Opsahl Commission 30th anniversary: ‘civic poetry’ still yielding insights

Laurence Simms (joint secretary of the British-Irish Secretariat) hosted a reception to mark the 30th anniversary of the Opsahl Commission, which invited and gathered oral and written submissions from individuals and civil society organisations about their suggestions for the way forward in Northern Ireland. Several dozen guests at the Notting Hill residence listened to reflections by various participants of the initiative and shared their stories with each other afterwards. Simms welcomed all who travelled long and short to attend. Remarking …

Read more…

Acknowledging deep hurt and pain: Day of Reflection at Belfast City Hall

Belfast City Council hosted an annual Day of Reflection event for a second year, providing an opportunity for people and communities across the city to acknowledge the deep hurt and pain caused by the conflict in and about Northern Ireland. After introductory remarks, a short film was repeated during the day, interspersed with readings from a variety of authors. Attendees were invited to share their hopes for the future by adding a leaf to a “Message Tree”, and a number …

Read more…

The memorials in our heads: the Im/material Monument (Gail Ritchie)

As the information sheet for Gail Ritchie’s exhibition, The Im/material Monument, points out, 25 years after the signing of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement there is no memorial to commemorate the collective dead of the Troubles. Through a series of objects, Ritchie challenges our imaginations as to what our memorialising could be. With a guided tour, she explained the motivations and intent of her work on display at QSS Artist Studios. Ritchie began her curated tour by remarking that she had …

Read more…

Book review — Refugees and Forced Displacement in Northern Ireland’s Troubles (Niall GILMARTIN and Brendan Ciarán BROWNE)

Among the imagery associated with the Troubles, occasionally you see one of a van or car overladen with house furniture and hastily assembled parcels of clothing and personal possessions. These people were given enough time to bring some things with them as they were either forced out or no longer felt safe remaining in their homes. These incidents usually get a brief mention in the analysis of the 30-year violent conflict in Northern Ireland, yet in a tone of an …

Read more…

How realistic is the doomsday scenario?

Back in the bad old days a mitigation presented for loyalists convicted of unlawfully possessing firearms was that the guns were stored for a ‘Doomsday scenario’, the doomsday in question being a United Ireland. Nationalists should consider that for a moment. For many Unionists, a united Ireland spells the end of life as they know it, an unknown, full of dread. As a child at the start of the Troubles I can remember such fears being voiced and although one …

Read more…

“One of the most disturbing features of contemporary Ireland is the almost universal ignorance among the younger generation of the Northern Troubles…”

Una Mullally is a high profile Irish Times columnist: a gay left-wing feminist (although I have never seen or heard her describe herself as a socialist) who is particularly popular among the young. This is not surprising given that one of her recurrent themes is that young Irish people (idealistic, open-minded, liberal in gender and identity politics, probably Sinn Fein inclined) are mobilising to take over the running of this country from old Irish people (reactionary, narrow-minded, Catholic Church-influenced, probably …

Read more…

The Steel Shutter Revisited 50th Anniversary Conference…

In 1972 at the height of the violent Troubles in Northern Ireland a group of people believed that they could make a difference by simply getting people to listen to one another. Taking great risks for all involved they flew nine stakeholders (5 Protestants and 4 Catholics) from Ireland to Pittsburgh and filmed a three-day encounter group. The famous psychologist Carl Rogers, and colleagues, attempted something radical. For the majority, it was the first time they had any real interaction with …

Read more…

Why I think The IRA War was a failure…

Various posts by Mick Fealty and many others, most recently by Brian Walker in “Leave futile arguments about equivalence aside. We all need to come clean about why the Troubles lasted so unforgivably long” have asked us to re-examine culpability for the Troubles and the need to let the healing process proceed through a truth recovery process. Despite their best efforts, the ensuing conversations have always descended into a welter of “whataboutery” and the sins of the other side. The …

Read more…

The trouble with teaching ‘the Troubles’…

teacher, learning, school

The final episode of Derry Girls (spoiler alert) covered the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement (GFA) with wit and plenty of pathos. After its broadcast, social media was full of older viewers reporting that they had quite forgotten the challenges that many people across the island of Ireland faced when deciding to support unpalatable aspects of the agreement, such as the release of prisoners. The younger adults were open about being entirely unaware of the context of this peace settlement which ended …

Read more…

Something Unresolved – The 50th Anniversary of Bloody Friday…

The room was spartan. Two chairs, a few books on a table and a filing cabinet. Where she kept notes, no doubt – on other stragglers who’d dragged their excess baggage up the stairs. I told of the house purchase gone wrong, how stupid I felt, and the sense of being trapped. She wrote something down. ‘If only I could get an unbroken night’s sleep, I might be able to cope.’ She asked when that problem started. I weighed up …

