There is a freshness to this new handbook that stems in part from its richly interdisciplinary character. The 45 chapters range widely across disciplines, from drama, fine art and literature to architecture, archaeology, political science, economics and beyond.
The freshness is a product too of the spirit in which the editors approached the task, choosing to accentuate the everyday and the personal. As a consequence, the handbook includes some strongly personalised and compelling essays, and the great majority of the contributions are accessible to non-specialists.
The handbook deals with the three-decades-long Troubles but also with an apparently never-ending peace process that has now lasted almost as long as the conflict.
The opening chapter, by Thomas Leahy, on British government approaches to dealing with the past, usefully distinguishes between conditional amnesties that make immunity from prosecution conditional on truth recovery, as in South Africa, and unconditional amnesties of the kind the British government has considered in the past. That the collection opens with a chapter on legacy reflects the editors’ strong interest in contemporary struggles over the past.
Some of the most thought-provoking contributions highlight spatial and territorial dimensions of the conflict. Adrian Grant’s chapter on the everyday impact of planning analyses struggles over housing both before and during the Troubles. He quotes from a 1950 document by a Stormont ministry explaining why some unionist local authorities were so insistent on controlling housing allocation: “Housing the wrong people in many areas is equivalent to handing over the keys to the Citadel.”
Unionist control of predominantly Catholic local authority areas such as Derry could only be sustained by gerrymanders and housing discrimination. That the October 1968 civil rights march in Derry, generally regarded as marking the beginning of the Troubles, was organised by the local Housing Action Committee was no coincidence.
David Coyles’ chapter on spaces of territory and division analyses the quiet shaping of Belfast’s ethnonational landscape by planners and officials. He examines planning decisions in three neighbourhoods in the north and east of the city. Drawing on declassified discussions of the Standing Committee on Housing, Coyles identifies a “political initiative” dating from the mid 1970s “to safeguard existing Protestant territory in the face of continued Protestant population decline and continued Catholic population growth”.
As Protestants moved to the suburbs and Protestant working-class areas in the city contracted, the derelict spaces were not used to house the growing population in nearby working-class Catholic areas. Instead, hidden barriers that used “…everyday retail, office and industrial buildings, and common infrastructure such as footpaths, roads and landscaping” were used to “separate and isolate communities” and prevent the politically sensitive expansion of Catholic working-class areas. The “determinism of local sectarian sovereignty” remains, Coyles writes, the “elephant in the room” of urban planning in Belfast.
Bryonie Reid’s elegantly written and insightful essay “Meeting Place” ranges across the urban and rural landscapes of north Down, Belfast, Leitrim and Fermanagh and a year spent as a student in Brighton, where “No one spoke of ‘Northern Ireland’, but only ‘Ireland’”. It sheds light on the politics of space from a different angle, evoking the intimate geographies of conflict even in the prosperous suburbs of north Down, where “a judge lived on our lane, sequestered behind darkened bullet-proof glass”.
This handbook includes some strongly personalised and compelling essays and the great majority of the contributions are accessible to non-specialists
Reid recalls too searching the little streets off the Lower Ormeau Road in south Belfast for the Irish-language class she wanted to attend. “Those streets on the eastern side of the road, leading to the Lagan river, were Catholic and nationalist and working-class and to me, a foreign country.”
The closing chapter of the handbook, a haunting essay by Martin Doyle that distils some of the themes of his book Dirty Linen. He recalls the 22 people killed during the Troubles in his rural home parish of Tullylish, Co Down and explores the 1976 murder of three members of the O’Dowd family. After the killings, the surviving family members moved across the Border to Co Meath.
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When their mother died in 1999, “The family then made a decision that would not be out of place in a Greek tragedy”, arranging for the bodies of their brothers to be exhumed in the North and reburied beside their mother’s grave in Co Meath. Doyle’s essay conveys well the indelible marking of intimate domestic spaces by acts of violence.
Among the other chapters that consider the intersection between the private and the public are Stephen Hopkins’s discussion of the reflective and self-questioning aspects of many Troubles memoirs and Lucy Newby’s chapter on children’s experiences of the conflict. Newby points out that the direst predictions of the effect of conflict on children – that they would become “militaristic automatons” for example – were not borne out.
Graham Dawson offers compelling and frank reflections on his contacts as a researcher with loyalists and unionists many years after he had first developed strong connections with Irish republicans and nationalists.
Caroline Magennis’s powerful and eloquent essay on the economic conditions of academic research at a time of precarious employment and intense pressure on higher education, particularly in the UK, has relevance far beyond the readership of this handbook and deserves to find a wide audience.
