Heritage after Conflict

Northern Ireland

Elizabeth Crooke, Thomas Maguire, Elizabeth Crooke, Thomas Maguire

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780815386360
• eBook ISBN: 9781351164306
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

The year 2018 marks the twentieth anniversary of the signing of the Belfast Agreement that initiated an uneasy peace in Northern Ireland after the forty years of the Troubles. The last twenty years, however, has still not been sufficient time to satisfactorily resolve the issue of how to deal with the events of the conflict and the dissonant heritages that both gave rise to it and were, in turn, fuelled by it. With contributions from across the UK and Europe, Heritage after Conflict brings together a range of expertise to examine the work to which heritage is currently being put within Northern Ireland.

Questions about the contemporary application of remembering infiltrate every aspect of heritage studies, including built heritages, urban regeneration and planning, tourism, museum provision and intangible cultural heritages. These represent challenges for heritage professionals, who must carefully consider how they might curate and conserve dissonant heritages without exacerbating political tensions that might spark violence. Through a lens of critical heritage studies, contributors to this book locate their work within the wider contexts of post-conflict societies, divided cities and dissonant heritages.

Heritage after Conflict should be essential reading for academics, researchers and postgraduate students engaged in the study of the social sciences, history, peace studies, economics, cultural geography, museum heritage and cultural policy, and the creative arts. It should also be of great interest to heritage professionals.

1 Negotiating heritage after conflict

Perspectives from Northern Ireland

Elizabeth Crooke and Tom Maguire

On 10 April 1998, then British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, marked the signing of the Belfast Agreement by announcing to the world’s press, ‘Today I hope that the burden of history can at long last start to be lifted from our shoulders’. Since then, that ‘burden of history’ has been engaged by the heritage and memory industries in Northern Ireland. The methods and consequences of this engagement are the subject of this volume.

Whilst the burden Blair referred to can be traced back to centuries of conflict on the island of Ireland, the Agreement sought to end the decades of violence in Northern Ireland, known as ‘The Troubles’, that erupted in 1968. That period of violent conflict between Irish republican paramilitaries and British unionism (both state forces and loyalist paramilitaries) had its roots in the partition of Ireland into two states in the 1920s. The Government of Ireland Act of 1920 responded to the Irish War of Independence by proposing an extended form of Home Rule on the island. This would provide for ‘harmonious action’ between a Parliament of Northern Ireland (constituted by the six counties with a majority Protestant population) and a Parliament of Southern Ireland (governing the rest of the island). Although the Northern Ireland Parliament met for the first time in June 1921, the refusal of Irish republicans to accept partition saw the continuation of the conflict. When the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1922 created the Irish Free State, Northern Ireland’s Parliament exercised its right to remain in the UK, and the unified Council of Ireland, envisaged by the original act, was never realised. With revisions to the constitution of the Free State in 1937 to remove remnants of British imperial control and the establishment of the Irish Republic in 1949, replacing the British monarch with the office of the President of the Republic as Head of State, the division of the island was completed. Until 1998, the Irish Republic insisted on its claim to the whole island, whilst Northern unionists maintained the project of constructing a Protestant state for the majority Protestant population (Brewer and Higgins 1998). This institutionalised sectarianism conflated religious affiliation and political allegiance: Protestant meant unionist or loyalist; Catholic meant Irish nationalist or republican. The asymmetrical dispensation of the resources of the state to these identity blocs continued until it was challenged in the 1960s by campaigns for an end to discrimination against the Catholic minority. The violent response of the Northern Irish state to the demands for reform made by the Civil Rights movement led to violence that would cost thousands of lives at the hands of paramilitaries and state security forces, creating further legacies of dark heritage.

