Kirk Simpson

Silence and Violence among Northern Ireland Border Protestants

ABSTRACT Developing recent ethnographic work on the subjective experiences of those involved in traumatic events, this paper examines the stories that Protestants tell about their experiences of violence along the Irish border in the 1970s and 1980s. These stories are only now beginning to surface, and the paper considers the transition from the private experience of suffering to its public telling. It focuses on how people find a voice for their telling and what happens as a result of breaking the silence. Of special interest is the language and style in which the narratives enter the public domain, and the silences that remain. The paper argues that the narratives are shaped as much by the demands of communalidentity as byindividualexperience, and thereby complements the trauma literature that tends to emphasise the latter.

Voices Silenced, Voices Rediscovered: Victims of Violence and the Reclamation of Language in Transitional Societies

In this article, I argue that the reclamation of language and the rediscovery of victims’ voices in post-conflict contexts are vital to the realisation of full human rights for all citizens, and necessary preludes to processes of truth recovery. Allowing and encouraging victims to engage in dialogue and public storytelling constitutes a crucial part of the transitional legal and political process. However, as a consequence of campaigns of political murder, torture and detention by oppressive regimes many victims of violence have been returned to a ‘pre-language’ state, in which the articulation of coherent individual and group histories has become increasingly difficult. I contend that enabling victims to reclaim language and narrate their stories is a crucial aspect of the legal, social and political ‘rebalancing project’ necessary in transitional societies to right the wrongs of the past.

Community and Creativity in the Classroom: An Experiment in the Use of the Guest Interview, Focus Group Interviews and Learning Journals in the Teaching and Learning of the Anthropology of Modern Dance

This article assesses the experimental teaching and learning of an anthropology module on ‘modern dance’. It reviews the teaching and learning of the modern dances (lecture, observation, embodied practice, guest interview), paying attention to the triangulation of investigation methods (learning journal, examination, self-esteem survey, focus group interview). Our findings suggest that—in keeping with contemporary participatory educational approaches—students prefer guest interviews and ‘performances of understanding’ for teaching and learning, and that focus groups and learning journals were the preferred research methods for illuminating the students’ teaching and learning experience.

‘Cold Storage’: The Disappearance of Unionist Storytelling and the Conflict

This chapter will focus on a collection of retrospective expressions by unionists — in the current post-conflict phase — that detail how during the 1980s and early 1990s, unionists feel that the narratives of their experiences were nearly completely subsumed, silenced or elided. A variety of explanations are offered for this by the respondents. The predominant feeling is that the woes of the unionist community — no matter how dire or callous the attacks upon civilians by terrorist groups — were totally incongruent and contrary to the wishes of British and Irish Government power-brokers and their concomitant, pre-determined plans for political reconstruction in Ireland, North and South (Cunningham, 2001). This chapter, again using a heavy emphasis on detailed and original lengthy narrative extracts, also outlines the ways in which unionists feel that they were totally disenfranchised and disempowered by the political dynamics of this period, and that allied to the fear of ‘speaking out’ against republican (and Loyalist) paramilitaries; this led to their viewpoints being locked away and hermetically sealed (Humphrey, 2003).

Conclusion — Mastering the Past in Northern Ireland

This book began by outlining its stated intentions: not to underscore the veracity or legitimacy of the narratives that would be provided within it, but to give voice to the dialogically and politically dispossessed during an era of transition in Northern Ireland (cf. Douglass and Vogler, 2003). As noted in the introductory chapter, this was important for a number of reasons, not least because large elements of the majority unionist-Protestant population feel both forgotten and marginalised. Additionally there is an academic necessity to record, for the purposes of accurate and balanced history — and in an effort to begin to ‘voice the void’ — the stories of those whom I have labelled ‘ordinary’ unionist civilians. The conflict in Northern Ireland was long and gruesome, and it would be naive to think that its cessation and its apparently ‘settled’ aftermath have brought about an easily digestible political or cultural situation for unionists. As has been demonstrated throughout this book, many unionists regard themselves as the victims — directly or indirectly — of a systematised, sustained and co-ordinated campaign of sectarian political violence by the PIRA.

