Cillian Mcgrattan
Biographic Data
| ID | 1481256 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Cillian Mcgrattan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Cillian |
| FAMILY NAME | Mcgrattan |
| SIGNATURE | MCGRATTAN C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University College Dublin |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3835-5654 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 125 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 4 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2008 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Interpreting the Northern Ireland protocol: The politics of distrust
This article explores some of the impacts of Brexit on governance in Northern Ireland. A devolved region administered by a fragile and often fractious consociational system, Brexit, and, in particular, the fundamental legislative mechanism through which Brexit is implemented, the December 2020 Northern Ireland Protocol, have worked to increase division across several levels - the inter-governmental, that of regional party politics, and that of gr…
Ireland, 2021: A Century of Insurgency, Terrorism and Security Challenges
Ireland’s ‘decade of centenaries’ means different things to different people.1 On the one hand, for Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland and the Republic,2 the term refers to the period bookended
Labour and the Politics of Disloyalty in Belfast, 1921–39: The Moral Economy of Loyalty by Christopher J. V. Loughlin
The North of Ireland was historically the most heavily industrialized part of the island. The shipbuilding and linen factories that were critical to that industrialization were centered around Belfast, which emerged in the nineteenth century as an important city of the British Empire. However, the development of working- class politics was troubled by the national question of independence. Marx and Engels, for instance, supported self- determinat…
Everyday Life after the Irish Conflict: The Impact of Devolution and Cross-Border Cooperation
Sunningdale, the Ulster Workers' Council Strike and the Struggle for Democracy in Northern Ireland
Version 1 The ‘Sunningdale experiment’ of 1973-74 witnessed the first attempt at establishing peace in Northern Ireland based on power-sharing. However, its provisions, particularly the cross-border ‘Council of Ireland’, proved to be a step too far. The experiment floundered amidst ongoing paramilitary-led violence and collapsed in May 1974 as a result of the Ulster Workers’ Council Strike. Yet, many of the ideas first articulated in this period …
Sunningdale, the Ulster Workers’ Council strike and the struggle for democracy in Northern Ireland
Version 1 The ‘Sunningdale experiment’ of 1973-74 witnessed the first attempt at establishing peace in Northern Ireland based on power-sharing. However, its provisions, particularly the cross-border ‘Council of Ireland’, proved to be a step too far. The experiment floundered amidst ongoing paramilitary-led violence and collapsed in May 1974 as a result of the Ulster Workers’ Council Strike. Yet, many of the ideas first articulated in this period …
Devolution and identity: Multidirectionality in ‘Welshness’ and ‘Northern Irishness’
In an era of Brexit and on-going constitutional debates in the UK, questions around devolution and national identifications currently attract scholarly attention as never before. This article focusses on national identification in two devolved regions, Wales and Northern Ireland, never before compared in this way, to explore how devolution can act in a fluid and multidirectional way to produce differing framings of national identification. Using …
Civil society, post-colonialism and transnational solidarity: The Irish and the Middle-East conflict
Memory in Post-Conflict Societies: From Contention to Integration
The file associated with this record is under an 18 month embargo from publication in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. The full text may be available through the publisher links provided above
The Stormont House Agreement and the New Politics of Storytelling in Northern Ireland
This article explores recent proposals to deal with the past in Northern Ireland. Focusing, in particular, on the 2014 Stormont House Agreement, I argue that it is possible to begin to discern a movement within policy design to respond proactively to what I term a new politics of storytelling. This consists of an emphasis on testimony-work as a means of dealing with unresolved legacies relating to the Troubles. I suggest that that new politics li…
Ideology, reconciliation and nationalism in Northern Ireland
This article explores the conceptualization of ‘reconciliation’ within modern Northern Irish nationalist discourse. I argue that the case of Northern Irish nationalism adds a new dimension to those understandings that remain currently underappreciated within the literature. The article charts how reconciliation becomes operationalized as a restrictive politics both despite and because of it being framed in a language of pluralism, restoration and…
Aoibhín de Búrca: Preventing Political Violence against Civilians: Nationalist Militant Conflict in Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine
As the flags on the lampposts in Belfast attest the Israeli/Palestinian–Irish comparison is nothing new, blog commentary and the letters pages in Ireland’s newspapers provide ample evidence in supp
From Armed Struggle to Political Struggle: Republican Tradition and Transformation in Northern Ireland by Graham Spencer
From Armed Struggle to Political Struggle: Republican Tradition and Transformation in Northern Ireland by Graham Spencer." Democracy and Security, 11(4), pp. 403–404
