant peace

In this thoughtful and engaging book, Feargal Cochrane looks at Northern Ireland's Troubles from the late 1960s to the present day. He explains why, a decade and a half after the peace process ended in political agreement in 1998, sectarian attitudes and violence continue to plague Northern Ireland today. Former members of the IRA now sit alongside their unionist adversaries in the Northern Ireland Assembly, but the region's attitudes have been slow to change and recent years have even seen an upsurge in violence on both sides. In this book, Cochrane, who grew up a Catholic in Belfast in the '70s and '80s, explores how divisions between Catholics and Protestants became so entrenched, and reviews the thirty years of political violence in Northern Ireland-which killed over 3,500 people-leading up to the peace agreement. The book asks whether the peace process has actually delivered for the citizens of Northern Ireland, and what more needs to be done to enhance the current reluctant peace.

Southern Magnolias and Orange Lilies: Gender, Class, and School Integration at Central High and Holy Cross

Scholars have written volumes regarding pro-active American Southern and Northern Irish women in the American civil rights movement and Northern Ireland's troubles. This work generally examines the South’s white, upper-class integrationists and Northern Ireland's Catholic Republicans, while Southern working-class segregationists and Northern Ireland's Protestant Loyalists are ignored. These women and the reasons for invisibility in historical records are similar. Both cultures demanded feminine submission to their place, serving God and man, Dixie and Ulster; conservatism discouraged females from politics. This explores the unusual public stance of Southern workingclass segregationist women and Northern Ireland's working-class Protestant females during Little Rock's Central High School crisis of 1957 and Belfast's Holy Cross Primary School protest of 2001. Segregationists protested integrating black students, while Protestants railed at Catholic families who walked daughters to school via the exclusively Protestant Glenbryn Estate. In analyzing these events, I examine the gender history and traditions of each group. I survey the social environment that motivated these women's protests, and the justifications used to delve into the public arena while defending the status quo. I also examine how these choices altered political roles for both groups in the protests' aftermath. My analysis yields integral conclusions regarding the personal and political ideologies of Southern segregationist and Northern Irish Protestant females. This study explores the fears and anxieties that these females held toward what they regarded as black and Catholic encroachment in societies. My study belongs to a limited body of research that will hopefully begin to provide understanding of the perspectives and consequences of two distantly separated groups of women who have been quieted in the Central High and Holy Cross dramas.

Long-Term Effects of Political Violence: Narrative Inquiry Across a 20-Year Period

The study of long-term effects of political violence generally concentrates on effects of a single event or period of violence on individuals or groups of individuals and commonly relies on recollections from those who experienced violence a long time after the event. Against the backdrop of Northern Ireland's Troubles, in this article we use narrative inquiry methodology to explore the long-term effects of violence across a 20-year period on a different level. Using two sets of interview data, one collected 20 years ago during a period of intense violence and the other collected recently, after the ceasefires when levels of community violence had decreased, we allow for comparisons of contemporaneous experiences and personal narratives that illustrate differences and similarities across a 20-year period. Personal accounts of violent experiences, individual coping and psychological health, social support needs and provision, and political and cultural change mirrored fluctuating levels of community violence across time, showed growing levels of societal awareness of victims' issues and increasing levels of service provision, and illustrated the effects of postceasefire violence.

The IRA Apology of 2002 and forgiveness in Northern Ireland's troubles: A cross-national study of printed media.

The IRA Apology of 2002 and forgiveness in Northern Ireland's troubles: A cross-national study of printed media.

