The purpose of this book is to examine and evaluate the political memoirs written by some of the many individuals who were engaged in or affected by the conflict in Northern Ireland in the period 1969–1998. Much scholarly attention across several disciplines has been devoted to the interlocking series of issues that, taken together, constitute efforts to address the complex legacies of this conflict. At least since the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement of 1998, questions concerning how society should remember the ‘Troubles’ have been at the forefront of both popular and academic debate. The nature of the conflict, its...

There has been a great deal of both academic and popular literature devoted to the involvement of the Provisional republican movement in the peace process since the Irish Republican Army (IRA) ceasefire of 1994. This attention has been concentrated upon the ideological and strategic transformation wrought by the leadership group, based around the Sinn Féin (SF) President since 1983, Gerry Adams. This chapter analyses a hitherto neglected dimension of these developments: the significance of political memoir-writing by Provisionals, which has provided both an insight into the movement’s role and objectives during the prosecution of its ‘armed struggle’ in Northern Ireland,...

As the previous chapter argued, the Irish Provisional republican movement, and more specifically its leadership group based around SF President Gerry Adams and Deputy First Minister Martin McGuinness, has jealously guarded the collective memory of the movement’s historical evolution, including in the field of life-writing. This close attention to control of the master narrative of the Provos’ story of the conflict has proceeded in parallel with the importance attached to maintaining the grip of the leading group over the political, strategic and internal processes by which the movement has discussed and interpreted its past. The leadership has also been engaged...

As we have demonstrated in the chapters analysing memoir-writing from within the republican movement, there is a long tradition of Irish republican and nationalist writing that has conflated individual protagonists’ lives with the ‘story’ of the nation. This personalisation of Irish republican history can be traced back at least as far as the nineteenth century, and this approach remains popular in the contemporary period. By contrast, it is difficult to discern a similar tradition within loyalist paramilitarism, at least until recently, even if republican efforts to ‘re-write the script’ and control the narrative of the peace process have proved irksome.¹...

Much of the memoir-writing devoted to political lives to emerge from Northern Ireland over the course of the last forty years has been undertaken by paramilitaries, or those previously affiliated to such organisations. There have been contributions written by unionist and nationalist politicians, but these have often been overshadowed somewhat, in terms of their popular reception and impact, by the more sensational accounts of the violent conflict. This chapter concentrates in particular upon the memoir-writing of mainstream, ‘constitutional’ politicians, largely from the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). It may be noteworthy that few memoirs have, to date, been published by leading...

This chapter analyses the memoir-writing that has emanated from the ranks of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), for many years the leading party representing the predominantly Catholic Irish nationalist minority community in Northern Ireland. Founded in 1970, as an extension of the civil rights movement of the late 1960s, the party produced some of the key protagonists of the Troubles era, and it could be argued that many of its institutional and policy prescriptions found their way into the eventual settlement of the 1998 Agreement. This has not been borne out in increased popular support; indeed, since 2001,...

It is a measure of the great significance attached to the experience of the power-sharing Executive (and the closely-related Sunningdale agreement) of autumn 1973 to spring 1974, that this short period has loomed so large in the published memoirs of many of the core protagonists. There are at least two important reasons for the concentration upon this era: first, for many of the Northern Irish politicians involved, this was their last (and sometimes only) experience of holding ministerial office, and therefore the failure of the short-lived Executive affected them deeply, in terms of their personal political lives; second, and perhaps...

This chapter will analyse the politics of memoir-writing by British government ministers during the 1970s and up to the present, in particular examining the ways in which British Secretaries of State for Northern Ireland (SOSNI) have used their published memoirs to interpret and reflect upon their period in office, and their perceptions of the Troubles. The chapter will argue that for the majority of SOSNI incumbents, Northern Ireland and its politico-military problems tended not to be central to their political identities, and for many of them the experience of being responsible for the governance of, and policy-making in, Northern Ireland...

This chapter investigates a number of recent memoirs by a range of journalists who have reported on the Northern Ireland conflict, and develops an interpretation of these sources based upon several prominent themes: first, the extent to which the author may be understood as an ‘insider’ or an ‘outsider’ with regard to the political life of Northern Ireland; second, the particular spatial dimension of the journalist’s experience of the conflict; third, the temporal dimension of this experience, both in the sense of the period of their reporting from or within Northern Ireland, and the distance between their professional day-to-day engagement...

This chapter investigates a distinctive dimension of the recent growth in memoir-writing by concentrating upon the publications of some of those victims/survivors who were intimately affected by the violence of the Troubles. Perhaps counter-intuitively, some victims, despite the fact that they have suffered intensely as a result of the conflict (whether in terms of physical injury and/or psychological trauma, or bereavement), have been less concerned than some other categories of memoirists with shaping the wider political and historical narrative of conflict. We can hypothesise that very often victims’ memoirs reflect a personal desire to come to terms with a traumatic...

This book has examined two related dimensions of political memoir-writing concerning the Troubles in Northern Ireland. First, it has attempted to discuss aspects of memoir-writing as a specific genre for studying political conflict. Second, it has also investigated in some depth the particular function and impact of political memoir in the context of Northern Ireland’s past, and the efforts to better understand that past. A careful reading and interpretation of these memoirs can provide genuine insights into the lived experience and retrospective judgments of some of the key protagonists of the conflict. It may also permit analysis of the rhetorical...