The political crisis manifesting itself in the Troubles originated in language

Novelist Bernard MacLaverty has observed that “narrative is a way of thinking.” I recalled his words often while working on my book Getting to Good Friday. This narrative account of Northern Ireland’s peace process is my attempt to answer a question that had long puzzled me, although I’d already written two books about Northern Irish literature (on the Field Day Theatre Company and Belfast playwright Stewart Parker).

During the years in which I researched those books, the Troubles seemed an eternal feature of life in the North. In their late-20th-century form, they had been ongoing since at least 1969 and bid fair to continue indefinitely. So how was peace made there – suddenly, as it then seemed to me – in April 1998?

The first inkling of the peace process book came to me while I was preparing to write an essay about Bernard MacLaverty’s novel Grace Notes (1997), which centres on a female composer from Northern Ireland. The book contains some obvious political commentary: the composer, a Catholic like MacLaverty, writes music incorporating Protestant drums, thus weaving a symbol of unionist oppression of the Catholic minority into a harmonious representation of Northern Irish identity. However, most of it seems more personal in nature, focusing on her difficult relationships with her mother and dead father and with the father of her child. Set at some unspecified time in the 1980s, the novel does not feature talk of any foreseeable end to the Troubles.

What I came to realise through my research, though, were the ways in which the time of its composition (1994–1996) influenced the structure and themes of Grace Notes, as the elation that followed paramilitary ceasefires in the summer and autumn of 1994 gave way to several years of political stagnation, renewed violence, and increased polarisation. MacLaverty’s novel testifies to the time in which it was written and first published through its portrayal of strained and broken relationships and awkward conversations. These personal interactions serve as metaphors for the tense political situation and the kind of honest and respectful communication that would be needed to improve it.

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The contemporary lack of resolution also had formal implications for Grace Notes, which has a ‘happy ending’ that occurs, chronologically, halfway through the events depicted in the book. Through writing about this novel, I recognised that I had not previously studied the 1990s in Northern Ireland, the very decade during which I’d most frequently visited as a researcher. I’d had the experience but missed the meaning – partly because much of what was happening then was not publicly known at the time.

Getting to Good Friday represents my personal search for that meaning, conducted through literary works that I began to read differently as I learned more about the political situation in Northern Ireland when they were written. It centres on creative writers’ reactions and contributions to progress towards peace during the 15 years preceding the 1998 Belfast Agreement. Rather than surveying literary production in this period, I focus on selected texts as part of an effort to craft an accessible narrative about the shifts in thinking and talking about Northern Ireland’s still-divided society which made the Agreement possible.

In addition to Grace Notes, I discuss Brian Friel’s Making History, Seamus Heaney’s The Cure at Troy, Michael Longley’s Ceasefire, Deirdre Madden’s One by One in the Darkness, Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark, Colum McCann’s Transatlantic, and David Park’s The Truth Commissioner. The book’s most distinctive feature is the way I use literary analysis to help explain historical events and processes. It suggests that literature as literature – in its formal properties, in addition to anything it might have to ‘say’ about a given subject – can enrich readers’ historical understanding.

John Hume, a prime mover of the peace process, remarked that political leadership involves “changing the language of others”. Such a belief chimes with Friel’s 1982 description of Ireland’s complicated relationship with Britain as a problem of language: “we are in fact talking about accommodation or marrying of two cultures here, which are ostensibly speaking the same language but which in fact aren’t”. Because Friel believed that the political crisis manifesting itself in the Troubles had originated in language, he also believed it might be “solved by language”. His claim struck me as fanciful when I first encountered it in the early 1990s, but it seems less so in retrospect.

Similarities between Hume’s analysis of Northern Ireland’s situation in the 1980s and 1990s and that of writers connected with Field Day were probably not coincidental. He was close friends with both Friel and Heaney and socially acquainted with Deane, and he regularly attended Field Day opening nights. Although I cannot prove direct influence, I believe that writers such as these were motivated by a desire both to comment on and to intervene in unfolding political situations.