Thematic Introduction and Background to the Northern Ireland Conflict

Northern Ireland has entered what is arguably the key phase in its troubled political history — truth recovery and dealing with the legacy of a violent past — yet the void in knowledge and the lack of academic literature with regard to unionist civilians is particularly striking (Simpson, 2008). This book aims to fill that gap. On the basis of new, original and extensive empirical and theoretical research, this book will begin to fill the ‘hole’ in the academic literature by presenting and offering critical and thematic analysis of previously unheard unionist oral histories and recollections of the conflict, stretching from the earliest iterations of violence in the 1970s to the final atrocities in the mid-1990s. Crucially, in so doing, it offers — for the first time — a reflective explanation of the ways in which unionists conceive of the past in the present post-conflict environment, and thus contributes genuine and necessary ‘balance’ to the contemporary political debate in Northern Ireland. Truth Recovery and remembering (and consequently mastering) the past in Northern Ireland cannot function successfully without unionist participation, and so the ‘unlocking’ and symbolic reading of their narratives and remembrance is not only desirable but is also politically and socially imperative (cf. Searle, 1970; Squire, 2005). This book is therefore structured in what is intended to be a new and fresh way that can draw on significant extracts of unionists’ oral histories to illustrate core thematic issues regarding the construction of counter-hegemonic discourse and forgotten narratives in Northern Ireland.

‘Ready to speak, but will anyone listen?’ Truth Recovery, Unionists and Social Memory

In this chapter I retrace my main theoretical argument: namely, that in the absence of agreed processes of truth recovery following the protracted conflict in Northern Ireland, many unionists now increasingly define themselves as oppositional or peripheral, and will attempt to resist anything which they perceive to be the manipulation and distortion of social memory because of the fear of imposed, manufactured history by their political opponents. Unionist resistance to recollections of political violence is primarily influenced by their trepidation about the potential elision of their biographies of suffering (cf. Feldman, 2004). In this chapter — again based on detailed ethnographic research — I argue that unionists in Northern Ireland can be persuaded to participate in truth recovery processes, but that their involvement will be contingent upon the creation of a framework for dealing with the past that can accommodate some form of dialogical, rationally established and morally assessed ‘truth’ (cf. Ricoeur, 2001).

‘They started it’: Unionists, Memory and Subjectivist Constructions of the Political ‘Other’

In the hundreds of formal and informal qualitative interviews with unionist civilians that I have conducted, various iterations of the sentiment ‘they started it’ — meaning that Irish republicans initiated the conflict in Northern Ireland — have been extremely common. In ethnic conflicts throughout the world, such a process of socio-cultural and political ‘othering’ is far from unusual (cf. Daniel, 1996; Das et al., 2000). In Northern Ireland, I found that such a view has greatly infused unionists’ perceptions of the past, in part transcending temporal, spatial and class boundaries. In this research, it was also evident that there was a trans-generational effect of this over-simplified narrative trope. Younger members of the unionist community who were born in the 1970s and 1980s, and who have no memory of how the conflict began, often retreat unthinkingly to this discourse and position of argumentation (cf. White, 1987).

‘It was worse in the beginning’ Recalling the Adjustment to Political Violence

If the period from 1969 to 1971 was ‘year zero’ in terms of how unionists framed the ‘before and after’ of the Northern Ireland conflict (and also the ‘before’ and ‘after’ of how they constructed perceptions of the ethnic ‘other’), then the period from 1971 to 1975 represented the political and social apocalypse that many in the Protestant community had claimed to have foreseen since the first murmurs of discontent by Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) in the 1960s. Others however — even though they had sniffed the pungent breeze of sustained violent conflagration — were taken aback by the sheer scale of terrorist activity in this period. The year 1972 was, statistically, the worst year of the Troubles. There were almost 2000 explosions and nearly 10,000 reported incidences of shooting. Between 1972 and 1975, 365 Protestants were killed, many of whom served in the RUC or the UDR (CAIN, 2009). The Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) began a dedicated campaign of attacking and murdering state security personnel, both in Northern Ireland and in England (Coogan, 2002; Alonso, 2006). Scotland and Wales remained largely unharmed and untouched (apart from the sacrifices of the men from Welsh and Scottish British Army regiments sent to try and restore law and order to an increasingly anarchic part of the UK).