Read more…

Paras have at last told their grim stories of the Falklands War. With strong public support behind them, perhaps Troubles combatants would do the same

This week’s showing on BBC2 of the gripping  Our Falklands War: a front line story  will have forced comparisons and  contrasts with the Troubles. When I reported the Falklands War from afar in Buenos Aires I used to wonder how those spotty youths in ill fitting uniforms would fare against the elite of the British Army like the Parachute Brigade. Not well as we saw when 1000 of them surrendered to less than 100 paras at Goose Green, although the …

Read more…

Police Ombudsman finds “collusive behaviour” by police in 11 loyalist murders…

The Police Ombudsman has released her reporting into collusion between the RUC and loyalist paramilitaries. From the report overview: Mrs Anderson found that concerns about police actions expressed by bereaved families and survivors were “legitimate and justified”, and said her investigation had identified a range of collusive behaviours by police, which included: Intelligence and surveillance failings which led to loyalist paramilitaries obtaining military grade weaponry in a 1987 arms importation; A failure to warn two men of threats to their …

Read more…

The media’s role in peacebuilding: none of its business?

So is peacebuilding none of the media’s business? That was a conclusion that broadcaster and journalist, Declan Harvey, posed to a panel of fellow journalists and writers at an online webinar delivered through Belfast City Council’s PEACE IV Programme, which is funded through the EU and managed by the Special EU Programmes Body. Panellists Alex Kane, Amanda Ferguson, and Leona O’Neill shared their perspectives and experiences of reporting in Northern Ireland, answering questions from Declan Harvey and those submitted by …

Read more…

‘Politicians will argue, they will fight over it and they will come up with reasons for not dealing with the past’

It was hoped that the Patten reforms would herald a new start for policing in Northern Ireland, but, argues Denis Bradley, the PSNI remains burdened with its legacy from the old RUC. Denis is a former vice-chair of the Northern Ireland Policing Board and co-chair of the Consultative Group on the Past. He was talking in the latest Forward Together podcast from the Holywell Trust. “In the setting-up of the PSNI, the new service inherited, carried with it, the deeds …

Read more…

‘My coping mechanism is talking, seeking peace and reconciliation’

  Alan McBride’s personal journey is well known, but remarkable nonetheless. It was in 1993 that his wife Sharon and her father Desmond Frizzell were killed in an IRA bomb attack on the family fish shop in Belfast’s Shankill Road. But with immense dignity, Alan has since dedicated his life to reconciliation and progress, as well as campaigning on behalf of victims. He is the latest interviewee in the Holywell Trust Forward Together podcasts. Alan admits that initially after Sharon …

Read more…

From Northern Ireland to the US, from 1968 to today, the camera is a powerful catalyst for change

The  horrific  image  of policemen in Minneapolis  caught in the act of slowly  choking  George Floyd to death  has prompted the thought :  how  different would have been the course of the Troubles if  they’d been waged under the eyes of  24/7  live news coverage and video cameras with sound on mobile phones?    Would a whole race of citizen journalists,  citizen terrorists and citizen security forces have been created  all videoing each other like crazy? Might violence amounting  to …

Read more…

What is justice anyway?

What is justice? The answer might be obvious, but in past Forward Together podcast interviews it has been noticeable that the responses to that question have been inconsistent. While parts of political unionism seem focused on the judicial process for acts going back to the Troubles, the response by some in republicanism has been that the core of justice is about creating a fair society today. Daniel Holder, deputy director of the Committee on the Administration of Justice, tells the …

Read more…

Northern Ireland’s mental health crisis

Mental health is a global challenge, but poor mental health is at crisis levels in Northern Ireland. That crisis is in part an ongoing impact from the Troubles, Siobhan O’Neill, professor of mental health science at Ulster University, says in the latest Holywell Trust podcast. “We’re seeing a rise in mental health problems in the Western world,” says Siobhan. “We know that around one in four or one in five people in Europe and the West have a mental health …

Read more…

Lost Lives Reminds us we can’t Forget…

For Terry Maguire, a recent BBC programme, Lost Lives, featuring deaths in the Troubles, triggered a flashback on his way to work. This caused him to reflect on an incident he witnessed as a schoolboy in Derry in 1972, making him reassess his long-held view that the Troubles had no personal impact. As I walked to work in darkness one morning in 2020, work tasks and concerns swirled unhelpfully in my half-awakened mind. When I reached the entrance of the …

Read more…

Considering Grace: An invitation to listen

Considering Grace: An invitation to listen by Allan LEONARD for Shared Future News 5 November 2019 Considering Grace, by Gladys Ganiel and Jamie Yohanis, is a new book that explores how Presbyterians responded to the Troubles, through a series of narratives from 120 people who tell their stories of how they coped with trauma and tests of their faith. The book was launched with a set of readings and short presentations at Assembly Buildings, Belfast, to an audience of several …

Read more…