The central premise of this book is an attempt to move towards a greater historical understanding (Verstehen) of the condition of ‘the forgotten’ citizens in Northern Ireland – the victims of political violence – and to make recommendations as to what can be done to empower them as part of the transition from conflict to peace. I make no apology for focusing on victims’ rights in Northern Ireland as a matter of political, social, cultural and legal priority. For those whose lives were destroyed or irrevocably changed for the worse by the long-lasting, deleterious effects of political violence, clichés and platitude-led expedient...

Searching for a ‘centre ground’ in Northern Irish politics has never been easy, least of all in terms of truth recovery and dealing with the past. The most problematic question often becomes: ‘Whose centre?’ Yet more often than not, this is a question posed by moral and cultural relativists, or political partisans who use tendentious rhetoric to argue that consensual agreement in which all past wrongdoing is acknowledged and documented is impossible. This, however, is political dissemblance and deceit – a weak disguise for such groups’ desires to possess, adapt and impose their manufactured versions and ‘truth’ of the past. The...

Following the contextual and thematic material on dealing with the past in Northern Ireland, this chapter offers a critique of structurally and theoretically weak approaches to truth recovery and their institutional manifestations, in particular the predominant mechanisms for dealing with the past in post-conflict societies – truth commissions. The current trend for truth commissions in transitional societies did not begin in South Africa in 1995, under the terms of the South African ‘Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act’. Whilst the visual and aural dimensions of that process (it was partially televised and also broadcast on the radio) certainly lent an...

In the previous chapter, significant and detailed criticisms of the inadequacies of the conceptual and theoretical frameworks which undermined truth recovery processes (predominantly truth commissions) in transitional societies were made. In the following two chapters, therefore, a comprehensive examination of how these flaws might be remedied is provided. This analysis necessarily focuses on the importance of the reclamation of language and the rediscovery of victims’ voices in post-conflict contexts, and the subsequent argument that these are necessary preludes to effective, critically interpretive processes of truth recovery in post-conflict societies such as Northern Ireland. Permitting and encouraging victims to engage in...

How can people in Northern Ireland (and by extension other post-conflict societies) come to ‘know the past’, after thirty-eight years of violent conflict? That is perhaps the most pressing and vexing question of all, particularly for victims. In this chapter, this issue is addressed via an in-depth discussion of a unique and original model for truth recovery that is based on the communicative rationality theory of Jurgen Habermas (1984). One of the most fundamental epistemological and ontological problems in the Northern Ireland context is how claims to historical ‘knowledge’ can be validated, whilst avoiding a relativist morass that serves only...

Throughout societies like Northern Ireland that have experienced the deleterious effects of political violence, the creation of fitting memorials should be integral to the efforts of transitional policymakers to combat widespread ambivalence towards the suffering of victims and the legacy of conflict; and also to combat the malign efforts of those who would seek to colonise history with recourse to partisan, exclusionary material representations of the past. An analysis of the importance of diverse memorialisation processes that focus on individual and collective experiences of victimhood, and which can build upon the consensual dialogical communicative justice offered by the Habermsian model...

The Northern Irish conflict, as an illustrative example of a wider phenomenon in transitional contexts, highlights the refusal of many post-conflict societies to face up to the legacy of political violence and suffering. The deleterious effects of long campaigns of paramilitary and counter-paramilitary violence upon victims in Northern Ireland and beyond are shocking, and often graphic. Throughout this book, however, the description and analysis of the often dull, disconnected, colourless and emotionless world that victims have simply ‘endured’ – for that has been all many can do, some for as long as forty years – is reflective of the fact that despite...