The IRA Apology of 2002 and Forgiveness in Northern Ireland's Troubles: A Cross-National Study of Printed Media

This study provides a cross-national exploration of the media and public responses to the 2002 Irish Republican Army (IRA) statement of apology for the hundreds of non-combatant deaths caused by them over the past 30 years. The study explored responses to the statement in national, regional, and local news papers across the United States, England, and Northern Ireland. It was hypothesized that relational closeness to victims of the IRA campaign would affect attitudes toward the IRA apology, as would geographical closeness to the political violence in Northern Ireland; also within Northern Ireland there would be differences in attitudes toward the statement due to the ethnopolitical orientation of the newspapers' intended readership. The results broadly supported these hypotheses, with the U.S. print media being generally more positive and the English print media more negative in attitude toward the statement of apology. Also, among responses in England, those areas that had suffered directly from IRA violence tended to have the most negative reactions of all. In Northern Ireland, newspapers with a predominately Catholic readership responded to the IRA apology generally positively, whereas newspapers with a predominately Protestant readership responded generally negatively. The results illustrate difficulties facing peace processes in settings of ethnic violence and the complexity of responses to apology and forgiveness of relevant publics within and outside actual conflict areas.

Faultlines, Limits, Transgressions: A Theme-Cluster in Late Twentieth-Century Irish Poetry

FAULTLINES, LIMITS, TRANSGRESSIONS: A THEME-CLUSTER IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRISH POETRY ROBERT WELCH Lines of history lines of power . . . Lines of defiance lines of discord under Walker’s arm brisk with guns British soldiers patrol the walls the gates between Ulster Catholic Ulster Protestant. . . . Lines of loss lines of energy . . . John Montague, The Rough Field These are the incantatory openings of various strophes in John Montague ’s The Rough Field, taken from the section of that sombre poem called “A New Siege” (1974:74,77). Looking back now, nearly thirty years after it was written, it may not be an exaggeration to suggest that much Irish poetry since 1972 has taken a kind of inner direction, an urgent prompting , from Montague’s fierce but elegant analysis of the reemerging Troubles in Ireland in that intensely orchestrated long work. The volume is a formal meditation that brings together history, memory, politics, the cascade of events as they unfold in the disparity of crisis, biography, and family history. Montague’s poem creates the “rough field” of living history by means of an individual conscience trying to negotiate its terrain, which is on the one hand as familiar as a townland, but on the other as strange and A THEME-CLUSTER IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRISH POETRY 161 terrifying as the places and landscapes of nightmare. In its nervous syntax, its curt lines stripped down to a kind of bardic economy, The Rough Field registers the reopening of old wounds, old faultlines in the Irish psyche, while recognizing too that these cuts and tears are not unconnected to other fissures and cracks opening up in Europe and America in the late 1960s and early 1970s: streets of Berlin Paris, Chicago seismic waves zig-zagging through a faulty world (1974:76) It is one of the achievements of Montague’s poem that these broader issues of political and social fissure are integrated into a series of biographical and familial explorations, so that the genealogy of public rifts and disruptions is given a personal and intimate stress, a felt interiority. The faultline is not only between different communities in Northern Ireland , between North and South, Ireland and Britain, Teague and Prod; it is also within communities, within families, within the Montagues themselves whose townland is the Rough Field of the title, Garvaghey (Mod. Ir. Garbh Achadh, literally ‘rough field’). And it runs, this fault, from father to son, from James Montague, estranged from his Tyrone family while he works behind a grille in the New York subway, to John Montague , who grows up to be very like his father, “the least happy / man I have known” (1974:47). This is candidly, bravely recorded in “The Fault”: When I am angry, sick or tired The line on my forehead pulses, The line on my left temple Opened by an old car accident. My father had the same scar In the same place, as if The fault ran through Us both: anger, impatience, A stress born of violence. (1974:45) Montague goes on remorselessly to describe the kind of sound a wound makes, this time the historical wound of the defeat of Irish civilization in the century following Kinsale: Who knows the sound a wound makes? A THEME-CLUSTER IN LATE TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRISH POETRY 162 Scar tissue can rend, the old hurt tear open as the torso of the fiddle groans to carry the tune . . . (1974:46) The consciousness of loss, the avid and tormenting awareness of it, rises up in bitterness, accusation, anger, and hatred. Montague owns up to the lot in verse dignified but also shocking in its candor: This bitterness I inherit from my father, the swarm of blood to the brain, the vomit surge of race hatred, the victim seeing the oppressor . . . (1974:46) This is what erupted during the Civil Rights March to Burntollet; on Bloody Sunday in January 1972; and in more recent times, before the cease-fires, at Greysteel. It was at Greysteel on Halloween 1993 that Robert Torrens McKnight from Macosquin, with others, walked into the Rising Sun overlooking Lough Foyle, said “Trick or Treat?” and sprayed the bar with automatic fire, killing 13 people. It is...