Anti-Terrorism Law and Normalising Northern Ireland: Jessie Blackbourn: (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015)
Henry Patterson: Ireland’s Violent Frontier: The Border and Anglo-Irish Relations during the Troubles
The September 2013 intervention on the debate on dealing with Northern Ireland’s past by the Irish Tanaiste (deputy prime minister), Eamon Gilmore, was generally warmly received by the media on bot
Peace Building and the Politics of Responsibility: Governing Northern Ireland
This article looks at the implications of the politics of trauma for building and sustaining peace. Drawing in particular on the Northern Irish example, it argues that articulating a commitment to societal responsibility is essential to building a peaceful democracy. The paper brings together recent work on political responsibility by Iris Marion Young and Eric Gordy to explore how models for building democratic peace (consociationalism, delibera…
Policing politics: Framing the Past in Post-Conflict Divided Societies
Dealing with violent pasts in post-conflict societies is especially problematic in ethnically divided societies where ideas about historical events are inextricably bound up with ideas about identity, community, and nation. In such cases "the past" often becomes a key issue on which to contest long-standing grievances and justify particularistic visions of the future. This article argues that, in conjunction with judicial procedures, post-conflic…
Nationalist Politics and Truth Recovery
The idea that truth recovery is necessary for resolving conflict is intuitively attractive. It seems logical to extrapolate from the idea that the reestablishment of peaceful inter-personal relations requires some kind of coming to terms with and working through the actions and events that caused a breakdown of harmony to the idea that inter-communal or interstate relations can and should operate in a similar way. Indeed, mechanisms for ensuring …
Irrevocable Futures: Tracing the Dynamics of Conflict, Bloody Sunday and Bloody Friday
The killing of 14 unarmed demonstrators by the British army in Derry in what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ (30 January 1972) has been seen as a turning point in the history of the Northern Irish conflict insofar as it epitomised the gulf between Northern Catholic-nationalists and the British government. For example, one historian has written of how the events of the day pushed Anglo-Irish relations to ‘breaking-point’ and that the subsequent ‘l…
Can We Fix It? The Peace Process and the Construction of Modern Nationalism in Northern Ireland
This chapter examines scholarly analyses of Northern Irish nationalism. I argue that a process of analytical saturation is occurring based on the recycling of the idea that Northern nationalist political discourse is ‘transformative’ of the ‘Irish problem’. I suggest that this process is detrimental to the historical appraisal of modern Irish nationalism as it foreshadows critical inquiry and obfuscates empirical detail. In contrast to that chara…
Generational Change
Tony Webster, the narrator of Julian Barnes’ Man Booker prize winning novel, The Sense of an Ending , is troubled: superficially, about the passing of time, but, at a deeper level, about the integrity of his identity: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most delinquent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand ti…
Conclusion: The Workings of the Past
The city centre explosion which occurs at the centre of Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street at one level has an almost imperceptible affect on the novel’s plot: the narrative(s) continue to accrue even more carnivaleseque dimensions yet remain at the same time haunted by the residual trauma of violence. At another level, however, the bomb ruptures the novel’s trajectory: lives are sundered and the traumatic aftermath reverberates through the rem…
Making History: The Articulation of the Northern State
As previous chapters have pointed out, in periods of transition, the relations between the present and the past are reconfigured: people look to new meanings in the past to make sense of their contemporary situation and to draw lessons that they believe they can use to fulfil their aspirations about the future. This chapter extends this debate by examining how the 1981 hunger strike has been re-presented by republicans and how the particular narr…
Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland
This book takes as its starting point the idea that not only does the present shape how we think about the past, but that the past is not entirely mutable since experiences and interpretations of events often endure. The past, of course, is fraught with political import: perceptions of unresolved grievances and injustices are inextricably linked with questions of power by providing rationales for whose voices are heard and whose voices are silenc…
Haunted by History
If the politics of transition in Northern Ireland bear the hallmarks of a belatedness how then are we to approach what came before? As the first chapter outlined, attempts at overcoming the past, drawing a line in the sand, or moving on will always be partial, depending as they do on, firstly, the conceit of a truncated periodisation that distinguishes between ‘bad’ pasts, ‘good’ presents, and hoped-for utopias; and, secondly, the harnessing of a…
Northern Ireland 1968–2008
A re-examination of the Northern Ireland conflict and the ongoing peace process, using previously unreleased archival material. The book looks at choices and omissions by the main political parties an
