This short extract is from chapter 3 (The reality and consequences of trauma in Northern Ireland) 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 third 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. The second excerpts focuses on The impact of the Troubles on women’s experience and equality.

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.

 

Delayed response to victims in Northern Ireland

It was not until the late 1980s, with the aftermath of the Enniskillen bomb and the beginning of the Bloody Sunday campaign, writes Graham Dawson (2007), that public awareness of the effects of violence began to surface. The WAVE Trauma Centre, a grassroots charity offering care and support to those bereaved, injured or traumatised as a result of the Troubles, was founded in 1991 but it was not until 1997 that an official government response began. Until then, says Dawson, “there had been a suppressed culture regarding the effects of violence”. In 1997, Kenneth Bloomfield was appointed as the first Victims Commissioner, producing the report We Will Remember Them in May 1998. The Good Friday Agreement, signed just weeks before, only briefly acknowledged the need to “address the suffering of victims” (Rights, Safeguards 11). The 2002 Programme for Government included a substantial commitment to a victims’ strategy and an implementation fund was launched during the same year.

But in 2007 the Report from the Interim Victims and Survivors Commissioner Bertha McDougall acknowledged that the response to victims was patchy, inadequately funded, and lacked a needs analysis. She concluded: “It is apparent that government was reactive rather than pro-active in meeting the needs of victims and survivors.”

Sissel Rosland writes that with the establishment of the Victims Commission there was an institutionalisation of victimhood – and the start of conflicting views about whether victimhood is passive and depoliticising or whether it implies agency and politicisation (Rosland 2009).

In 2009 The Report of the Consultative Group on the Past (more commonly known as Eames-Bradley) was published and is widely considered to have been an effective response. The co-chairmen were highly respected: The Right Reverend the Lord Eames had been Primate of All-Ireland and Archbishop of Armagh; Denis Bradley was a former Catholic priest and former vice-chairman of the Northern Ireland Policing Board.

The Eames-Bradley report was immediately rejected by unionists, led by Jim Allister of the Traditional Unionist Voice (TUV) party, because of the proposal that the closest relative of every victim should receive a £12,000 payment. Despite the official definition of victims (Victims and Survivors (Northern Ireland) Order 2006), the idea of a “hierarchy of victims” – the idea that some victims are more innocent or blameworthy than others – was and remains common among unionists and has continued to dog attempts to respond to victims. For example, unionists have consistently blocked the granting of a pension to long-term disabled because a tiny minority may have been Republican terrorists who blew themselves up by mistake.

No further progress was made until the Stormont House Agreement in 2014, which proposed the four pillars or mechanisms to deal with the past: a Historical Investigations Unit, an Independent Commission on Information Retrieval, an Oral History Archive and an Implementation and Reconciliation Group. Its implementation was further delayed by the collapse of the Stormont Assembly and Executive in 2016. During the same year, the Lord Chief Justice, Declan Morgan, repeatedly called for £150m of funding to be released to allow the over 50 outstanding legacy cases to be addressed within 5 years.

On 8 March 2018, Sir Paul Girvan held that former first minister Arlene Foster’s decision not to allow a paper on legacy inquests to go before the Executive Committee meeting on 24 March 2016 was unlawful as she had failed to take into account an obligation on state authorities for the Coroner’s Office to comply with Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights, on the right to life. He ruled that the provision of funding for legacy inquests cannot be postponed until a political agreement is reached; nor is it dependent on agreement of an overall package of legacy arrangements.

The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Karen Bradley, on 11 March 2018 finally announced a consultation on the legacy mechanisms proposed in the Stormont House Agreement, which concluded in October.

Some have spoken of the continual kicking of legacy issues into the long grass, and of a “subtle resistance” to implementing the legacy mechanisms. Some say that the most recent proposals are inferior to those proposed by Eames-Bradley. Many would argue that the proposals do not respond to gender issues. The fear persists that the proposed mechanisms are too complex and are mutually, internally incompatible. They do not, in my view, respond adequately to the full reality of the “legacy” indicated by my own research.

It is only during the last decade that serious attention has been given to transgenerational trauma in Northern Ireland. Three substantial studies have been recently published, by Queen’s University of Belfast in 2017, by the Commission for Victims and Survivors in 2015 (O’Neill and others), and by WAVE Trauma Centre in 2014. They all survey the existing, comparative literature on transgenerational trauma. They confirm that it does exist and explore the various means by which it occurs, express the need for further study in Northern Ireland and offer recommendations for policy and practice.

Professor John Brewer has spoken of the “brutalisation of everyday life” (conversation with author) which persists to the present day in Northern Ireland and is characterised by a desensitisation to violence, and higher degrees of domestic abuse, poor mental health, addictions, suicide and depression. There is a high degree of overlap between depression, suicidal tendencies, and addictions to drugs and alcohol, and therefore people may present to any of the relevant services with similar underlying causes. However, those agencies are not being funded from the same government departments, may not be working with one another, and are not linked strategically by any umbrella strategy or programme. There have been calls for a national trauma centre to be established. During the Galvanising the Peace Network conference which brought community groups together at Duncairn Centre in Belfast (20 Sep 2017), following publication of a discussion paper, a participant noted that “people are too busy at ground level dealing with trauma to think strategically about it”. A connection is needed, said another, between frontline workers and the strategists.

