Remembering and Looking Forward Chapter 1 Dealing with the Past In
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Notes Introduction: Remembering and Looking Forward 1 Diana Rusk, ‘British-Irish relations reach an all-time high’, Irish News, 14 March 2012, pp. 8–9. 2 David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney and Chris Thornton, Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women, and Children Who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles (Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1999). 3 Declan Kearney, ‘Uncomfortable conversations are key to reconciliation’, An Phoblacht, 5 March 2012, available at http://aprnonline.com/?p=88667, accessed on 14 March 2012. 4 Michael Ignatieff, Warrior’s Honor: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (London: Chatto & Windus, 1998), p. 173. 5 See, for example, Neil Jarman, Material Conflicts: Parades and Visual Displays in Northern Ireland (Oxford: Berg, 1997); see also Sara McDowell, ‘Commemorating the troubles: Unravelling the representation of the contestation of memory in Northern Ireland since 1994’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Ulster, 2006). 6 Mary Fulbrook, German National Identity after the Holocaust (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), p. 36. Chapter 1 Dealing with the Past in Northern Ireland 1 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (London: University of California Press, 1984), p. 184. 2 Jeffrey K. Olick, ‘From usable pasts to the return of the repressed’, avail- able at www.iasc-culture.org/HHR_Archives/UsesPast/Olick.pdf, accessed on 14 March 2012. 3 Ereshnee Naidu and Cyril Adonis, ‘History on their own terms: The relevance of the past for a new generation’ (2007), p. 4, available at kms1.isn.ethz.ch/ serviceengine/Files/ISN/99640/ipublicationdocument_singledocument/007e56 25-1ed7-4b05-baee-a491beb31f8f/en/history[1].pdf, accessed on 2 May 2012. 4 It is for this reason that the New Zealand historian and theorist, J.G.A. Pocock argued that ‘Disinterested historiography is possible only in stable societies, where the present is fortified by means other than the writing of histories’, ‘Time, institutions and action: An essay on traditions and their understanding’ [1968], in Political Thought and History: Essays on Theory and Method (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 215. 5 For Volkan, a clear example of ‘chosen trauma’ was Slobodan Milosevic’s con- juring of the ghosts of the Battle of Kosovo to mobilise Serbian nationalism. See, for example, Vamik D. Volkan, ‘Chosen trauma, the political ideology of entitle- ment and violence’ (N.P. 2004), available at www.vamikvolkan.com/Chosen- Trauma-the-Political-Ideology-of-Entitlement-and-Violence.php, accessed on 2 May 2012. 176 Notes 177 6 Stef Jansen, ‘The violence of memories: Local narratives of the past after ethnic cleansing in Croatia’, Local History, 6:1 (2002), p. 84. 7 Lucette Valensi, ‘Traumatic events and historical consciousness: Who is in charge?’, in Historians and Social Values, edited by Joep Leerssen and Ann Rigney (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2000), p. 195. 8 Ibid., p. 190. 9 Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved, translated by Raymond Rosenthal (London: Abacus, 2010), pp. 11–12. 10 Rebecca Graff-McRae, Remembering and Forgetting 1916: Commemoration and Conflict in Post-Peace Process Ireland (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2011), p. 4. 11 Iwona Irwin Zarecka, Frames of Remembrance: The Dynamics of Collective Memory (London: Transaction Publishers, 1994), p. 115. 12 Problems relating to transitions have, of course, longer historical pedigrees stretching beyond the twentieth century; see Jon Elster, Closing the Books: Transitional Justice in Historical Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer- sity Press, 1994); Paul Ricoeur, Memory, History, Forgetting (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). 13 Benjamin’s evocation of these sentiments finds its most elegiac expression in his contemplation on the Angel of History that he sees in Paul Klee’s Angelus Nova: ‘His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole that which has been smashed. But a storm is blow- ing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress’. Cited in Stefanie Lehner, Sub- altern Ethics in Contemporary Scottish and Irish Literature: Tracing Counter Histories (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 48. 14 Andrew Rigby, Justice and Reconciliation: After the Violence (London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001); see also Ricoeur, Memory. 15 David Mendeloff, ‘Truth-seeking, truth-telling, and postconflict peacebuilding: Curb the enthusiasm?’, International Studies Review, 6 (2004), pp. 355–80. 16 Theodore Zeldin, An Intimate History of Humanity (London: Minerva, 1994), p. 272. 