Vicky Cosstick is the author of the upcoming e-book entitled Don’t Mention the War: Exploring Aspects of the Legacy of the Northern Ireland Troubles. This will be launched in Belfast on Monday 4 February – you can register to attend via the Eventbrite page here. Her 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.

Parts of this e-book are being serialised on Northern Slant ahead of the launch – it 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.

 

There are in Northern Ireland two distinct realities, two parallel universes

“We must be able to do better than this”, reflected a young woman in Belfast, shortly after the 20th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement, on the progress made or not made during those two decades. She works in PR and her husband for a university; they have a child just about to start school. Their lives have been little affected by the Northern Ireland Troubles and their legacy, but this woman admits she still thinks about whether the person she has just met is a Protestant or Catholic. She and her husband wonder what sort of place their child is growing up in; they would prefer their child to go to an integrated school.

What sort of place is Northern Ireland? You could come as a tourist or on business – particularly on a sunny day – and believe that everything is normal, indeed that you are in a very attractive place. Most visitors will have heard of the Troubles, but it is easy to believe superficially that they are over and done with. However, if you picked up a local newspaper, switched on the radio, tuned into the local Twitter traffic, or visited in July, you would quickly recognise that all is not, even twenty years after the peace agreement was signed, entirely well with Northern Ireland. You might catch a mention of “former paramilitaries”, reference to one of the unresolved legacy killings, or find yourself in the middle of a sectarian debate. It is possible to live and work almost entirely normally in Northern Ireland – especially with eyes wide shut – but it is not a normal place.

There are in Northern Ireland two distinct realities, two parallel universes. On the one hand, there is the shiny bright world of the Titanic Quarter and the booming tourist trade. In early August 2018, Amanda Ferguson reported in The Irish Times that “2.26 million room nights were sold in 2017. New hotels are springing up across the city, catering to both the luxury and price-conscious ends of the market” (4 August 2018). Some or many in Northern Ireland, who prefer not to “mention the war”, would like to believe that the Troubles are over, are in the past. That position suits those in business and tourism, and in government in Northern Ireland and the UK.

On the other hand, Northern Ireland is stuck in a logjam of unresolved post-conflict issues: the collapse of the Stormont Assembly and the continuing failure of negotiations to restore power-sharing; unresolved legacy issues, including the failure to grant a pension to disabled victims; continuing signs of a divided society – manifold forms of segregation and sectarianism: the peacewalls, segregated housing and education; the persistent scars of years of violence including the levels of trauma, suicide, depression, addiction; high rates of poverty and deprivation. Many citizens of Northern Ireland carry the dual reality within them, functioning more or less normally at one level but bearing the story and wounds of the conflict within them, more or less consciously. There is a layer of life that lives the Troubles every day, a layer within individuals and families, within workplaces and government institutions.

 

A frozen peace – interrogating the way that “legacy” has typically been understood       

The peace process is paralysed in a number of ways: “Peace is not a given in Northern Ireland but is instead continually appraised, threatened, undermined and re-negotiated” (Murtagh 2008). And nothing could be more threatening to that process, it now transpires, than Brexit.

My book on the peacewalls – Belfast: Toward a City Without Walls – was published in June 2015. After the work was done and the excitement died down, I accepted it might be the end of the matter, but something kept drawing me back to Belfast. I continued to write articles and stay in touch with developments around the peacewalls and the wider peace process. I continued to be intrigued by the complexity of the place, by its dissonances.

We were then approaching, and have since, marked the twentieth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. The Agreement is rightly celebrated for having brought an end to the endemic violence of the previous thirty years, but it left “unfinished business”. Discourse amongst the mainstream media in Northern Ireland has been dominated by “legacy” issues, which include over fifty outstanding inquests and some 1,188 unresolved killings – out of the total of 3,600 killings. Of those unresolved killings, 530 are attributed to Republicans, 271 to Loyalists, 354 to the security forces (the British Army, the Ulster Defence Regiment or UDR which was the part-time auxiliary force of the British Army, and former police force the Royal Ulster Constabulary or RUC), and 33 to “unknown”. The “four pillars” of the legacy mechanisms proposed by the Stormont House Agreement in 2014 designed to “deal with the past” are now out for wide consultation: a Historical Investigations Unit, an Independent Commission on Information Retrieval, an Oral History Archive and an Implementation and Reconciliation Group.

