Truth recovery in Northern Ireland

Critically interpreting the past

Kirk Simpson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780719091230
• eBook ISBN: 9781847797285
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political History & Theory
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book is a unique analysis of truth recovery in post-conflict Northern Ireland. It proposes a new model of victim and perpetrator dialogue that is entirely victim-centred, suggesting that only a 'moral bottom line' in which violence is dismissed as universally wrong can assists in the effective democratic reconstruction of Northern Ireland.

1 The conflict in Northern Ireland

A contextual and thematic analysis

Introduction

Searching for a ‘centre ground’ in Northern Irish politics has never been easy, least of all in terms of truth recovery and dealing with the past. The most problematic question often becomes: ‘Whose centre?’ Yet more often than not, this is a question posed by moral and cultural relativists, or political partisans who use tendentious rhetoric to argue that consensual agreement in which all past wrongdoing is acknowledged and documented is impossible. This, however, is political dissemblance and deceit – a weak disguise for such groups’ desires to possess, adapt and impose their manufactured versions and ‘truth’ of the past. The quest to ‘own’ history is something that can potentially destabilise transitional society in Northern Ireland. This book does not seek to chronicle the Northern Irish conflict. Neither does it attempt to present an exhaustive and detailed history of the ‘patchwork’ of initiatives that have been taken by both governmental and non-governmental actors in relation to truth recovery in Northern Ireland in the last thirty years, and within the last decade in particular, although it is important to note that where appropriate, significant political and legal developments in the dealing with the past debate are referenced appropriately and in a relevant fashion. This is not to suggest that this is – in any way – an analysis that lacks suitable historical context. The stark empirical ‘facts’ that are presented in this chapter should provide even the most unfamiliar of readers with an indication of the scale of the violence and the nadir that social, political and cultural relations reached in Northern Ireland, and there is no suggestion that attempts to uncover or reclaim the truth of those events began only after the conflict had ceased. However, there is already much detailed and expert research that sets out to detail ‘the Troubles’ in all of their violent and political minutiae (and does so extremely well). Thus, presenting some type of ‘authentic’ or ‘authoritative’ version of an objective past – and concomitantly offering intricate and extensive detail of the panoply of initiatives that could reasonably be described as representing some form of truth recovery taken at various points throughout the last forty years – is not the intention here. Such an approach would make this book – which attempts to critically interpret the past in Northern Ireland, and which seeks to transcend temporally and spatially bound analyses of episodic violence in search of a theoretical framework that nullifies the mendacity of much of the political argument that has characterised the transitional phase – extremely difficult. Instead, following Croce’s statement that ‘all history is contemporary history’ (and nowhere is this perhaps more the case that Northern Ireland), this chapter deliberately locates the current problems of managing, dealing and mastering the past within the most recent post-conflict ‘endgame’ debates about truth recovery. It is hoped that this will provide a suitable contextual – and more importantly thematic – background for the reader, and for the rest of the book. As noted, further mention of high profile truth recovery projects that have taken place (such as legal inquiries, nongovernmental activities, and retrospective police investigations) will be made in subsequent chapters, where appropriate and relevant (most pertinently in Chapters 4 and 5).

Background

Between 1969 (if not before) and 1998 (and certainly after) Northern Ireland became a political laboratory for a particularly virulent strain of vituperative loathing of the ethnic ‘other’. The spread of noxious faux-ideological creeds (Irish republican/nationalist and British loyalist/unionist), with their voracious appetite for hatred apparently sated only by pointless destruction, became almost epidemic. The legacy of such hatred continues to present a considerable obstacle to post-conflict political progress. For a long time, victims of political violence on both sides – unionist-Protestant and nationalist-Catholic – felt incensed (and continue to feel incensed and insulted) by the very notion that members of the other community could or would also consider themselves victims. This has been particularly the case for unionists, who traditionally felt (and many still feel) that as ‘terrorists’, the Provisional Irish Republican Army’s (PIRA) claims (or indeed those of Loyalist paramilitaries) to victimhood were especially galling. More moderate nationalism in the form of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and it supporters have also condemned efforts by people on both ‘sides’ to monopolise victimhood. Whilst there is wider and increasing (if unspoken) recognition of the multi-directional hurt and havoc that was wreaked as a result of the conflict, disagreement, which is often indignant in text and tone, persists about the ‘true nature of the past’, and there is continued refusal amongst sections of both communities to acknowledge the victim status of their political ‘opponents’. This is one of the phenomena that this book sets out to examine, and it is in this chapter that this theme and context is adopted and scrutinised closely as a pertinent example of the difficulties of dealing with the past in Northern Ireland.

