This short extract is from chapter 2 (The impact of the Troubles on women’s experience and equality) from the upcoming e-book by Vicky Cosstick entitled Don’t Mention the War: Exploring Aspects of the Legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles. This e-book will be launched in Belfast on Monday 4 February – you can register to attend via the Eventbrite page here. 

This is the second serialisation from the e-book. The first excerpt sets out the issues to be explored: There are in NI two distinct realities, two parallel universes.

Vicky’s work encompasses research and essays about the legacy of the conflict in Northern Ireland on the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, working with artist Rita Duffy and supported by Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust funding.

The e-book can be ordered in advance of publication from Amazon here and will be published on 4 February. Other articles from Vicky Cosstick on Northern Slant can be found here.

Northern Slant welcomes perspectives from authors of different backgrounds and political persuasions – the opinions shared in this publication belong entirely to the author and not Northern Slant.

 

For me, examining the question of gender and the legacy of the Troubles forked into two sub-questions – which in the end re-joined into one overall question. Those two questions are: what was distinctive about women’s experience of the conflict and, therefore, needs to be addressed in any analysis of and response to the legacy of the conflict; secondly, what was the impact of the conflict on the progress of women’s rights and equality issues, and how has the women’s movement in Northern Ireland been effective in progressing those issues? The overarching question is: what is the untold story of women in Northern Ireland?

Last year, the documentary No Stone Unturned, on the Loughinisland Massacre, received justified praise. It followed the shooting by the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in June 1994 of six Catholic men who were sitting in a bar watching the Republic of Ireland play in a World Cup football match.

The focus is on re-telling the story of the violence, complete with dramatic re-enactments of the attack itself and photographs of the bloody aftermath. It is an almost completely male story: the victims, the perpetrators, the investigators, the documentary makers, all those quoted in the film – former RUC personnel, commentators, politicians – are men. The only women in the film are the wife of one of the perpetrators and the relatives of the dead, who are leading the campaign for justice. None of the reviews seemed to notice or comment on this fact, nor has anyone I have spoken to about the film noticed the absence of women’s voices in the film.

Like this documentary, the story of the Troubles has been an almost completely male story, of men of violence on Republican and Loyalist sides, and in the RUC, UDR and British Army, against predominantly male victims, told by male writers and journalists, and studied by male academics. We can therefore speak literally of a “master-narrative” of the conflict. There is no book that looks overall at the subject of “women and the Troubles”. “Women are invisible in mainstream analyses of the conflict” (Rooney 2006). This has been accepted, says Eilish Rooney, as a “matter of common sense. Men dominate in the war and in the negotiations, so the discourse simply reflects the reality of the sex segregation… Women’s invisibility goes unnoticed and unmentioned.” The peace agreements were made mostly by men. Northern Ireland from the 1970s to the 1990s was, says Yvonne Galligan (2008), a “militarised and masculinised society.” Women are relegated to tokenistic, secondary or supporting roles.

 

Women are excluded from the narrative

It could be argued that the very concept of legacy as generally accepted in Northern Ireland is a gendered concept – it may appear to be “gender neutral”, but women are excluded and invisible by definition because it focusses on specific deaths and incidents, violence, blame and immediate impact – rather than on story, relationship and process. Of course, women are capable – and were during the Troubles – of violence too; and, of course, not all men are violent. But I will argue that only when the conflict is viewed through a gender lens does the broader legacy of the conflict emerge into full view. To recognise the broader legacy of the conflict is to have a gender lens.

The male narrative of the Troubles tends to focus on the violence itself and the bloody aftermath. It is about violence and death, responsibility or blame, it is about justification and which side they were on. It is about whataboutery. If it is a personal story it usually begins with recruitment, recounts the violent incident(s), and how many times they were in jail and for how long – but rarely what for. Men do not often talk about their own childhood, whether it was happy or if they were physically or sexually abused, whether they have problems with alcohol, how many children they have and whether they adore, abandon or beat their wives.