To people unfamiliar with Irish history, parsing creative writing to glean political insights might seem an odd tactic. However, in the case of the Belfast Agreement, progress hinged on negotiators’ ability to revise the terms used to discuss the conflict. As Fintan O’Toole remarked shortly after the Agreement was approved, the British and Irish governments, in nudging the parties towards consensus, were required “to act more like poets and novelists than like politicians: massaging fixed meanings so that they become supple and fluid; complicating the definitions of words so that they become open and ambiguous”.

Albert Reynolds, taoiseach from 1992 to 1994, confirms O’Toole’s insight in his autobiography. Describing an important stage of the peace process, during which he and his top adviser on Northern Ireland, Martin Mansergh, were secretly exchanging documents with the Sinn Féin leadership, Reynolds recounts how “With painstaking care phrases, words, the placing of a comma, a full stop, would be analysed so that they exactly and meticulously expressed the philosophy, policy and aspirations of Sinn Féin. At the same time they needed to take into account the concerns of the unionists, the demands and rigours of the British and Irish constitutions, and the innumerable agendas and agreements at the root of the Troubles. Everything was challenged, amended, suspended in a hundred different ways as progress alternately inched forward and stalled”.

This high-stakes writerly negotiation between Irish nationalists and republicans was itself the prelude to an even more strenuous one between the British and Irish governments over the wording of what would become known as the Downing Street Declaration of December 1993. On the final day of these intergovernmental talks, Reynolds recalled, “tensions were high as we battled with revising, refining, balancing and counterbalancing the text of the joint declaration. It was imperative it was acceptable to both republicans and unionists or all our aspirations for peace would be lost, our hopes for an end to violence would be dashed – all our efforts wasted.”

A vital element of the peace process involved framing an agreement that could be interpreted in different ways by unionists and nationalists. Literary writers and critics are comfortable with precisely this kind of ambiguity, and expert in creating texts that support divergent readings. On May 22nd, 1998, the day it was endorsed by referendums north and south of the Border, Longley commented that “In its language the Good Friday Agreement depended on an almost poetic precision and suggestiveness to get its complicated message across’. Brief factual accounts of what happened in the late 1980s and early 1990s often do not address how and why it happened. Literature can help to answer such questions.

The peace process in Northern Ireland remains unfinished business. The 2016 Brexit referendum undermined a key basis of the Agreement – the EU membership of both the Republic of Ireland and the United Kingdom – and reopened questions that had long been regarded as closed by raising the spectre of a hard border once again dividing the island of Ireland. This threat intensified problems with the Northern Ireland governmental bodies created by the Agreement, which, as historian Ian McBride notes, “[b]y institutionalising cross-community consensus as the basis of decision making ... also inadvertently institutionalised the communal division’.

[ Seamus Heaney: ‘If I described myself as an Ulsterman I’d have thought I was selling a bit of my birthright’ ]

The Belfast Agreement accomplished the remarkable feat of establishing peace in Northern Ireland, but it should be seen as the beginning rather than the end of the challenging task of imagining a shared Northern Irish identity. In this endeavour, the contributions of artists will continue to be at least as important as initiatives by politicians. Creative writers approach problems with more questions than answers, and this disposition enables them to produce texts that invite readers to explore perspectives very different from their own. My own methods in writing this book resembled those of the authors whose works I examine in it: I wrote towards understanding of something (how peace was made in Northern Ireland) that baffled me at the start of the process. Like them, I did not know what I intended to say until I grappled with the concrete task of trying to say it. Getting to Good Friday does not have a thesis that can be neatly summed up in a sentence, but its form testifies to my faith in narrative as a means of comprehending complexity.

[ Modern Ireland in 100 Artworks: 1975 – North, by Seamus Heaney ]

Marilynn Richtarik is a Professor of English at Georgia State University in Atlanta and the author of Acting Between the Lines: The Field Day Theatre Company and Irish Cultural Politics 1980–1984 and Stewart Parker: A Life. Getting to Good Friday: Literature and the Peace Process in Northern Ireland is published by Oxford University Press.