There is little value, however, in rehearsing narratives here about particular paradigmatic cases of suffering that would ostensibly illustrate for the reader (especially the reader unfamiliar with Northern Ireland’s past) the ‘nature’ of the conflict. I do not purport to know the ‘nature’ of the conflict, and this book does not seek to trace its genesis or fine detail (this has been done far more capably, and indeed exhaustively, elsewhere). In a fluid political situation like Northern Ireland, things are constantly changing. To reiterate well-worn stories of the past, or to outline structural or individual causes of political violence in the detached tone of the third person, so that this book might be read as an ‘authority’ (or certainly authoritative, in some sense) on Northern Ireland would be naïve and ephemeral (though that is not to say that the provision of some historical and contextual information is not necessary). Such is the critical theory-led approach of the book and the emphasis on the individual, this chapter might well benefit – were it to pursue the historical analysis route exclusively – from an examination of the ‘forgotten victims’. Rather than a collectivised focus on inquires into those killed as a result of high-profile incidents – such as Bloody Friday, Bloody Sunday, the Shankill Bomb, the Greysteel Massacre, or the Kingsmills Massacre, awful, obscene and tragic as all of those terrible events undoubtedly were – it is considerably more difficult to investigate the thousands of occasions on which innocent men, women and even children were murdered or injured by paramilitaries or indeed state forces in the name of spurious causes. Yet to pursue that line would also be somewhat insidious, and could be – in my estimation – an unseemly exploitation of the memory of particular individuals who might still be locked deep in the grieving process. As scholars and ethnographers, there is a fine line to walk between exposing untold stories for the betterment of society, and beginning to get drawn into analyses of victim testimony or experience that are in some way regarded as ‘good academic copy’. The very point of this book is to outline, theoretically, a model that will circumnavigate the problem of researchers having to invade (and sometimes feel uncomfortable doing so) the personal space of victims to ‘search’ for hidden stories. This book offers a model for truth recovery that will empower victims of the Northern Ireland conflict to tell the story themselves, and not have to rely on interpretations that are filtered through to the public via academic or governmental interlocutors. Many ethnographers of political violence have wrestled with these issues. In my own research experience, I have found that retrieving previously incommunicable stories of victims was for them, in some way, liberating and positive (Simpson and Donnan, 2006; Donnan and Simpson, 2007). My field notes also reveal, however, that many other respondents have often complained that they feel their privacy has been invaded by academics and journalists and that they suffer from ‘research fatigue’. I know, however, that the stories can and should be used, as is standard with academic material (and which differentiates it from journalism), in a rigorous, sensitive and appropriate fashion that can illuminate particular phenomena for a certain scholarly community and the wider citizenry. Even acknowledging this, the material can remain divorced (and in many ways inaccessible) from the experience of those for whom their public telling would be most beneficial. It is unlikely that in most transitional contexts, victims of political violence get widespread access to what are sometimes esoteric journals. This poses an obvious question for readers of this book. One might be inclined to think that it too could fall prey to the same flaws. It is crucial to note, however, that this should not be understood by the reader as a critique of the academic method, or criticism of the value of some of the tremendous work that has been done by scholars in the field (such as Donnan, 2005) – if anything, quite the reverse. It is an early acknowledgement that this book does not seek to walk the same path as so many before.