“The men fought the war and saved Ireland from the pub”, says one woman activist (in conversation with the author). Meanwhile women were expected to put the food on the table and manage domestic life. Most perpetrators were men and most victims were male – that created many widows and bereaved mothers, children and sisters, and women carers of the injured and long term severely disabled. “Women bore a disproportionate burden of care which often isolates them in the home” (WPB 2014). Women were not passive supporters or onlookers – they actively kept domestic life going, were formal or informal community organisers, sought to protect and keep their children safe and out of trouble.

 

The predominance of sectarian division

If you ask about the women’s movement in Northern Ireland, you will immediately be told the story of the Women’s Coalition (NIWC), which made a remarkable contribution to the process and content of the 1998 peace agreement.

The story of the Coalition, including of the toxic, misogynistic culture of the negotiations that the women endured, is powerfully told in the 2017 documentary Wave Goodbye to Dinosaurs (BBCNI 10 Sep 2017). Unfortunately, the contribution of the Coalition to the formal peace process was not sustained after the Agreement, and the NIWC itself was wound up in May 2006. There is no mention of women’s issues in the St Andrew’s Agreement of 2006; the 2014 Stormont House Agreement makes a single mention of the need for the advancement of women in public life. The Civic Forum met just a few times between 2000 and 2002; the issues mentioned above have been neglected in post-conflict Northern Ireland, and now remain as aspects of the broader legacy, the residue of the Troubles. “Significant for women has been the abandonment of the Civic Forum which might have allowed women access to influence from their civil society locations” (Ashe & Roulston 2016).

Other than this brief shining moment of the Women’s Coalition, issues of women and gender in Northern Ireland have been and continue to be sublimated to a male-dominated, sectarian politics. According to Murtagh (2008), “The hierarchies of gender remain unchanged by almost 20 years of ceasefire and peace.”

The women’s movement in Northern Ireland has failed to be effective for several reasons. First, sectarian division has always predominated over gender issues. Secondly, the “women’s movement became the women’s sector” (a conversation with the author), and that grassroots, women’s community development sector, although effective in certain ways and at certain things, became fragmented and weakened. Feminism was deemed unattractive.

 

Systemic exclusion of women

What is not adequately acknowledged is the systemic relationship between inequalities and harms experienced by woman in Northern Ireland today and the Troubles. There is, says Susan McCrory of the Falls Women’s Centre, a generation of women aged between 40-60 “completely forgotten about, who lived through the conflict and continue to live through the conflict”. The Women and Peacebuilding project calls for a “conflict mapping” to be undertaken to demonstrate the experiences of women affected by the conflict which addresses specific direct and indirect gender harms that resulted from the conflict.

Women are systematically excluded from peace processes and agreements worldwide despite evidence that peace agreements which include women are more likely to last. According to research, of 585 peace agreements signed between 1990–2010 only 16% contained references to women; fewer than 8% of delegates to UN-mediated peace processes were women; and fewer than 3% of the signatories were women. At the same time, the participation of civil society groups, including women’s organisations, makes a peace agreement 64% less likely to fail (CFR).

Women’s experiences of the conflict, rights and equality have been consistently ignored in Northern Ireland. This is partly because sectarian division and issues predominate in policy and the public mindset. It is also one of the consequences of the fact that the Troubles in Northern Ireland have never been recognised as an “armed conflict” or a “war.” As a result, policy and practice do not address the legacy of the conflict directly. Where policy and practice do address it, they fail to mention women, and where they mention women they fail to mention the conflict. Only when UNSCR 1325 is applied as a lens will full justice be done to the reality of women’s issues in Northern Ireland and to the full reality of the legacy of the conflict.

The root cause of the systemic blindness to women’s experience in Northern Ireland is the sectarian mindset, which ranks maintenance of a polarised and segregated society above equality. The consequences of the exclusion of women from the “master-narrative” are many and various but our primary concern here is that it has led to a failure to implement equality for women in Northern Ireland as well as an incomplete understanding of the legacy of the Troubles. It is therefore one reason that progress towards a “warm peace”, marked by forgiveness and reconciliation, remains out of reach.