scholarly journals ‘Absent and yet Somehow Present’: Idealized Landscapes and the Counter-historical Impulse in Contemporary Northern Irish Photography and Writing

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 64-76
Author(s):  
Stephanie Lehner
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Point Of Departure

This article explores how three artists are responding to the idealized landscape that is contemporary Northern Ireland. I argue that the rural/urban dichotomy which implicitly or explicitly forms a point of departure in the photographic collections of David Farrell’s Innocent Landscapes (2001) and John Duncan’s Trees from Germany (2003) is also evident in David Park’s 2008 novel, The Truth Commissioner, offering a new lens to explore the play of absences and presences that constitute the peace process. The three works allow us to perceive how idealized landscapes act as façades that conceal, contain and defer alternative realities.

A Shared Future? Exclusion, Stigmatization, and Mental Health of Same-Sex-Attracted Young People in Northern Ireland

2010 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 488-508 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dirk Schubotz ◽  
Malachai O'Hara
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Young People ◽  
Sex Education ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
School Bullying ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Same Sex ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Young Life

For more than a decade the Peace Process has fundamentally changed Northern Irish society. However, although socioreligious integration and ethnic mixing are high on the political agenda in Northern Ireland, the Peace Process has so far failed to address the needs of some of the most vulnerable young people, for example, those who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Public debates in Northern Ireland remain hostile to same-sex-attracted people. Empirical evidence from the annual Young Life and Times (YLT) survey of 16-year-olds undertaken by ARK shows that same-sex-attracted young people report worse experiences in the education sector (e.g., sex education, school bullying), suffer from poorer mental health, experience higher social pressures to engage in health-adverse behavior, and are more likely to say that they will leave Northern Ireland and not return. Equality legislation and peace process have done little to address the heteronormativity in Northern Ireland.

scholarly journals ‘The Troubles' and the peace process in Northern Irelanda in Seamus Heaney’s "The cure at Troy"

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan José Cogolludo Díaz
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Seamus Heaney ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Sectarian Violence ◽  
The Future ◽  
Irish People

Based on Philoctetes, the tragic play by Sophocles, the poet Seamus Heaney creates his own version in The Cure at Troy to present the political and social problems in Northern Ireland during the period that became known euphemistically as ‘the Troubles’. This paper aims to highlight the significance of Heaney’s play in the final years of the conflict. Heaney uses the classical Greek play to bring to light the plight and suffering of the Northern Irish people as a consequence of the atavistic and sectarian violence between the unionist and nationalist communities. Nevertheless, Heaney also provides possible answers that allow readers to harbour a certain degree of hope towards peace and the future in Northern Ireland.

‘The Troubles we’ve seen’: film, television drama and the Northern Irish conflict in Britain

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Hill
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Relative Scarcity

This chapter examines films and television dramas dealing with the impact of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ in Britain and the controversies that they generated. It begins with a consideration of early TV dramas such as The Vanishing Army (1978) and Chance of a Lifetime (1980) dealing with the experiences of the returning British soldier. This is followed by an examination of the representation of the IRA’s activities on the British ‘mainland’ in productions such as The Patriot Game (1969), Hennessy (1975), Eighteen Months to Balcombe Street (1977) and The Long Good Friday (1979) as well as an analysis of how the miscarriages of justice that emerged in the wake of the IRA’s bombing campaigns were turned into (documentary)-dramas such as Who Bombed Birmingham? (1990) and In the Name of the Father(1993). The chapter then concludes with some consideration of the ‘peace process’ and the relative scarcity of dramas dealing with the divisions and tensions that were a feature of the earlier period.

scholarly journals “What Is This, the Seventies?” Spectres of the Past (and the Future) in Recent Northern Irish Television

2020 ◽  
pp. 152747642098582
Author(s):  
Colin Coulter
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
Television Drama ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Future ◽  
Theoretical Frame

For all the gains made during its celebrated peace process, Northern Ireland remains haunted by a conflict that claimed more than 3,700 lives. One of the spaces in which the ghosts of the past manifest themselves is that of television drama. In this article, Mark Fisher’s reading of “hauntology” provides the theoretical frame for an analysis of two recent TV series set in Northern Ireland: The Fall and Derry Girls. Although the programs could not be more different in both tone and content, they both illustrate sharply that the region remains, in John Hewitt’s indelible phrase, a “ghost-haunted land.” In particular, The Fall and Derry Girls reveal that Northern Ireland continues to be deeply troubled both by those who were lost during the conflict and by that which was lost in the transition to peace.

