Performance practices and conflict resolution: Jo Berry and Patrick Magee’s Facing the Enemy

This chapter explores performance as a tool to demonstrate and negotiate contemporary conflict resolution through analysis of Facing The Enemy, the performance practice of Jo Berry and Patrick Magee. Berry is daughter of Sir Anthony Berry, Conservative MP killed in the attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton and Magee is the former IRA member responsible for the attack. Performance theory offers a framework to assess the theatrical “performativity” of the work, raising awareness of the issues surrounding the Troubes in Britain. Performance allows them to face a personal dimension of conflict resolution while using it as a tool to explore this paradigm. I argue for the authority of a performance practice whereby the performers retain their core identity throughout, while negotiating enough to accommodate the other.

Commemorating bonds of Union: remembering the Ulster Special Constabulary at the National Memorial Arboretum

In 2006, two acts of commemoration took place to the memory of the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC). One was staged in a public site of national commemoration at the National Memorial Arboretum (NMA) in Lichfield, Staffordshire and the other was a very local service in the remote site of Mullaghfad Church, Co.Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. Both of these events were state-funded under the terms of the ‘Victims and Survivors Befriending Grant Scheme’, but engaged in very different modes of remembrance. This chapter focuses on the USC memorial at the NMA as a strategic site of memory for the Ulster unionist community. Drawing upon interviews with members of the Ulster Special Constabulary Association (USCA) present at the commemoration, it explores the active role Britain plays as a physical and symbolic site of ‘respite’ for Ulster unionists. In contrast to the private, divisive nature of memorials to the USC in Northern Ireland, the NMA site enables the USCA to locate its role in the Troubles in terms of British heroism and sacrifice, alongside memorials to other UK police units. The chapter suggests that historians should look more closely at the active role Britain plays in commemorating the Northern Irish Troubles.

Suspect stories: William Trevor’s portrayals of the Irish in London during the Troubles

This chapter explores how three short stories by William Trevor portray the way in which Irish people in London were affected by the Troubles. For a writer who had established a reputation for his empathetic portrayal of the anomalous position of the Anglo-Irish in Ireland, the political situation of the Irish in London in the 1970s and 1980s provided Trevor with similar subject matter, but in a wholly new context. His stories provide an important corrective to some of the more pervasive stereotypes found in the popular genre of Troubles fiction. They reveal how, during the Troubles, the neighbourhood and the home became heightened political ‘contact zones’ between migrant and host communities. With attention to AvtarBrah’s notion of ‘diaspora space’, I demonstrate how fiction, and the personal and collective narratives contained therein, has a valuable role to play in mediating memories of the Troubles in Britain. This, in turn, can inform the wider discussion of British-Irish relations and contribute to post-conflict understanding.

‘Not our cup of tea’: Irish and British feminist encounters in London during the Troubles

Little writing exists on the experiences of women central to the numerous organizations that sprang up throughout the thirty years of the Irish Troubles. This chapter concentrates on three feminist groups, all London-based: the Women on Ireland Collective (1973-4), the Women and Ireland Group (1976-80) and the London Armagh Group (1980-mid-1990s) representing a small, but vibrant section of anti-imperialist women active on Irish issues in Britain. The focus of the three groups was the plight of working-class women living primarily in Republican areas of Northern Ireland in their daily struggles with the British Army and local police force. In time, the focus widened to include Republican women prisoners incarcerated in Armagh Jail and in various prisons in Britain. Most group members were activists in the British Women’s Liberation Movement (WLM), especially its socialist strand, and perceived that movement as their main constituency. However, they encountereda widespread dismissal in all strands of the British WLM of Irish issues as ‘too complex’, the nature of the Troubles being too much ‘a man’s war’, and as such, ‘not our cup of tea’. This chapter examines the groups’ activities in this context, and argues that their experience highlighted the limits of feminist solidarity.