With the signing of the Belfast Agreement, it was anticipated that a Northern Irish society would find ways to manage peacefully conflicts of identity and the legacies of the past. Much of the work of political institutions and civil society over the past two decades has been concerned with addressing the insistent outworking of history in the present. This is not surprising since, as Ashworth, Graham and Tunbridge contend, ‘heritage is a primary instrument in the discovery or creation and subsequent nurturing of a national identity’ (2005: 27). Heritage is thus a potent mechanism for making or contesting claims on territory and resources for that identity. Frequently, heritage is used as a resource in the present, often as a continuation of the contestation of the past. The deployment of the imagined heritages of the dominant identity blocs (Shirlow and McGovern 1997) has been a recurrent political strategy in Northern Ireland. Legacy issues and the different claims of separate cultural identities continue to threaten the political stability of the devolved Northern Ireland Assembly, once again suspended at the time of writing in early 2018. As editors we are acutely aware that factors and processes evident here can be discerned too across a range of international contexts. Northern Ireland’s issues and the uses of heritage within them are distinctive but not necessarily unique, and any understanding of them must be informed by engagement with the wider fields of contested heritages in other divided societies. The constitutional crisis between Catalunya and Spain (Breen et al. 2016), the legacy of the war in former Yugoslavia and initiatives in Rwanda and Uganda (Giblin 2014) or Cambodia (Winter 2008) all point to commonalities of experience when societies in conflict or emerging from conflict make use of the past. This collection provides a series of case studies that examine where heritage practices in Northern Ireland are now, twenty years after the Agreement; what work they have been put to (Harrison 2013b); and how they might provide models and insights that can be adapted to other societies emerging from conflict.

Whilst much has been made of the importance of tangible heritage in its function of marking territorial exclusivity and identity, the potency of intangible cultural heritage is evidenced in the discussion of language and naming conventions. One of the reasons for the collapse of the power-sharing Executive in January 2017 was the inability of politicians to resolve the issue of an Irish Language Act and the relative status of Ulster-Scots, for example. Yet even in the use of English, dissonance is obvious. Whilst some may refer to the ‘North of Ireland’ to contest the legitimacy of the state, or ‘Ulster’ to emphasise separateness from the rest of the island, we deliberately use ‘Northern Ireland’ as a means of focussing the discussion on the relationships between public policy, institutional practices and lived experience. Less straightforward is the naming of the second city as Derry or Londonderry, as was the case when it was awarded the title of UK City of Culture, Derry-Londonderry. The use of such names may be taken to mark alignment with one or other of the two main identity blocs, though even here naming is problematic. Whilst Catholic-Nationalist-Republican and Protestant-Unionist-Loyalist are widely used, their effect is to homogenise a very diverse range of people to conflate religion, ethnicity and political grouping, masking asymmetries, internal contradictions and other taxonomies of identity.

We do not subscribe to any account that suggests that the violence of the Troubles was between only these two blocs or monolithic communities. Even with the historical document that marks the beginning of the period under consideration, some refer to it as the Belfast Agreement, while others refer to it as the Good Friday Agreement or both interchangeably. We have not sought to impose uniformity on our contributors about any such naming practices since they bring a wide range of perspectives to bear. They were invited together for a one-day symposium at Ulster University’s Belfast campus in 2017, organised through the University’s Engaging the Past research group, which we lead. Our personal backgrounds and experiences are very different, and, although we both teach on the same Heritage and Museum Studies postgraduate programme, our discipline orientations and research interests are very different as well. The chapters here span different discipline backgrounds, often working across and between disciplines; they work in a range of institutional settings, are produced by academics at different stages of their careers and together provide international perspectives due to these backgrounds and the critical frameworks they deploy.

Heritage and political change in Northern Ireland

The heritage landscape is a past curated for the present, involving selective remembering and deliberate concealing in equal measure. In every case, that heritage is bound in present-day concerns and shaped by the power of memory, identity and belonging. Scanning the century since the formation of Northern Ireland, and considering the buildings, sites and landscapes deemed as heritage; the artefacts and artworks considered worthy of museum attention; the practices established and then defended as ‘heritage’; and emerging recognition of intangible cultural heritage (such as language, folklore and music), we see trends through the years that reflect the current social and political mood. This was clearly demonstrated by two commemorative events in 1998: first, the bicentenary of the 1798 Rebellion, an insurrection against British rule; second, the opening of the Peace Park in Belgium, a cross-community initiative that marked the contribution of men from Ireland, north and south, to the First World War. The bicentenary events were marked by two major exhibitions, one in the National Museum of Ireland and the other in the Ulster Museum. As the peace process was gathering pace, historians reframed the rebellion as less divisive and more ‘open, inclusive and dynamic’, with the author of the Dublin exhibition suggesting we ‘use the 1790s as a vision and inspiration for the 1990s’ (Whelan 1996, cited by Howe 1999: 227). In a similar spirit of revisionism, standing at the Peace Tower in Belgium, built to mimic a medieval Irish round tower, the then President of the Republic of Ireland, Mary McAleese, asked us to remember the past differently (Crooke 2000: 159–162; see also Poulter 2017). Both the bicentenary events and the opening of the Peace Park are examples of conscious and active reshaping of the meaning of past events – a reshaping that is motivated by the concerns of the time – such as the Belfast Agreement (more commonly referred to as the Good Friday Agreement) and later the referendums held in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland on 22 May 1998, which resulted in its ratification.