17 Eric Hobsbawm, Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914–1991 (London: Abacus, 1994), p. 5. 18 See, in particular, Simon Prince, Northern Ireland’s ’68: Civil Rights, Global Revolt and the Origins of The Troubles (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2007). 19 Lord Robin Eames and Denis Bradley, ‘Full text of speech given by Lord Robin Eames and Denis Bradley at the Innovation Centre, Titanic Quarter, Belfast, May 2008’, available at www.irishtimes.com/focus/2008/peace/index.pdf accessed on 2 May 2012. 20 Report of the Consultative Group on the Past, p. 71. 21 Cillian McGrattan ‘“Order out of chaos:” The politics of transitional justice’, Politics, 29:3 (2009), pp. 164–72. 22 Report, p. 99. 23 Ibid., p. 4. 178 Notes 24 This paragraph borrows from Cillian McGrattan and Stefanie Lehner, ‘Re/Presenting victimhood: Nationalism, victims and silences’, Nordic-Irish Studies, forthcoming. 25 W. James Booth, ‘The unforgotten: Memories of justice’, American Political Science Review, 95:4 (2001), pp. 781–2. 26 Greg Grandin, ‘The Instruction of great catastrophe: Truth commissions, national history, and State formation in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala’, American Historical Review, 110:1 (2005), pp. 46–67. 27 Michael Humphrey, ‘Marginalizing “victims” and “terrorists”: Modes of exclu- sion in the reconciliation process’, in Reconciliation after Terrorism: Strategy, Poss- ibility or Absurdity?, edited by Judith Renner and Alexander Spencer (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 53. 28 Kevin Bean, The New Politics of Sinn Féin (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007). 29 Cillian McGrattan, ‘Community-based restorative justice in Northern Ireland: A neo-traditionalist paradigm?’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 12:3 (2010), pp. 408–24. 30 Aaron Edwards and Cillian McGrattan, ‘Terroristic narratives: On the (Re)- Invention of Peace in Northern Ireland’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 23:3 (2011), pp. 357–76. 31 Quite what the pedagogical benefits involved in students listening to well- trod terrorist stories are or having them spin the glossy teaching resource’s ‘consequence wheel’ four decades after Bloody Sunday and Sunningdale (not mentioned in the pack) remain unclear. Certainly, the ethical and polit- ical standards remain loaded and, arguably, repugnant: a similar initiative was met with widespread opposition in Spain where a balance was sought by includ-ing victims’ stories. Nevertheless, the initiative has been warmly welcomed, receiving coverage on the BBC and the Belfast Tele-graph. See www.communityfoundationni. org/ News/From-Prison-to-Peace-Partnership- shares-message-with- pupils. 32 Mark Thompson, ‘Political agendas will only hide the truths of our past’, Belfast Telegraph, 12 January 2012, available at www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/ opinion/news-analysis/political-agendas-will-only-hide-the-truths-of-our-past- 16101890.html#ixzz1jHXgd4Pz. 33 Cillian McGrattan, ‘Spectres of history: Nationalist party politics and truth recovery in Northern Ireland’, Political Studies, 60:2, pp. 455–73. 34 Edna Longley, ‘Northern Ireland: Commemoration, elegy, forgetting’, in History and Memory in Modern Ireland, edited by Ian McBride (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 231. 35 Humphrey, ‘Marginalizing’, p. 54. 36 Yehudith Auerbach and Ifat Maoz, ‘Terror, empathy and reconciliation in the Israel-Palestinian conflict’, in Reconciliation after Terrorism: Strategy, Possibility or Absurdity?, edited by Judith Renner and Alexander Spencer (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 190. 37 Paul Ricoeur, ‘Reflections on a new ethos for Europe’, in Paul Ricoeur: The Hermeneutics of Praxis, edited by Richard Kearney (London: Sage, 1996), pp. 6–7. 38 Ibid., p. 7. 39 Ibid., pp. 7–8. 40 Ibid., p. 11. Notes 179 41 Thomas Hylland Eriksen, Guardian, 25 July 2011, available at www.guardian. co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jul/25/anders-behring-breivik-norway-extremists. Chapter 2 Belatedness 1 Gerry Adams, ‘An opportunity to build new relationship between our countries’, Irish Examiner, 14 May 2011, available at www.irishexaminer.com, accessed on 16 May 2011. 2 Aaron Kelly, ‘Geopolitical eclipse: Culture and the peace process in Northern Ireland’, Third Text, 19:5 (2005), pp. 545–53; Stefanie Lehner, ‘The peace process as Arkhe-Tainment?’, Irish Studies Review, 15:4 (2007), pp. 507–20. See also BBC online, ‘Dates set for Queen and Duke’s visit to Ireland’, 14 April 2011, available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13003898, accessed on 16 May 2011; and Tom Brady, ‘Lockdown as 8,000 gardai on royal alert for Queen’s visit’, Irish Independ- ent, 16 May 2011, available at www.independent.ie,