Culture, Rhetoric, and Reconciliation: The Place of Language in the Northern Irish Conflict and Peace Process (1998-2002)

2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jennifer Dougherty
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
National Level ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
Seamus Heaney ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Potential Conflict ◽  
Positive Role ◽  
Language Play ◽  
The Troubles

Alterations in public discourse towards multiculturalism, reconciliation and liberal democracy at the national level in Northern Ireland are evident from 1998 - 2002, but to what end? To what extent did language play a positive role in the Northern Ireland peace process? Recognizing that language does not tell the whole story of the Northern Irish experience of the Troubles or current peace process, the author highlights how language, as a transmitter and constitutor of culture, has played a role as a signifier of potential conflict, peace and progress (or lack thereof). In particular, the author considers several texts including excerpts from speeches given by Noble Prize Winners—the former First Minister David Trimble and former SDLP leader, John Hume; an IRA apology, Bloody Sunday Inquiry and the Belfast Agreement; and several selections from the work of Northern Irish poets Seamus Heaney and Eavan Boland.

scholarly journals Gendering the ‘post-conflict’ narrative in Northern Ireland’s peace process

2018 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Niall Gilmartin
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Gender Relations ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
Formal Representation ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
New Era ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Male Power ◽  
Good Friday Agreement

The Good Friday Agreement negotiations gave a unique opportunity for the insertion of women’s rights and equal formal representation in the new post-conflict Northern Ireland. Notwithstanding the robust and unambiguous commitments in the text of the agreement, the primary architects of the peace process, however, situated gender and women’s position as peripheral to the main priorities of ‘guns and government’. While conventional forms of peacebuilding claim to be beneficial for all, evidence from the so-called ‘post-conflict’ period around the world demonstrates a continuity of violence for many women, as well as new forms of violence. This article explores the position of women in Northern Ireland today across a number of issues, including formal politics, community activism, domestic violence and reproductive rights. By doing so, it continues feminist endeavours seeking to problematise the ‘post-conflict’ narrative by gendering peace and security. While the Good Friday Agreement did undoubtedly provide the potential for a new era of gender relations, 20 years on Northern Irish society exhibits all the trademarks and insidious characteristics of a patriarchal society that has yet to undergo a genuine transformation in gender relations. The article argues that the consistent privileging of masculinity and the dominance of male power is a commonality that remains uninterrupted by the peace process.

scholarly journals Memory, Trauma and Forgetting in Northern Irish Drama

2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 77-91
Author(s):  
Anthony Roche
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
The Other ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Violent Incident ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
The Past ◽  
Irish Drama ◽  
Bloody Sunday

The ethical exhortation ‘not to forget’ runs the risk of ‘a memory that would never forget anything’. At the other extreme is the no less dangerous risk of total amnesia, an erasure of the past that immediately suggests Freud and the return of the repressed. The complex balance to be found between memory and forgetting is particularly fraught in Northern Ireland and the politics of how the past is to be negotiated in the current post peace process climate. I propose to look at this subject in relation to the trauma engendered by decades of violence in two Northern Irish plays: Quietly (2012) by Owen McCafferty, set in the post peace process climate of 2009 but harking back to a violent incident in the same location thirty-five years earlier; and Frank McGuinness’s Carthaginians (1988), a canonical play about one of the central events in ‘the Troubles’, Bloody Sunday of 30 January 1972, but set more than a decade later.

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