The latest proposal in Northern Ireland’s complex and often fraught story of devolution, ‘A Fresh Start: The Stormont Agreement and Implementation Plan’ was agreed between the main parties in the Northern Ireland Assembly and the British and Irish governments in November 2015. Interestingly, the rationale appears above the title: ‘An agreement to consolidate the peace, secure stability, enable progress and offer hope’. The ‘plan’ itself concentrates mainly on extending austerity to Northern Ireland’s welfare system along with providing a body to report on the continued activities of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), which continues to indulge in racketeering, smuggling and occasional killings.
The November agreement all but avoids the contentious issue of the legacy of the conflict that witnessed almost 4,000 killings in over three decades – around 2,000 of which remain unresolved. The agreement correctly points out that ‘A large measure of agreement has been found on the detail of many of the issues addressed by the [December 2014 Stormont House Agreement (SHA)]’. But, as it explains, ‘Some of these remain a work in progress’. It goes on to state that the two governments will explore these issues, which include questions of truth/information recovery and prosecution for unresolved murders, a potential amnesty, restitution and reparation, the reintegration of ex-paramilitaries into society and the provision of appropriate services, including trauma care for victims.
The critical point of division currently seems to be over how much information would be given to the information recovery bodies agreed in the SHA. That particular agreement proposed to parcel the past into a number of distinct but related overlapping institutions. The examination of unsolved killings would fall under the auspices of a Historical Investigations Unit (HIU). A separate (but related) body, the Independent Commission on Information Retrieval (ICIR) would provide accounts to relatives of those killed. In effect, the ICIR would act as an archive in the event of the forensic and evidence-based HIU being frustrated by the type of stonewalling that IRA members have presented to the UK-based Saville Inquiry into Bloody Sunday and the Irish-based Smithwick Tribunal on the organisation’s collusion with An Gardá Síochána.
This institutional proposal is undoubtedly a realistic response to the fact that the Northern Irish state remains a contested concept. Whereas in South Africa, which remains an under-acknowledged inspiration for much of the ‘legacy’ policy design in Northern Ireland, truth recovery or ‘full disclosure’ was the prerequisite for amnesty, Irish republicans would, presumably, be reluctant to present accounts that could lead to prosecutions of themselves or former comrades by the British authorities. The idea of an international adjudicator, however, seems to imply a moral equivalence between the state (responsible for around 10% of the deaths) and the terror groups of loyalism (responsible for around 30%) and republicanism (responsible for around 60% of the killings).
Republicans have presented the current impasse as being related to the British state reneging on promises to cooperate fully with the information recovery bodies – the government, for its part, citing concerns over national security and protection of individual’s safety. This has somewhat overshadowed the reluctance of the Irish state to engage fully in making available its own records on security and collusion with republicans.
It has also overshadowed discrepancies in policy design concerning the substitution of due process with storytelling or testimony work. This, arguably, reflects the privatising (or ‘communalising) of ‘peace’ by emphasising in a very public and political way the importance of recording, articulating and promoting what the Commission for Victims and Survivors call ‘lived experience’. The recent policy documents echo the elision of this kind of storytelling with the more established and critical methodologies of oral history.
Where this becomes problematic is precisely at the junction of individual memories with public policy – a junction that those recent documents crash through. Thus, the SHA states that the details of individual testimonies given to the ICIR will not be made available to the HIU but that immunity ‘from prosecution for any crime committed’ will not be available ‘should the required evidential test be satisfied by other means’. Of course, the ICIR would not be needed if other evidence than hear-say would be available. However, the privileging of testimony over forensic examination gives rise to the possibility that contradictory forms of ‘evidence’ will be given to/uncovered by the HIU and the ICIR. If the process is time-bound (to five years as it is envisaged) then we might expect a rush to tell stories to the ICIR that effectively circumvent police work.
The SHA points to some answers to those problems in the form of an Oral History Archive (OHA) and what it describes as a Timelines project that would produce a factual historical analysis of the Troubles. Both entities are seemingly to be embedded in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland. Although it remains unclear as to the ‘chain of command’ of the Timelines group – namely, how it is appointed, what is its remit, when will it report – that methodology may, like the HIU act as forensic, empirical and contextual reproof to the testimony-based work of the ICIR. The OHA is rather curiously justified on the grounds that ‘Oral history can provide opportunities for ordinary people, who are normally hidden from history, to record their own perspectives’. It does not state who these people might be in a society as saturated by memory and the past as Northern Ireland’s.
The possibility might be that a pluralistic tapestry of working class and gendered memories may come to the surface to balance those of ex-combatants that arguably dominate the arena at present. Yet, designing policy around storytelling eventually risks diminishing the very possibility of giving voice and agency to the most vulnerable by facilitating the catch-allism that ‘all in [Northern Ireland] to some degree are traumatised’. Paradoxically, the design of policy around testimony-work means that valorising storytelling can devalue ‘lived experience’
Of course, the two approaches – testimony work and forensic, empirical analyses – may not be mutually exclusive; however, the present emphasis within policy design on storytelling affords it a kind of positive valence that overshadows its limitations and that may, ultimately, prove to obscure the possibility that it may achieve the opposite of the stated aims of balance, transparency and proportionality.
Cillian McGrattan is Lecturer in Politics at the University of Ulster. His article ‘The Stormont House Agreement and the New Politics of Storytelling in Northern Ireland’ is available on early view in Parliamentary Affairs. Cillian tweets @cmcgrattan.
Image: LSD for Society