The personal and everyday are to the fore in the handbook, but there are plenty of chapters on the public world of politics as well. Conall Parr and Sophie Long both offer critical but sympathetic analyses of Ulster loyalism, highlighting progressive ideas and imaginative proposals for compromise. The potential for loyalist flexibility was realised in 1998, when the two small loyalist parties backed the peace agreement even though the Democratic Unionist Party opposed it.
Three chapters, by Brian Hanley, Agnès Maillot and Jack Hepworth, deal with different aspects of the provisional republican movement. Hanley’s chapter on “The Cutting Edge of the IRA” highlights the paucity of internal source materials on the decision-making of the Provisional IRA, in marked contrast to the IRA of the 1919-1922 period. If a consensus on dealing with the past is ever reached, the release of any Provisional IRA records that do exist must surely come up for discussion.
Hepworth examines the transformation of the Provisionals between the late 1970s and the peace agreement of 1998 while Maillot offers a thoughtful analysis of Sinn Féin’s rhetorical strategies since the ending of the IRA campaign in the 1990s, highlighting the party’s reframing of that campaign.
Hepworth notes that both the old leadership of Ó Brádaigh and O’Connell and the emerging leadership of Adams and McGuinness backed hunger striker Bobby Sands’ bid for election in Fermanagh South Tyrone in 1981. He might have added that Ó Brádaigh had actually contested the seat himself in 1966.
Small details like these call into question the crude and overdrawn distinctions between the supposed militarists of 1970s Sinn Féin and their electorally focused successors. It points to the need for a more nuanced understanding of the shifting relationship between political violence and electoral politics in the provisional republican movement.
Among the other themes covered in the handbook are dissident republicans, policing, Free Derry, the legacy of the prisons, the role of trade unions, the interpretations of economists, the value of comparative analysis, the role of clergy in both Ireland and Germany, immigrant communities, the evolution of LGBTQ+ communities and much more. There is value and interest in every chapter.
There are good reasons for the emphasis on post-conflict reflection, though at times it feels a little overdone. There are, for example, half a dozen chapters about museums and exhibitions. But there is no chapter surveying the role of the British state even if a few chapters do focus on aspects of Britain’s role, notably that on collusion by Mark McGovern. There is little on the role of the Irish government either, and nothing on American involvement. This is the outcome of considered, and perfectly defensible, editorial choices but it does make the collection feel a little light on the high politics of the conflict and peace process.
The personal and everyday are to the fore in this handbook, but there are plenty of chapters on the public world of politics
The editors explain in their introduction that the handbook was to include a chapter on unionist parties but that it was not submitted in time for inclusion. They explain too that they were unable to commission a chapter on the impact of Brexit on Northern Ireland in time for publication. These are unfortunate, if understandable, absences.
As the editors note in their introduction, post-Brexit struggles over the status of Northern Ireland have stimulated renewed interest in the conflict and its legacy, and in the web of relationships that connect Northern Ireland to Great Britain and to the Republic of Ireland. This, and the regular resurfacing of the conflict and its legacy in public debate in both the Republic and the North, make this handbook especially timely.
With its emphasis on the everyday lived experience of conflict and on contemporary struggles over the legacy of conflict, the handbook humanises and complicates our understanding of the Troubles. The overall effect is one of refreshing diversity and of a new approach that stretches Troubles scholarship beyond its traditional boundaries and showcases some of the best new research on the topic.
Niall Ó Dochartaigh is professor of political science and sociology at the University of Galway and the author of Deniable Contact: Back-channel Negotiation in Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press)
Further reading
Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict by David McKittrick and David McVea (Viking, 2012)
Although the most recent edition is more than a decade old, this remains one of the best introductions for the general reader. Clear and concise without ever simplifying or distorting, this co-authored book is deeply informed by McKittrick’s lifetime of experience as a journalist covering the conflict and the peace process for The Irish Times, the BBC and the London Independent.
A Treatise on Northern Ireland: Volumes 1-3 by Brendan O’Leary (Oxford University Press, 2019)
O’Leary’s magisterial, three-volume survey of the Northern Ireland conflict offers an extraordinarily rich and detailed analysis of the politics of conflict and division in Ireland from the perspective of a leading comparative political scientist. A Treatise is underpinned by extensive statistical evidence and is particularly strong on patterns of conflict, on high politics and on the novel consociational arrangements for government established by the Belfast Agreement.
Negotiating a Settlement in Northern Ireland 1969-2019 by John Coakley and Jennifer Todd (Oxford University Press, 2020)
An insightful and deeply researched study of repeated efforts by the British and Irish governments over a span of 25 years to bring an end to violent conflict in Northern Ireland. The authors combine sharp and original analysis of each phase of negotiation with carefully condensed and thematically organised transcripts of witness seminars and interviews with senior civil servants, politicians and former members of government in both Britain and Ireland.