Memory, Politics and Identity: Haunted by History
The question of how to move beyond contentious pasts exercises societies across the globe. Focusing on Northern Ireland, this book examines how historical injustices continue to haunt contemporary liv
Order Out of Chaos: The Politics of Transitional Justice
This article critically assesses the application of the ‘transitional justice’ model of conflict transformation in Northern Ireland. The model addresses a number of important issues for societies emerging from violent conflict, including victims’ rights and dealing with the past. This article claims that the model is founded upon highly contentious political assumptions that give rise to a problematic framing of the issues involved. The underlyin…
Memory in Post-Conflict Societies: From Contention to Integration
The file associated with this record is under an 18 month embargo from publication in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. The full text may be available through the publisher links provided above
Terroristic Narratives: On the (Re) Invention of Peace in Northern Ireland
It has been argued that a key factor in explaining the relative success of the Northern Ireland peace process is the role played by Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and Community-Based Organisations (CBOs) in fostering dialogue and promoting shared space for cooperation across the communal divide. This article critically interrogates the normative import of that narrative, which implies that NGOs and CBOs occupy a higher moral ground than st…
Explaining Northern Ireland? The limitations of the ethnic conflict model
This article claims that while the concept of ethno-nationalism may be taken as shorthand for describing what appear to be the dominant features of certain political conflicts, it possesses little explanatory value – instead obscuring and confusing more than it reveals. Using the Northern Ireland case as an illustrative example, it is argued that the reluctance to problematise or contextualise ethnic claims means that ethnic conflict theorists ma…
Crisis of confidence: Anglo-Irish relations in the early Troubles, 1966–1974
Dublin, the SDLP and the Sunningdale Agreement: Maximalist Nationalism and Path Dependency
This paper seeks to fill a gap in the literature on the Sunningdale agreement as regards the role played by the two nationalist negotiators—the Social Democratic and Labour Party and the Dublin, Fine Gael–Labour coalition government. Utilising recently released archival material and internal party sources, the paper argues that, despite declining chances of success, these actors became locked-in to an increasingly narrow policy trajectory, based …
Ideology, reconciliation and nationalism in Northern Ireland
This article explores the conceptualization of ‘reconciliation’ within modern Northern Irish nationalist discourse. I argue that the case of Northern Irish nationalism adds a new dimension to those understandings that remain currently underappreciated within the literature. The article charts how reconciliation becomes operationalized as a restrictive politics both despite and because of it being framed in a language of pluralism, restoration and…
Policing politics: Framing the Past in Post-Conflict Divided Societies
Dealing with violent pasts in post-conflict societies is especially problematic in ethnically divided societies where ideas about historical events are inextricably bound up with ideas about identity, community, and nation. In such cases "the past" often becomes a key issue on which to contest long-standing grievances and justify particularistic visions of the future. This article argues that, in conjunction with judicial procedures, post-conflic…
The Northern Ireland Westminster Election, 2010
The Northern Irish Westminster general election of 6 May 2010 witnessed a mixture of striking episodes and more mundane continuities in Northern Ireland. Not for the first time in the history of the Northern state, these changes reflected the ethnic divide – the leaders of the two main unionist parties failed to win a seat (indeed, the First Minister and leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, Peter Robinson, was unseated), as did the leader of …
Community-Based Restorative Justice in Northern Ireland: A Neo-Traditionalist Paradigm
This article critically assesses the scholarly representation of community-based restorative justice (CBRJ) schemes in Northern Ireland. These schemes, which emerged in working-class areas following the republican and loyalist ceasefires of the 1990s, have been the subject of intense political debate and a growing body of academic literature. I argue that the academic depiction of the schemes in republican areas ignores the substantial progress m…
Spectres of History: Nationalist Party Politics and Truth Recovery in Northern Ireland
This article critically explores the idea that resolving ethnic conflicts requires some form of truth recovery mechanism to ensure accountability for past actions. While the truth recovery model suggests the need for a pluralistic, inclusive approach to peace building, I argue that its intersection with party and identity politics means that it has the potential to destabilise settlement processes. Using the Northern Ireland case as an example, I…
The Politics of Transitional Justice or All's Well That Ends Well: A Response to Brown
Devolution and identity: Multidirectionality in ‘Welshness’ and ‘Northern Irishness’