When the word “legacy” is used in Northern Ireland it is usually understood to refer to these 1,188 Troubles-related deaths, the needs of victims and survivors, and issues related to reconciliation and memorialising the past – the direct impacts of the conflict on individuals. I was surprised that people were surprised when I referred to the peacewalls as part of the legacy of the conflict. I began to wonder if the definition of “legacy” was too narrow and specific, and to ask, “what is, actually, the legacy of the Troubles?” – what is the overall impact of the Troubles on the life of Northern Ireland? What is the residue of the conflict? The endemic violence is over, and there is no appetite for its return, but the conflict persists. I wondered whether part of the reason that the peace process is unfinished is that the full effect of the Troubles hasn’t been fully acknowledged, even within Northern Ireland itself. Furthermore, the conflict persists because it is, consciously or unconsciously, in the interests of some or many that it should. Which are the groups and institutions who benefit from the polarisation in Northern Ireland?

The metaphor of ice and frozenness has often been used to describe the paralysis of the peace process in Northern Ireland. Professor John Brewer of Queen’s University Belfast (in conversation with the author) has spoken of a “cold peace” – an absence of violence but a lack of forgiveness and reconciliation. The remarkable feminist Ulster artist Rita Duffy has often used the image of icebergs in her work; one of her exhibitions had the title “Thaw”. Sandra Peake, CEO of WAVE Trauma Centre, has used the idea of “frozen time” to evolve the arresting of psychic development that happens for those traumatised by the conflict. There are many, she said, frozen in that “block of ice” (quoted in Dawson 2007). I began to ask why and how is the peace process frozen in Northern Ireland.

Meanwhile, the result of the 2016 Brexit referendum shocked me to the core. With a home in Donegal, friends either side of the border and a long-standing fascination with Ireland, I have been criss-crossing the border for the more than 40 years since my first visit to the island in 1977. The total failure of debates prior to, or for some time after, the referendum to have taken into account the impact on Ireland, North and South, and the increasingly invisible border highlighted the endemic invisibility of Northern Ireland in the British media. In August 2018, two years after the vote, prominent Conservative MP Jacob Rees-Mogg’s comment that after Brexit people crossing the Irish border should be subject to “inspections, just like during The Troubles” betrays the ignorance and carelessness of a certain, worrying proportion of the powers that be at Westminster. Furthermore, it is Brexit that influenced Prime Minister Theresa May’s decision to trigger the general election of 2017 which, in turn, led to the necessity of the Conservative Party to make a pact with the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) to keep them in power. I will argue that the unhappy and tetchy Tory/DUP alliance has also had a negative, braking effect on the peace process.

This series of essays is therefore an attempt to write differently about the complex post-conflict reality in Northern Ireland. I am interested, as always, in what is changing and how. I am interrogating the way that “legacy” has typically been understood, particularly in light of post-anniversary reflections on the Good Friday Agreement.

 

About this e-book

This essay consists of six chapters, including this introduction.

In Chapter Two, I explore issues of gender equality and women’s experiences of the Troubles. I look at the contribution of the Women’s Coalition to the Good Friday Agreement and ask why it was not sustained afterwards. I suggest that the very concept of “legacy” as commonly used and understood in Northern Ireland is not gender-neutral, but leans heavily towards male experience and perspectives on the conflict. I notice that most studies of the conflict exclude women’s experiences and women’s needs; and most studies of gender equality and women’s issues fail to adequately address the conflict. I suggest that only when the lens of UN Security Council Resolution 1325 is applied is proper attention given to women’s experiences and perspectives on the conflict, and the impact on their lives then and now. I ask why on almost any measure of equality, women in Northern Ireland lag behind the rest of the UK and I suggest that sectarian politics have dominated the agenda, disallowing any attention to women’s equality issues. I suggest the need for a “conflict mapping” to identify and address the direct and indirect gender harms that resulted from the Troubles.

In Chapter Three, I examine the consequences of the astonishing lack of government response to victims and survivors during the thirty years of conflict, and the uneven pattern of support in the twenty years since the Agreement was signed. I explore, in the broadest terms, the evidence of high rates of poor mental health, suicide, addiction and depression, and domestic violence. I suggest that the extent of the impact of the violence and other factors have caused “cultural trauma” and indeed a “blocked” or frozen trauma process which is preventing Northern Ireland from moving beyond conflict. I look at three recent studies of transgenerational effects of trauma. I suggest that it is too soon to speak of forgiveness and reconciliation when the individual, systemic and transgenerational effects of trauma – as well as the justice issues – remain unaddressed.