Political delegations of women from Britain to the North of Ireland and the campaign against strip searching in the 1980s

This chapter gives an account of delegations of women, primarily organised during the 1980s by Labour Women for Ireland (LWI), the women’s section of the Labour Committee on Ireland (LCI), to the North of Ireland.The primary focus of the visits was to raise the profile of the campaign against strip searching of women in Armagh Jail.

Policing the Irish community in Britain

The Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1974 and its successors was only part, albeit an important part, of the methodology used to control the Irish community. Very few terrorists were arrested and prosecuted under these Acts but they provided the British government with a wide range of effective information gathering powers. Many members of the Irish community had suffered from a lack of civil and economic rights in the North of Ireland in the past and were deeply concerned at the use of strip-searching, plastic bullets and shoot to kill policies there. But the Prevention of Terrorism Acts tended to have a chilling effect on political debate and action in the Irish community in Britain; as did a number of now notorious miscarriages of justice; such as the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven. At the same time, Frank Kitson’s intelligence gathering methods, referred to in his seminal text, Low Intensity Operations, were used to increase surveillance of the Irish community in Britain and much of the British media fuelled anti-Irish racism. Later the spread of similar policing tactics to other minority communities in Britain had the unintended consequence of building understanding of and support for the previously beleaguered Irish community.

British questions

This chapter revisits a series of interviews conducted with leading British politicians in 1991 for the Channel Four documentary Pack Up the Troubles. Drawing on material not used in the final broadcast, it provides a snapshot of an important group of British protagonists in the conflict, seven years before the Good Friday Agreement, analysing their attitudes and understanding of the situation.

‘I’d find a way to contribute to peace’

Personal testimony of the daughter of Sir Anthony George Berry, a Conservative MP killed in the Brighton hotel bombing.

Responding to the IRA bombing campaign in mainland Britain: the case of Warrington

On Saturday 20th March, 1993, 2 IRA bombs exploded in the centre of Warrington, claiming 2 young lives, those of 3 year old Johnathan Ball and 12 year old Tim Parry, and wounding more than 50 others. The attack left the local community shocked and appalled, and provoked a wave of indignation and sympathy nationally, across the water in Ireland, and worldwide. The victims’ families and members of the local community strove to come to terms with the tragedy by finding ways to foster closer links between Britain and Ireland, and in the hope of preventing further acts of violence and hatred. Several community groups undertook initiatives, initially under the umbrella of W.I.R.E (Warrington Ireland Reconciliation Enterprise). Among the prominent participants were Colin and Wendy Parry, who have spearheaded a lasting response to the bombing. Based mainly on interviews with the main protagonists in Warrington and drawing on local and Republican newspaper archives, this chapter sets out to place the 1993 Warrington bombing in the context of the IRA’s bombing campaign in England and the tentative peace process. It will show how such a constructive civic response impacted on Anglo-Irish relations, adding new impetus to the 1990s peace process.

The ‘oxygen of publicity’ and the suffocation of censorship: national newspaper representations of the British broadcasting ban (1988–94)

The British broadcasting ban was a form of direct censorship introduced by the British Government in 1988, following several decades of indirect censorship against the broadcast media before and during the Northern Ireland conflict. Indirect censorship had long operated through a combination of pressure against broadcasters from Stormont and Westminster politicians and the institutionalised self-censorship of the ‘reference upwards’ system practised by broadcasters. The broadcasting ban, however, directly controlled the British broadcast media by making it illegal for representatives of eleven republican and loyalist organisations to speak on television and the radio until the restrictions were lifted in 1994. This chapter begins by briefly considering the significant events leading up to the introduction of the broadcasting ban with a particular focus on the relationship between the British Government and the British broadcast media in this period. It then outlines the justifications given by the British Government for the broadcasting ban, explains how broadcasters were impacted by it and how they tried to resist it. After contextualising these important factors, the findings of a study on British newspaper representations of the broadcasting ban are presented and analysed, revealing the extent to which national newspapers supported and resisted this censorship in Britain.