In an era of Brexit and on-going constitutional debates in the UK, questions around devolution and national identifications currently attract scholarly attention as never before. This article focusses on national identification in two devolved regions, Wales and Northern Ireland, never before compared in this way, to explore how devolution can act in a fluid and multidirectional way to produce differing framings of national identification. Using …
The Stormont House Agreement and the New Politics of Storytelling in Northern Ireland
This article explores recent proposals to deal with the past in Northern Ireland. Focusing, in particular, on the 2014 Stormont House Agreement, I argue that it is possible to begin to discern a movement within policy design to respond proactively to what I term a new politics of storytelling. This consists of an emphasis on testimony-work as a means of dealing with unresolved legacies relating to the Troubles. I suggest that that new politics li…
What We Talk About When We Talk About Peace: A Rejoinder to McEvoy and Shirlow
Learning from the past or laundering history? Consociational narratives and state intervention in Northern Ireland
Dublin, the SDLP and the Sunningdale Agreement: Maximalist Nationalism and Path Dependency
This paper seeks to fill a gap in the literature on the Sunningdale agreement as regards the role played by the two nationalist negotiators—the Social Democratic and Labour Party and the Dublin, Fine Gael–Labour coalition government. Utilising recently released archival material and internal party sources, the paper argues that, despite declining chances of success, these actors became locked-in to an increasingly narrow policy trajectory, based …
Order Out of Chaos: The Politics of Transitional Justice
This article critically assesses the application of the ‘transitional justice’ model of conflict transformation in Northern Ireland. The model addresses a number of important issues for societies emerging from violent conflict, including victims’ rights and dealing with the past. This article claims that the model is founded upon highly contentious political assumptions that give rise to a problematic framing of the issues involved. The underlyin…
Conclusion
As the narrator of Javier Cercas’ novel, cited above, points out, changing circumstances in the present affect our ideas about the past. However, he also recognises that the notion that the past is malleable can be misleading; and in fact, the past impinges on the present — often in a constraining and highly restrictive fashion. This study has claimed that the release of new archival material allows us to explore in greater depth than was previou…
Direct Rule and Power Sharing,1972–74
The prorogation of the Stormont parliament and the introduction of direct rule from London in March 1972 transformed the political context in Northern Ireland and contributed to the further radicalisation of the North’s politics. Westminster’s intervention in removing Northern Ireland state structures established the essential factors that framed the long-term marginalisation of the North’s politics and its protracted political impasse. It profou…
The Politics of the Past,1998–2008
This chapter looks at the politics of the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement and argues that the faltering attempts to establish devolution in Northern Ireland were a product of the ways in which contemporary political developments are saturated with the politics of the past. This chapter explores how the legacies of the conflict continued to influence post-Agreement politics in the North. The underlying question is the extent to which it is poss…
Turning Points in the Troubles, 1968–71
This chapter begins the process of charting how historical decisions exacerbated inter-communal rivalries, political polarisation and entrenchment. It explores the argument that policy choices and historical interventions had a downstream impact — certain choices carried through to constrain and shape later options; and the act of making decisions ruled out once-plausible alternatives, which became evermore remote. Which choices actually carried …
The Politics of Entrenchment,1974–85
This chapter examines the policy direction of the British government and the Northern Irish parties between the collapse of the Sunningdale executive in May 1974 and the Anglo-Irish Agreement in November 1985. The unfolding of historical processes played a determining role in the events of these years. As previous choices continued to work themselves out, the Northern Irish parties became further entrenched within their stated policies and the Br…
The Northern Ireland Conflict
The Northern Ireland conflict is often described in terms of the presence of two rival ethnic communities, two competing ideas about identity and belonging, and two antagonistic visions of political aspiration. As such, it is portrayed as a quintessential example of what can happen when two ethnic groups live close together in a territory.1 This fundamental lesson underpins many others — in particular, the need to keep ethnic groups apart and the…
The Northern Ireland Peace Process, 1985–97
Defining what is meant by the term ‘peace process’ is logically prior to its dating; hence this chapter explores the winding down of the conflict and examines how, despite the move from bombings and shootings, political entrenchment remained untouched and communal polarisation persisted. The reason for this was that the political context in which emerging debates over equality agendas, ‘parity of esteem’, identity politics and reform and reconcil…
Learning from the past or laundering history? Consociational narratives and state intervention in Northern Ireland
Community-Based Restorative Justice in Northern Ireland: A Neo-Traditionalist Paradigm