Providing a context for the focus of this book, which is heritage after 1998, this Introduction provides a brief account of the political history of the region, divided into three phases. Within each we focus on moments of what might be termed heritage construction: first, the consolidation of unionist identity through monumental buildings; second, the growing confidence of nationalist and republican communities expressed through remembrance and murals; and later (in the phase which is the time period of this book) the dual uses of heritage to, on the one hand, continue a legacy of the Troubles and, on the other, as a medium through which to explore conflict transformation, reconciliation and resolution. It is impossible in this short Introduction to cover every example of heritage that could be deemed relevant to each period. Instead, we have chosen key activities in each that we believe epitomise the various ways in which heritage has been employed – choosing each for the characteristics it demonstrates of how the past is engaged in identity concretion, challenge and reconstruction (Assmann and Czaplicka 1995). Between this Introduction as the starting point and the chapters as deeper exploration, we demonstrate how the creation and manipulation of the heritage landscape is reflected in the changing confidence and aspirations of political communities through time. Each phase, in turn, has contributed its own heritage legacies, which continue to work in relation to each other in the present as they continue to be reworked and revisited.

Consolidation phase, 1920–1968

In the first decades of the new Northern Ireland, unionist identity was consolidated around the creation of buildings for governance, statues and rituals. The reference points for these were largely the contemporary and recent history, rather than any more distant past, demarcating a territory for the present and constructing a heritage for the future. The new Parliament Buildings at Stormont, ‘a grand stage for unionists’ (McIntosh 2000: 97),agreed upon in 1922 and completed in 1931, are an example of ‘monumental architecture’ that not only ‘reflected the determination of the dominant Ulster Unionists to carve out a distinctive political identity’ but also demonstrated the ‘permanence and status of Northern Ireland to the wider world’, becoming an ‘icon for the new régime’ (Greer 1999: 374–375). Consolidation was furthered by ceremonial festivals honouring the Unionist leader Edward Carson: the opening of Stormont parliament, the unveiling of the Carson statue in 1933, his funeral in 1935 and the plaque erected in his memory in 1938 (McIntosh 2000). These are ‘marking devices’ laced with political propaganda and enacted in ‘rituals which spoke primarily, although not exclusively, to a unionist audience’ (McIntosh 2000: 95; see also Loughlin 2007). The aim was to consolidate a hegemonic unionist identity that erased markers of class, faith and gender to silence internal dissent within the majority population. To the extent that such marking devices spoke to the Irish nationalist minority, they articulated the exclusion and estrangement of that section of the population from the emergent state.

The declaration of the Irish Republic in 1948 was a provocation for the government of Northern Ireland to turn to heritage assets as a source of a distinctive and separate national identity. Contributing to this, the extension of the scope of the Belfast Museum and Art Gallery, to become the Ulster Museum, was motivated by a ‘fear of Ulster being included in the Southern project, thereby losing its specificity’ (Bigand 2011: online). It was made a national museum under the 1961 Museum Act (Northern Ireland), and, as Bigand observes, ‘from its creation the museum had to deal with the reputation of being strongly Protestant/Unionist-biased’ (2011: online). During the same period, but under a different primary impetus, the development of a distinctive Ulster folklore movement was underway, spearheaded by E. Estyn Evans, in line with wider movements in folklore across the UK. By 1954 Evans had gathered a committee to establish a folk museum, and in 1958 the legislation to bring it about was passed, with the current site at Cultra being purchased in 1961 (Ó Giolláin 2000: 57). It might be seen that in each of these instances an example of a type of British regional museum was elevated to a national status just as the Northern Irish state needed to identify and justify its separate identity from its southern neighbour. One might see also in these strategies of heritage separation a further denial of the heritage of Northern Ireland’s Catholic nationalist citizens and their claims to a place in the state.