There are hopefully therefore no lazy or biased analyses of the conflict that are predicated upon temporally or spatially bound events contained in this book. There is a recognition that there is currently a hierarchy of victim-hood in Northern Ireland that needs to be unpacked, and most crucially of all, there is an emphatic announcement in this early stage that critically interpreting the past in Northern Ireland necessarily involves reflexive examination, and that includes reflexivity and phenomenological reflection on the part of authors. In actual fact, therefore, the recognition that academic writing can sometimes seem to be too far separated from those whom it seeks to empower can strengthen this work. Allowing and encouraging the reader to appreciate that authors also struggle with ethical questions, especially in the context of political violence and transitional justice, is absolutely fundamental to the ethos of this research. As this book outlines a model for truth recovery on Northern Ireland that has at its core a repudiation of master narratives of the past and which rejects the voyeuristic exploitation of victims’ stories for partisan political or other purposes, it would be absurd, arrogant or both to omit this acknowledgement. I hope this admission helps the reader, from wherever they come politically or geographically, or from whatever section of society they come, to better empathise with the material and to become genuinely engaged in what is the first attempt to devise an original model for dealing with the past in Northern Ireland that is inspired by Habermasian theory and which is based on critical interpretation.

This chapter thus provides a short historical overview of the nature and evolution of the Northern Ireland state and the resultant conflict, for contextual purposes. It does not offer an in-depth portrayal of the main protagonists and key moments in the history of the conflict. It concentrates instead on a focussed identification and discussion of ‘current’ thematic and contextual issues when the ‘past’ has impacted upon political developments in the political transition. The chapter seeks to illustrate the trouble with ‘managing’ the past in a divided society like Northern Ireland, but deviates in the main from standard chronological examinations that are often event-led and can be overly descriptive in tone. In the second half of this chapter in particular, a more contemporary analytic approach is attempted, focusing on the current transition from conflict to peace as the most pressing and significant area of investigation, and attempts to link this not only to post-conflict societies beyond Northern Ireland, but also begins to outline the theoretical framework that is crucial to the exposition and explication of the importance of public storytelling and the Habermasian model for truth recovery (and subsequent process of inclusive memorialisation).

A candid examination of core contemporary and illuminative thematic debates about the nature of Northern Irish history is crucial to the explication of critically interpretive modes of analysis. The detailed discussion of contentious and rancorous epistemological ‘methods of knowing’, and the scrutiny of the ideological endurance of age-old cultural and political loyalties that perpetuate deep fracture lines in Northern Ireland and beyond, are outlined here and in subsequent chapters in order to problematise and hopefully offer tentative solutions to the issue of dealing with the past. The reader is asked to pay particular attention to the continued oppositional texture of the discourse regarding truth recovery amongst key political actors in transitional Northern Ireland (and other transitional contexts). This should act as a clear indication of the problems that have endured at the subterranean political level in Northern Ireland, despite the iconographic détente between erstwhile enemies Ian Paisley MP MLA (leader of the Democratic Unionist Party [DUP] and First Minster of the Northern Ireland Assembly) and Martin McGuiness MP MLA (chief negotiator of Sinn Fein and Deputy First Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly), and the restoration of devolved government in 2007. If the political and legal transition in Northern Ireland has reached its end phase (and there is still considerable scepticism that this is the case) truth recovery has assumed a central and crucial position.

