‘Each neighbourly murder’
Lost Lives and the challenge of commemorating the victims of the Northern Ireland troubles

Abstract

This essay opens by considering the sensitivities surrounding any attempt to create a memorial to all the victims of the Northern Ireland troubles, and proceeds to a detailed examination of one such project, Lost Lives. The links between the methodology of the book and the aims of its writers to commemorate each individual death, to provide an alternative history of the troubles, and to address future generations are central to the discussion which follows. Drawing particularly upon the work of William Watkin and Wilhelm Verwoerd, the essay considers Lost Lives as an example of the possibilities of ‘ethical mourning’ and ‘inclusive moral remembrance’ both in its commemoration of the dead and in its implicit appeal for new and conciliatory ways of resolving the issues that divide the community.

Keywords:

• victims
• conflict
• Lost Lives
• civilian
• commemoration
• memory
• remembrance
• memorial
• responsibility
• violence
• alternative history
• ethical mourning

Notes

Fay, Morrissey and Smyth (1999) quote these words from a leaflet by Isobel Hylands which accompanied her exhibition ‘Violence: Counting the Cost’. See also Jane Leonard, Memorials to the Casualties of Conflict in Northern Ireland, 1969–1997 (1997) which was originally commissioned in 1995 as a background document on options for a peace memorial and which ‘surveys the landscape of conflict commemoration in contemporary Northern Ireland’ (5). Leonard uses the descriptors ‘partisan’ and ‘general’ memorials employed below.

McKay (2008: 2) comments: ‘I wrote this book because I believe the dead should not be forgotten and that they should be remembered, above all, in the words of those who love them’. Smyth and Fay's (2000: 6) book formed part of a wider project, ‘The Cost of the Troubles Study’, and lays particular emphasis on the ‘[m]any bereaved or injured people [who] feel neglected or forgotten’ and whose experiences ‘must be known, acknowledged and available to a wider public’.

The summary (Bradley and Eames, 2009: Executive Summary, 21) points out that the Irish Government's Remembrance Commission has already agreed a similar ‘Acknowledgement Payment’ on behalf of citizens of the Irish Republic who died in the conflict.