The legacies of conflict in Northern Ireland and the politics of memoir-writing

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 the Northern Ireland conflict. Although the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement of 1998 tended to concentrate upon the constitutional future and the institutional architecture of the Northern Ireland Assembly and Executive, nonetheless questions concerning the ‘politics of the past’, or how society should remember the ‘Troubles’ have been increasingly at the forefront of both popular and academic debate. The nature of the conflict, its genesis, its prosecution, and its outcome, if indeed it can be said to be definitively over, are all key aspects of this urgent, though often unfocused, attention. In an emerging, though still fragile, post-conflict environment, ‘dealing with the past’, whether in terms of a mooted overarching truth and reconciliation process, or through piecemeal attempts to uncover hitherto disputed or neglected aspects of the violent conflict, has become a critical arena within the contemporary political life of Northern Ireland. This is the context for the body of work which constitutes this submission, and which has broken new ground in the study of political memoir in a divided society. [Taken from Introduction]