Book Review: Northern Ireland's Troubles: The Human Cost

Book Review: Northern Ireland's Troubles: The Human Cost

Personal accounts from Northern Ireland's troubles: public conflict, private loss

The troubles is my life multiple bereavement and loss serious injury living with the aftermath taking up arms in the minority loss of a father his only child unintended death all in a day's work that was the last time seen him I don't ask God for anything Just me and the kids rough justice.

Northern Ireland's troubles: the human costs

Part 1 Context: Northern Ireland - a state in conflict understanding political violence in Northern Ireland economic and social aspects of the troubles pen pictures of the protagonists a chronology of events. Part 2 The human costs of the troubles: profiling those who died in Northern Ireland's troubles patterns of violence victims and perpetrators half the battle - the impact of the troubles on children conclusions and next steps.

“Though Not an Irishman”

Abstract. One of the most important elements to the rise of Henry George to international prominence in the 1880s was his‐successful cultivation of a large Irish‐American following. This was no small accomplishment, given the fact that George was not Irish Catholic, but rather English‐American Protestant. Nonetheless, through his early interest in Ireland's troubles, marriage to Irish Catholic Annie McCloskey Fox, friendship with Patrick Ford and Michael Davitt, activism in the Irish Land League, travels through Ireland during the Land War as a correspondent for the Irish World, and linking the struggle of Irish peasants against economic injustice to a similar struggle of American workers, George developed an enormous Irish‐American following. This relationship accounted for much of the early sales of Progress and Poverty and subsequent lecture opportunities, as well as making him known widely throughout the British Isles. The culmination of this phenomenon was George's sensational run for mayor of New York City in 1886.

Traces of Another Time: History and Politics in Postwar British Fiction (review)

Reviewed by: Traces of Another Time: History and Politics in Postwar British Fiction Margaret Moan Rowe Margaret Scanlan . Traces of Another Time: History and Politics in Postwar British Fiction. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1990. 211 pp. $27.50. Margaret Scanlan's study, which provides absorbing analyses of a number of contemporary British novels, invites praise. In three parts she moves from works as different as J. G. Farrell's Troubles, to Iris Murdoch's Nuns and Soldiers, to Doris Lessing's Children of Violence, and Anthony Burgess' The End of the World News. Her particular interest is Britain's relationship with Ireland, Republic and North (her movement between references to England and references to Britain is somewhat annoying). This interest leads to the strongest section in the book "Part One: Troubles in Ireland." In those three chapters, Scanlan's argument that in contemporary fiction "we find a rebirth and development of the sceptical and critical history novel that Thackeray wrote" finds its most cohesive presentation in her readings of novels by Murdoch, Bowen, Farrell, and works by less well known Irish writers like Thomas Kilroy and Bernard MacLaverty. More diffuse and less satisfying is her second section "Losing Confidence: Spies and Other Aliens" where her inclusion of chapters on fiction influenced by Kim Philby's story and Murdoch's Nuns and Soldiers seems a forced fit. Once again, however, I must note that the chapters themselves arc very absorbing. Scanlan writes clearly and displays a real command of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century novel; she has read widely and makes effective use of examples. She draws on contemporary historiography and literary theory to buttress her readings of the novels, and, as Alvin Kiernan aptly notes on the book jacket, "The theory, most of which is quietly assumed rather than flaunted and agonized over, is very impressive." [End Page 623] Copyright © 1990 Purdue Research Foundation