Many of the interviews and informal conversations I have in Northern Ireland involve a tangential acknowledgement of the systemic reality of trauma in Northern Ireland. Leader of the Green Party in Northern Ireland, Claire Bailey MLA, asks: “Have we acknowledged we are a deeply traumatised society?” Artist Bronagh Lawson suggests that many people in Northern Ireland continue to experience elements of trauma, including politicians and media, and of course trauma professionals themselves. During a panel discussion on Embracing the Most Marginalised at the British Council’s Peace & Beyond conference in Belfast to mark the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement (April 2018), I asked the panellists if they thought there had been adequate acknowledgement of systemic and transgenerational trauma. They all replied that there had not. PSNI Assistant Chief Constable Stephen Martin said: “We haven’t absolutely caught the thrust of it. There is lots of good work, but it’s not as coordinated or as fulsome as it should be.”

During the same discussion, two youth workers shared their experience. Sean Murray of the organisation Breakthrough in Dungannon spoke of the legacy of the Troubles in border areas: poor mental health, high levels of self-harm, suicide, low income, alcohol, fear of dissident paramilitaries – 70% of all this being conflict-related, compounded by “Brexit anxiety”. Gary McAllister of AMBIT in Ballymena, which he described as the “heroin capital of Northern Ireland”, spoke of unemployment and deprivation, paramilitary attacks, racism, sectarianism and high levels of trauma, depression and suicide among young people.

 

The trauma process

The legacy of the conflict, says one source, has disallowed politics from evolving in a normal, pragmatic way. It has “smothered” the normal dynamic of politics (source in conversation with the author). Furthermore, says Professor John Brewer, Northern Ireland’s universities are as culpable as its churches; they have not moved into a post-conflict research agenda.

One of the characteristics of cultural trauma is the “refusal to recognise the existence of others’ trauma” which leads to the failure to achieve a “moral stance”. In other words, a failure to take responsibility for causing pain and hurt, which is a necessary step towards reconciliation. Humberto de la Calle, head of the Colombian government peace negotiating team which in November 2016 reached a final agreement with the FARC rebels, said that Colombia “needs to learn that there is not just one truth about the conflict, there are many. And learning these truths is not just about knowing the history of the conflict but about taking responsibility for our roles in it” (Schneider 2017).

A striking perennial factor in the Northern Ireland conflict is each side’s – republican, loyalist and the British government – failure to take responsibility for their own violent acts and inability to empathise with the suffering of the other side. To the outsider, this is stark and incomprehensible. “By denying the reality of others’ suffering, people not only diffuse their own responsibility but often project the responsibility for their own suffering onto these others” (Alexander 2004).

Speaking at Queen’s University, Belfast, in May 2018, Irish President Michael D Higgins spoke of philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s notion of “narrative hospitality”: a stance of opening ourselves to the “perspectives, stories, memories and pains of the stranger, the other, even the enemy of yesterday, however dissonant it might seem.”

When completed, the cultural trauma process would in some cases “identify the existence and source of human suffering” and “take on board some significant responsibility for it”, allowing them to share the suffering of others. The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, for example, says Alexander, “succeeded to a significant degree in generating the trauma process beyond the racially polarised audience to a shared experience.” The trauma process therefore can potentially lift the communal understanding of a trauma above and beyond the polarising dynamic. Whether that happens depends on how the master narrative, the “spiral of signification”, the cultural meaning-making processes are mediated by the various institutional carriers, and indeed the power, control and independence of those various institutional systems. Furthermore “local, political and national governments deploy significant power over the trauma process.” Whether and how all these elements come into play are “subjected to the unstructured, unforeseeable contingencies of historical time” (Alexander 2004).

Dawson writes that you can only come to terms with the past if you know the truth about it. In Northern Ireland, the very notion of overcoming the legacy of the past is problematic, considering the historical – and contemporary, I would add – British state denial of responsibility. This denial is exacerbated by the veil of official secrecy, reinforced by the “war on terror” that began after 9/11, which continues to obscure the past and to impede a necessary reassessment of the state’s role in the conflict and its political, cultural and psychic impact.

Let us be clear. This issue affects not only the resolution of specific legacy cases and inquests but how the Northern Ireland conflict is perceived and remembered by the public as a whole, both in Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK. This, says Dawson, is “the effects of state power in structuring the field of narratives” – precisely echoing Alexander’s insight into the mediation of cultural trauma (Dawson 2007).

To summarise, the issue is how a society moves from 30 years of violent conflict to some semblance of normality. That journey must start with a widespread recognition that this is indeed a post-conflict society and that the residue of the violence is everyone’s responsibility. That includes the Westminster government acknowledging their moral, legal and financial responsibility for the part they have played in the conflict and for contributing to reparations today. It includes resolving, as far as possible, the outstanding truth and justice issues. It involves acknowledging that for the long-term severely disabled – who still do not have a pension – injured and traumatised that the “past” exists in the daily present. It involves arriving at a mature approach to the telling and retelling of multiple narratives. It involves finding genuinely cathartic ways, including through the arts, to memorialise the conflict. It involves addressing the ongoing systemic and transgenerational trauma issues: addictions, suicide, depression, anxiety. It involves the political leadership in both Northern Ireland and Westminster taking responsibility for their leadership role, in particular for addressing ongoing sectarian issues.