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. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Art · Ethnology · Hegemony · Literature · Narrative · Northern ireland · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Irish and British Studies · Law · Theatre and Performance Studies