“‘You Can’t Grab Anything with a Closed Fist’: Reflections on Ulster Protestant Identity in Derek Lundy´s Memoir Men that God Made Mad: A Journey Through Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland”
Billy Gray, Dalarna University
In Ireland and within Irish studies itself, considerable effort has been expended in the attempt to disclose the complex interaction between past conflicts and contemporary attempts to recoup their significance in the present. Given that the interpretation of historical events has often been at the heart of national conflict, there have frequently been fierce clashes between rival versions of a common past. Derek Lundy´s Men that God Made Mad: A Journey Through Truth, Myth and Terror in Northern Ireland a work of non-fiction published in 2006, is an invaluable and timely contribution to our understanding of the selectivity of national memory and the indelible link that exists between familial remembrance and its communal counterpart. As a work of historical investigation, it sheds light on the interaction between repressed cultural memories, communal and national amnesia and the evasion of the past.
A generically hybrid work, part historical investigation, part memoir, Lundy´s text combines a blend of meticulous research with autobiographical snapshots, interspersed with an exploration of the connection between personal and collective identities. Claiming that ´the lives of my ancestors resonate in the very core of Ulster history´´ Lundy uses the lives of three such ancestors as a prism through which to examine the standard, received stories of myth and history so prominent within the Ulster Protestant tradition. In doing so, Lundy´s narrative provides support for Jean Braham’s view that “We see the past in something of the same way as we see a Henry Moore sculpture. The ‘holes’ define the shape. What is left repressed or what cannot be uttered, is often as significant…as what is said”. Moreover Lundy, through an engagement with his own personal background as a member of an Ulster Protestant family, positions himself in a metaphorical space where individual memory, cultural allegiance and concepts of the self merge. My paper will seek to show how Lundy’s text, in attempting to investigate the past with ‘thoughts of salvage,’ can be viewed as an attempt at achieving a renegotiation of selfhood.
“‘The Battles We Refuse to Fight Today Become the Hardships Our Children Must Endure Tomorrow’: The Troubles and Its Legacy in Children’s/Young Adult Fiction”
Michaela Marková, Technical University of Liberec
The recent Ulster University research paper on the current state of the educational system in Northern Ireland reports that education in this region is ‘divided and splintered’. It appeals for vested interests of ‘the traditional political blocks’ to be reformed. Indeed, it argues that ‘history, politics and ecclesiastical interventions’ have contributed to the development of such a divided system and need thus to be addressed if an ‘ambitious and radical’ transformation, which it calls for, is to be achieved. Although not being its primary objective, the UU’s report draws attention to the sentiment that unless the contentious issues related to the legacy of Troubles, are openly addressed, future will be thwarted. The current debate concerning the Northern Ireland protocol and post-Brexit Irish Sea border further attests to how widespread this sentiment actually is. It also illustrates that children and their prospects for future are used to justify the assumed call into action, as is alluded to by the title of the proposed paper, which references the signs that have appeared in relation to the debated issues. The paper takes the aforementioned sentiment as a departure point. It proceeds from the impediments to implementation of community restorative justice in Northern Ireland as related to the conflict the sentiment warns us about to examine how the urgency to address the contested legacy of the Troubles is communicated to children, namely in fiction. While the discourse about/of the conflict in fiction for adults has been widely discussed, the paper seeks to examine how the crimes of the past and/or the peace-dividends are portrayed in works for children/YA, as such remains an under-discussed topic.