This article critically assesses the scholarly representation of community-based restorative justice (CBRJ) schemes in Northern Ireland. These schemes, which emerged in working-class areas following the republican and loyalist ceasefires of the 1990s, have been the subject of intense political debate and a growing body of academic literature. I argue that the academic depiction of the schemes in republican areas ignores the substantial progress m…
The Politics of Transitional Justice or All's Well That Ends Well: A Response to Brown
Explaining Northern Ireland? The limitations of the ethnic conflict model
This article claims that while the concept of ethno-nationalism may be taken as shorthand for describing what appear to be the dominant features of certain political conflicts, it possesses little explanatory value – instead obscuring and confusing more than it reveals. Using the Northern Ireland case as an illustrative example, it is argued that the reluctance to problematise or contextualise ethnic claims means that ethnic conflict theorists ma…
Northern Ireland 1968–2008
A re-examination of the Northern Ireland conflict and the ongoing peace process, using previously unreleased archival material. The book looks at choices and omissions by the main political parties an
John Bew, Martyn Frampton, and Iñigo Gurruchaga: Talking to Terrorists: Making Peace in Northern Ireland and the Basque Country
Carolin Goerzig: Talking to Terrorists: Concessions and the Renunciation of Violence
Crisis of confidence: Anglo-Irish relations in the early Troubles, 1966–1974
The Northern Ireland Westminster Election, 2010
The Northern Irish Westminster general election of 6 May 2010 witnessed a mixture of striking episodes and more mundane continuities in Northern Ireland. Not for the first time in the history of the Northern state, these changes reflected the ethnic divide – the leaders of the two main unionist parties failed to win a seat (indeed, the First Minister and leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, Peter Robinson, was unseated), as did the leader of …
Terroristic Narratives: On the (Re) Invention of Peace in Northern Ireland
It has been argued that a key factor in explaining the relative success of the Northern Ireland peace process is the role played by Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and Community-Based Organisations (CBOs) in fostering dialogue and promoting shared space for cooperation across the communal divide. This article critically interrogates the normative import of that narrative, which implies that NGOs and CBOs occupy a higher moral ground than st…
Everyday Life After the Irish Conflict: The Impact of Devolution and Cross-border Cooperation
Part 1 Introduction and context 1 Introduction: The politics of everyday life Cillian McGrattan and Elizabeth Meehan 2 The rocky road from enmity Duncan Morrow Part 2 Space, place and human relations in Northern Ireland 3 Routine divisions: segregation and daily life in Northern Ireland Neil Jarman and John Bell 4 Promoting good relations: the role of schools in Northern Ireland Joanne Hughes and Caitlin Donnelly 5 Everyday evangelicals: life in …
Moving On’: The Politics of Shared Society in Northern Ireland
Debates over the direction of the Northern Irish peace process have moved from decommissioning and all‐party inclusion to community relations and whether society is becoming more or less integrated and shared. This article contends that what is missing from this debate is consideration of the fact that a process of de‐politicisation is occurring – specifically, inspired by a progressivist imperative, political discourse and engagement are increas…
Memory, Politics and Identity: Haunted by History
The question of how to move beyond contentious pasts exercises societies across the globe. Focusing on Northern Ireland, this book examines how historical injustices continue to haunt contemporary liv
Spectres of History: Nationalist Party Politics and Truth Recovery in Northern Ireland
This article critically explores the idea that resolving ethnic conflicts requires some form of truth recovery mechanism to ensure accountability for past actions. While the truth recovery model suggests the need for a pluralistic, inclusive approach to peace building, I argue that its intersection with party and identity politics means that it has the potential to destabilise settlement processes. Using the Northern Ireland case as an example, I…
Nationalist Politics and Truth Recovery
The idea that truth recovery is necessary for resolving conflict is intuitively attractive. It seems logical to extrapolate from the idea that the reestablishment of peaceful inter-personal relations requires some kind of coming to terms with and working through the actions and events that caused a breakdown of harmony to the idea that inter-communal or interstate relations can and should operate in a similar way. Indeed, mechanisms for ensuring …
Irrevocable Futures: Tracing the Dynamics of Conflict, Bloody Sunday and Bloody Friday
The killing of 14 unarmed demonstrators by the British army in Derry in what became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’ (30 January 1972) has been seen as a turning point in the history of the Northern Irish conflict insofar as it epitomised the gulf between Northern Catholic-nationalists and the British government. For example, one historian has written of how the events of the day pushed Anglo-Irish relations to ‘breaking-point’ and that the subsequent ‘l…
Political science (49 works) · Law (46 works) · Irish and British Studies (45 works) · Sociology (44 works) · Politics (42 works) · Law (25 works) · Political economy (25 works) · Northern ireland (24 works) · Ethnology (23 works) · History (20 works)