Challenge phase, 1968–1998

Whilst Irish republicans contested the state’s power sporadically through campaigns of violence by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in the 1940s and in a Border Campaign from the 1950s, the state remained relatively stable, and its unionist hegemony remained unchecked until the 1960s. By this time the political climate was changing in the region. Rolston describes nationalist opposition to the unionist state as ranging from ‘sullen participation’ to ‘armed rebellion against the state’ (1987: 8). At this time nationalist culture was more contained than that of its unionist neighbours: ‘it was anything but triumphalist, but was instead clandestine … safely hidden from unionist view … relegated to the margins of civil society’ (Rolston 1987: 8). From 1964 the Campaign for Social Justice in Northern Ireland was bringing discrimination against Catholics to wider attention. In 1966 the Northern Ireland Government tolerated the republican celebrations of the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising. Counterdemonstrations were led by Ian Paisley (later founder of the Democratic Unionist Party) in Belfast, including a ‘thanksgiving service’ to commemorate the defeat of the 1916 rebels, held in the Ulster Hall 16 April 1966 (O’Callaghan and O’Donnell 2006). Furthermore, it is thought that the Ulster Volunteer Force was re-established in 1966 in anticipation of the fiftieth anniversary of the rising (Higgins 2012). By August 1968 an increasingly uneasy peace between hegemonic unionism and the Catholic nationalist minority was shattered as a non-violent campaign for civil rights gave way to widespread civil disorder. British troops were dispatched in 1969 to restore order. As paramilitary violence between armed groups of republicans, loyalists and state security forces increased the British government suspended the Northern Irish parliament and imposed direct rule in 1972.

In the early Troubles period, as unionism was derailed, and loyalism sought new symbols, ‘nationalist culture thrived in its ghettoes’ (Rolston 1987: 13), reflected in increased commitment to the Irish language, history and folk music. Here the recourse to Irish heritage was used to underpin political claims by nationalists and republicans to legitimate a separate identity and the rights attendant to it. Later, the death of the hunger striker Bobby Sands saw the first wave of highly politicised republican murals (Rolston 1987). Rolston sees this period as one that is marked by increasing confidence amongst nationalist and republican communities, and a crisis of identity amongst unionists and loyalists. Brian Graham argues that the latter was, in part, fuelled by a lack of belonging invested in the cultural landscape, giving Protestants little authority over their territory (Graham 1997). By the end of this period we see rival communities of identity repeatedly justified by competing understandings of the past expressed in largely separate heritages (Graham and Nash 2006; Beiner 2007). The forty years of conflict only further increased the polarisation of community identity, and appeals to separate heritages were reinforced by the heritage of the violence itself, leading to a complex relationship with how seminal periods during the Troubles are remembered (see Reynolds this volume; Crooke 2010). Crucially, whilst these polarised identities competed for political power, they had also to suppress many of the distinctions within their own communities to maintain their hegemony. This meant ignoring or recuperating very different forms of herita...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Negotiating heritage after conflict: perspectives from Northern Ireland
• 2 Enduring insularity and the memory of Northern Ireland’s 1968
• 3 The Decade of Centenaries and a methodology for engaging with ‘difficult heritage’
• 4 Organised innocence in the paramilitary museum
• 5 Representing loyalist paramilitary heritage in non-museum exhibitions – aims, practices and challenges
• 6 Long Kesh/Maze: a case for participation in post-conflict heritage
• 7 Discourses and practices of dealing with the spatial legacy of conflict in Belfast: the cases of Crumlin Road Gaol and Girdwood Park
• 8 Legacies of conflict: housing and the security-threat-community
• 9 Migrants and the heritage sector: issues of recognition, access and representation
• 10 Where are all the women? public memory, gender and memorialisation in contemporary Belfast
• Index