‘Sharing Responsibility’ and the future of Northern Ireland

By Tony Novosel - In the 1978 comedy Animal House, a group of students embark on a drunken road trip in a fellow student’s car. The result? A totalled car and a very distraught student. Seemingly to comfort him, one of the older students puts his arm around him and then calmly says, “C’mon Flounder. You can’t...

Museology of “The Troubles”: Reflections on an Emerging Public History Initiative

By Martin Duffy- Queen’s University recently hosted a lively Forum discussing the question, “Do we need a Museum of the Troubles and Peace?”[1] Devotees of this blog may well have read Dr Katie McClurkin’s thoughtful article, “A Sacred Mission: Envisioning a Troubles Museum” which deftly crystallizes the symbolic burden such a facility inherits in a...

A “sacred mission”? Envisioning a ‘Troubles’ Museum

By Kathryn McClurkin The very notion of a museum devoted to ‘the Troubles’ sparks many questions. Where would it be located? How would it frame the history of the conflict? Who would the museum be for? Would it be an all-Ireland institution or a determinedly Northern Ireland institution? How would it be funded? Is this...

Photographic Ubiquity: Remembering Bobby Sands

By Katherine Side - When 27-year-old, Robert (“Bobby”) Gerard Sands died on May 5, 1981, after 66 days on hunger strike, he was already recognizable to many. A single colour photograph of Sands circulated widely as a commodity throughout the republican movement and its international coverage. This image still endures. It has been painted successively...

More than music: singing the Troubles in Northern Ireland

By Jess Readett- Music and politics went hand in hand throughout the ‘Troubles’. From the unionist Lambeg drum beating on Orange Day, to Bobby Sands’ lyrics scrawled on the cigarette packets smuggled out of Long Kesh – the ‘Troubles’ had a soundtrack that served as more than mere background music to its players. In the...

The Limitations of ‘Maternal’ Activism in Troubles Narratives

By Miren Mohrenweiser- “Maternal activism” and “wee women’s work” are phrases typically applied to women’s activity during the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ regardless of political or religious affiliation.[1] What’s notable about these terms is that their implied opposites—i.e. “paternal activism” and “big men’s work”—are never referred to in this gendered sense. Men’s political activity doesn’t require...

Difficult History, Difficult Women, Difficult Research

In one of the first posts on Writing the ‘Troubles’, Eli Davies wrote ‘the starting point for my research is an observation, and it’s by no means an original one: that women’s experiences of the conflict in Northern Ireland are excluded in mainstream discourse’. This observation is also the starting point of my own research...

Researching the republican movement: inside and out.

By Daniel Finn The two major Irish conflicts of the last century led to very different outcomes in terms of legality and state formation. The War of Independence gave rise to a new state that established its own form of constitutional legitimacy. The IRA campaign of the 1970s and 80s, on the other hand, could...

Situating Irish America in the Northern Irish Civil Rights Movement

By Melissa Baird- The influence of the United States – its government, its Irish diasporic population, or the common overlap of both – on the ‘Troubles’ has been increasingly well researched.[1] However, the role of the United States in the Northern Irish civil rights movement, and how this related to the ‘Troubles’, is something that...

Killing Strangers: How Political Violence Became Modern.

By Tim Wilson- My new book Killing Strangers sets itself a simple exam question to answer: How have forms of political violence changed over time? In answering that question, it attempts to link the changing ‘repertoires’ of protest violence with deeper processes of modernisation. Its arena is Western Europe and North America; its timespan, the...