Silence and Violence among Northern Ireland Border Protestants

ABSTRACT

Developing recent ethnographic work on the subjective experiences of those involved in traumatic events, this paper examines the stories that Protestants tell about their experiences of violence along the Irish border in the 1970s and 1980s. These stories are only now beginning to surface, and the paper considers the transition from the private experience of suffering to its public telling. It focuses on how people find a voice for their telling and what happens as a result of breaking the silence. Of special interest is the language and style in which the narratives enter the public domain, and the silences that remain. The paper argues that the narratives are shaped as much by the demands of communalidentity as byindividualexperience, and thereby complements the trauma literature that tends to emphasise the latter.

Keywords:

• Violence
• suffering
• silence
• conflict
• Northern Ireland

Acknowledgments

This paper was first presented at a conference on ‘Borders and Emotions’ organised by Maruška Svašek at the Queen's University of Belfast in May 2004, and the authors are grateful to her and to everyone else who offered comments on that occasion. They are especially grateful to Fiona Magowan who kindly read several successive drafts of the manuscript, and to Nils Bubandt and Mark Graham and the three anonymous referees for their thoughtful and insightful comments. But their greatest debt is to all those in south Armagh who agreed to be interviewed and to share their experiences, particularly the staff and members of saver/naver. Research for the paper was funded as part of a joint project with colleagues in University College Cork under the Irish Government's National Development Plan (2000–2006) through Strand 1 of the Higher Education Authority's North-South Programme for Collaborative Research.

Notes

1. These differences may also be related to the greater numbers of Presbyterians and Protestant evangelicals in the border counties, compared to the predominance of other denominations in and around the Protestant ‘heartlands’ of Belfast.

2. A reference to the Kingsmills massacre of 5 January 1976, when eleven men were machine-gunned at the side of their minibus as they returned from work. Only one survived. For further narratives on this and other massacres, see Donnan 2005. For an analysis of the narratives of ‘practitioners’ of political violence in Northern Ireland, see Feldman 1991.

3. There are clearly resonances here for many Protestants, particularly ex-servicemen, with the silence observed on Remembrance Day.