Northern Ireland – a brief historical context

As already noted, a detailed analysis of the history and the nature of the conflict in Northern Ireland is beyond the scope and the intention of this book, and has been extensively documented elsewhere (see Buckland, 1981; Hennessey, 1997; Bew and Gillespie, 1999; Bew et al., 2001). What follows in this next section therefore is not by any means a seminal history of the ‘Troubles’, but rather an attempt to sketch, especially for the reader less familiar with the issues, a brief historical outline of the Northern Ireland state and its politics. An understanding of the oppositional cultural and political identities and allegiances of the unionist and nationalist communities provides both an informational and important contextual backdrop. The state of Northern Ireland was conceived in legislative terms 1920 in the Government of Ireland Act, and was born ‘in a crisis’ (Townshend, 1999: 181). The Ulster Unionists, (Protestants [in the main]) wanted to maintain the connection with the British Empire, and their long-held political stance was centred on the repudiation and rebuttal of any form of home rule (self-determination) for any part of Ireland. By 1921, however, they were being asked (or rather compelled by the British government) to manage their own devolved administration, consisting of six counties in the north-east corner of the Province of Ulster, in a new state that would be called ‘Northern Ireland’. Old arguments that home rule was a mechanism by which Irish nationalists (mainly Catholic) had sought to destroy British rule in Ireland resurfaced and were brought under considerable and critical scrutiny by the Ulster Unionists’ uncertain and confused acceptance of the new and complex Northern Ireland state (founded, as it was, on a version of home rule). Such charges though, assumed a spirit of pluralism in the new Northern Ireland state that never materialised – the unionist majority was not particularly inclined to ensure that the Catholic nationalist minority was forcefully represented in government. The British, the supposedly natural ally of unionists (and the government of the reconstituted ‘United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’) to which they pledged their often conditional loyalty, was apparently undecided as to the future of this new state, and seemed to oscillate between explicit support and emphatic neglect.

Any idea the British had that the legislative provisions they had outlined for government in Northern Ireland would ensure fair representation for the Catholic nationalist minority was undone by the gradual abolition of the proportional representation voting system, first for local elections in 1922, and then for Stormont elections in 1929. This was a veritable blueprint for eventual political catastrophe. The sizeable minority of Catholics (over one-third of the population) regarded Northern Ireland as ‘temporary and illegitimate’ (Hughes, 1994: 71). This core question of the political legitimacy of the Northern Ireland state was one that would lead ineluctably to the deconstruction of its stability and durability, and make it increasingly difficult for the British (and later Irish) governments, and the unionist political parties, to reconcile northern nationalists and republicans with the reality of the partition of Ireland into two states, and the principle of consent (that there would no change in the constitutional status of Northern Ireland without the consent of the majority of its citizens). In the context of such constitutional uncertainty, economic crisis and a divided society, it is perhaps surprising not that the political system completely broke down in 1972 (when the British government rescinded devolved power), but that it had lasted so long (Buckland, 1981).

By the mid 1960s, the then Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) Prime Minister Terence O’Neill realised that the government of Northern Ireland had to respond to the demographic and political changes that were taking place in Northern Irish society. Catholics were gradually awakening from a disem-powered slumber and were no longer willing to play the role of a subdued and excluded community (in part motivated by the pace of revolutionary action in other parts of the world at that time). By the 1960s nationalists made it their stated position that the system of government in Northern Ireland needed to be reformed, if not abolished. The package of measures offered by O’Neill in 1968 that was intended to ensure, amongst other things, fair allocation of public housing and reform of the local government system, failed utterly to stop the inevitable slide into political and social turmoil. Nightly riots between groups of republicans and loyalists in troubled parts of Belfast added to the growing sense of social and political despair. The British government pressured the Northern Ireland Unionist government to implement reforms, and tried to combat growing disaffection by offering direction (from afar) through the Cameron Report of 1969 that highlighted the discriminatory structure of Northern Ireland’s public authorities (Townshend, 1999). It became clear, however, that the underlying ideological differences of the unionist and nationalist communities were fuelling an adversarial political crisis that was destroying Northern Ireland. The SDLP, the mainstream representation of Catholics in Northern Ireland after its formation in 1970, outlined its vision of the nationalist goal of Irish unity – but reconciled its supporters to the fact that such an objective could only be achieved on the basis of unionist consent. It also argued that a solution to the problem would necessarily involve an external ‘Irish dimension’ – that is, that the government of the Irish Republic would be given some role in the affairs of the Northern Ireland state. The formation of the PIRA in 1970/71, however, emphasised the perilous and chaotic state of affairs in Northern Ireland (English, 2004). The PIRA’s objective was simple – complete Irish unity and the end of British rule in Ireland, with or without the consent of the unionist community in Northern Ireland. Loyalist paramilitary gangs mobilised in huge numbers in opposition to what they perceived as this brazen assault on their political authority and the diminution of British sovereignty in Northern Ireland, and a dastardly cycle of violence was initiated.