In Chapter Four, I suggest that there have been two fundamental structural flaws in the Good Friday Agreement: it enshrined the notion of “two communities”, thus inhibiting progress towards a “shared future”; it failed to acknowledge the severity of the conflict and the role and responsibility of the British state as one of the protagonists. This and other weaknesses in the Agreement have left it vulnerable to the unanticipated crisis caused by Brexit and the DUP/Tory pact at Westminster. I explore how and why Brexit damages the “spirit and soul” of the Good Friday Agreement. I suggest that the Agreement needs to be understood as a process rather than as a document, with various key moments and elements that continue to this day.

In Chapter Five, I explore the role played by the media in the post-conflict peace process in Northern Ireland. I look at the reasons for and implications of the lack of British media interest in Northern Ireland and the nature of the public discourse within Northern Ireland. I explore a “dependency dynamic” between victims and perpetrators, journalists, academics and politicians that feeds, I believe, the ongoing conflict and helps to keep the peace process “frozen”. I suggest that the media is a critical component of a functioning democracy and is required to hold the government, and the Tory/DUP arrangement, to account.

Chapter Six I have called “In-conclusions” because of the state of suspended animation in which Northern Ireland still finds itself. I summarise the current political state of play in the light of my research. I explore the Tackling Paramilitarism initiative and some positive contributions being made to the peace process particularly at community level, including oral history and the amount of cross-community work. I explore the role and responsibilities of political leadership and I summarise the conclusions and implications of my own research.

 

Challenging the “master-narrative”

In this introduction I have attempted to explain what interests me so much about Northern Ireland – as the research progressed, I became aware of deeper personal motivations. I realised, for the first time, incredibly, the impact of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) on my own family and myself. I had one grandfather, on my American mother’s side, who died from suicide during the Great Depression when put out of work as a singer in the Metropolitan Opera. He shot himself at the age of 44 when my mother was seven; my grandmother was left penniless and became an alcoholic; her son, my uncle, went to fight and died in the First World War, aged just 17. My own mother, I now see, was addicted to prescription drugs and died from emphysema caused by smoking at the age of just 55. Meanwhile, my father’s father returned from World War I a shadow of his former self, gassed and shell shocked and having lost an arm, and died eventually in 1944.

It is easy now to see the transgenerational impact of these stories on my own story, and to understand why there can be decades of delay in recognising and acknowledging it. These are moments of epiphany, revelation, moments of no return – a penny drops and suddenly we see things differently. With a gender lens, I have learned from my Northern Ireland research to see that the story of initial violence and trauma is one thing, but how the impact plays out over time for the women and children left behind is another.

In this series of essays, I will also argue that there is a “master-narrative” about the war and about the peace, which is propagated and nurtured by the “system” of certain politicians, media, academics and other institutions, which does not tell the whole story. To an outsider, much of that master-narrative doesn’t make sense, it doesn’t add up. When as an outsider I start poking around to look for answers to my own perplexities, a different narrative emerges. Not necessarily the whole narrative, not necessarily the right narrative, but a valid way of putting the pieces of the puzzle together. Because, to respond to the question posed in the first sentence of this essay, the story that Northern Ireland is telling itself, and is told about Northern Ireland, isn’t good enough.

 

This chapter references various sources including:

Dawson, G., 2007. Making Peace with the Past?: Memories, Trauma and the Irish Troubles. Manchester University Press, Manchester

Fay, M.-T., Morrissey, M., Smyth, M., 1999. Northern Ireland’s Troubles: The Human Costs. Pluto Press, London

Lederach, J.P., 2010. The Moral Imagination: The Art and Soul of Building Peace, Reprint edition. ed. Oxford University Press

Murtagh, Cera 2008 “A Transient Transition: The Cultural and Institutional Obstacles Impeding the Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition in its Progression from Informal to Formal Politics”, Irish Political Studies, 23:1, 21-40

Ramo, J.C., 2010. The Age of the Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do about It. Little, Brown, London

Rooney, E., 2007. “Women’s equality in Northern Ireland’s transition: intersectionality in theory and place.” Feminist Legal Studies 14, 353–375.

Tuama, P.Ó., 2013. Sorry For Your Troubles. Canterbury Press Norwich, Norwich, UK

van der Merwe, 2003. “The Role of the Church in Promoting Reconciliation in Post–TRC South Africa” In Chapman, A. & Spong, B. (eds), Religion and Reconciliation in South Africa, Philadelphia: Templeton Foundation Press.

Thornton, C., Kelters, S., Feeney, B., McKittrick, D., 2004. Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles, 2nd Revised edition edition. ed. Mainstream Publishing, Edinburgh