O’Neill resigned in 1969 after being unable to secure the confidence of his party (he was denounced and traduced by many as a traitor to the unionist cause), and was replaced by James Chichester-Clark, who was also unable to find a solution to the worsening political and social problems. Due to internal pressure he too was replaced, by a ‘hard-line’ Ulster Unionist, Brian Faulkner, in 1971. Like many other unionists in 1971, Faulkner was unable to comprehend or to countenance alternatives to majoritarian government, and his policy for reform (outlined in a Green Paper on reform in 1971) offered no ‘real scope for nationalist participation in government’ (Townshend, 1999: 206). The worsening violence in Northern Ireland, however, and particularly the events of Bloody Sunday in 1972, led the British Prime Minister, Edward Heath, to call for Faulkner to concede all of Stormont’s security powers (including the much valued Special Powers Act) to Westminster. Faulkner refused, and the British government reacted by suspending the Stormont government. A Secretary of State, William Whitlelaw, replaced it, and assumed responsibility in a new Northern Ireland Office (NIO) for most of the Stormont ministers’ former functions. Direct Rule from Westminster was imposed, and the long search for a solution to the Northern Ireland ‘problem’ began.

The first serious attempt at power sharing, agreed to at a conference in Sunningdale in 1973 by the SDLP and the Ulster Unionist Party, caused major divisions within the unionist community. Unionism, once a monolithic political movement, had begun to fracture into many pieces. Large numbers of unionists rejected Faulkner’s acceptance of a new political arrangement within Northern Ireland on the basis of a consociational power-sharing government with an Irish dimension. Faulkner was forced to resign after failing to win his party’s support for the Council of Ireland, the ‘all-Ireland’ political element of the Sunningdale Agreement that the SDLP had been able to successfully negotiate on behalf of northern nationalists. In protest, at the British general election of 1974, anti-Sunningdale Unionist candidates won eleven of Northern Ireland’s twelve Westminster parliamentary seats.

The Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) strike which followed in 1974 was an amalgamation of unionist and loyalist interests, and while it included a sinister paramilitary element, it demonstrated the deep suspicion, mistrust and confusion that existed amongst elements of the unionist community in Northern Ireland. The PIRA had increased its campaign of violence, and the ranks of illegal loyalist gangs were also exponentially swollen. The UWC strike succeeded in its aim of bringing down the power-sharing executive, and the Sunningdale deal, but it offered nothing in terms of a vision for a new Northern Ireland. Unionists and nationalists, not to mention their more extreme counterparts, loyalists and republicans, were poles apart, with little prospect of political agreement or even lasting paramilitary ceasefires. The destruction of the Sunningdale deal provoked exasperation and resentment within an unsympathetic British Labour Party government led by Harold Wilson. Bew, Gibbon and Patterson (1996: 199) have argued that Wilson’s own favoured solution to the problem was complete British withdrawal from Northern Ireland, a policy he ‘abandoned reluctantly only after the Irish government responde...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• List of boxes
• List of abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The conflict in Northern Ireland: a contextual and thematic analysis
• 2 Truth commissions and dealing with the past
• 3 Voices silenced, voices rediscovered: victims of violence and the reclamation of language in transitional societies
• 4 Victims of political violence: a Habermasian model of truth recovery
• 5 Memorialisation in post-conflict societies: critically interpreting the past
• 6 Conclusion
• References
• Index