The introduction, and the book more generally, addresses a paradox: that the Northern Ireland conflict, commonly known as ‘the Troubles’, has had profound and shaping impacts upon politics, culture and the lives of many thousands of people in Great Britain, producing lasting legacies that continue to resonate nearly half a century after the eruption of political violence in 1968-9; but that engagements with the conflict, and with its ‘post-conflict’ transformation, from within Britain have been limited, lacking, frequently problematic, often troubled, in ways that are not fully grasped or considered.The book, then, has four main aims: to investigate the history of responses to, engagements with, and memories of the Northern Irish conflict in Britain; to explore absences and weaknesses or silences in this history; to promote a wider academic and public debate in Britain concerning the significance of this history, and the lessons to be learned from the post-conflict efforts to ‘deal with the past’ in Northern Ireland; and to provoke reflection on the significance of opening up hitherto unexamined histories and memories of the Troubles, and the ways in which ongoing conflicts between competing understandings of the past might be addressed and negotiated.

This chapter revisits a series of interviews conducted with leading British politicians in 1991 for the Channel Four documentary Pack Up the Troubles. Drawing on material not used in the final broadcast, it provides a snapshot of an important group of British protagonists in the conflict, seven years before the Good Friday Agreement, analysing their attitudes and understanding of the situation.

Personal testimony of a British soldier injured during the Troubles.

This chapter explores performance as a tool to demonstrate and negotiate contemporary conflict resolution through analysis of Facing The Enemy, the performance practice of Jo Berry and Patrick Magee. Berry is daughter of Sir Anthony Berry, Conservative MP killed in the attack on the Grand Hotel in Brighton and Magee is the former IRA member responsible for the attack.Performance theory offers a framework to assess the theatrical “performativity” of the work, raising awareness of the issues surrounding the Troubes in Britain. Performance allows them to face a personal dimension of conflict resolution while using it as a tool to explore this paradigm. I argue for the authority of a performance practice whereby the performers retain their core identity throughout, while negotiating enough to accommodate the other.

There is a huge body of memoir literature relating to the ‘Troubles’. This chapter looks at two bodies of British memoirs: first the military memoir and second, the political memoir. It looks at three accounts written by members of the Parachute Regiment, A F N Clarke’s Contact, Harry McCallion’s Killing Zone and Michael Asher’s Shoot to Kill They are discussed in terms of what they have to say about the culture of the ‘Paras’ and the contribution this culture made to intensifying the conflict, providing the Provisional IRA with a base of support that made it possible for them to wage a protracted war.The discussion of political memoirs looks at the memoirs of a number of Labour politicians, James Callaghan, Harold Wilson, Merlyn Rees, Roy Mason, Peter Hain and Tony Blair. It chronicles how the change from Old Labour to New Labour also involved a shift in attitude and tone, from support for eventual Irish unity, hostility towards the Unionists and Ian Paisley in particular to support for a reformed ‘Unionism’. Callaghan and Tony Blair’s memoirs are compared very much to the latter’s disadvantage.The chapter argues for the importance of memoir literature.

In light of the controversies that remain about Bloody Sunday and other violent episodes involving the state, this chapter examines three important aspects to the debate around truth recovery and the role of the Security Forces in the Troubles. First, it asks what role the Security Forces played in the conflict according to official state narratives. Second, it examines the apparent obfuscation of security forces’ experiences by an anti-state republican agenda. Here the chapter makes the case that republicans do this because of a need to reinforce tropes of meaning that preserve the integrity of the killings carried out by the Provisional IRA, while justifying continued hostility to the British state as well as their commitment to a peace process. Lastly, the chapter asks what consequences these official state and anti-state representations of the past have had on attempts to ‘give a voice’ to Security Forces victims (particularly those from Britain) amidst the apparent obfuscating of terrorist violence. By marginalising the experiences of those who soldiered during the Troubles we risk skewing our understanding of the three dimensional nature of the conflict and further postponing the opportunities to move towards meaningful peace and reconciliation.

This chapter explores how three short stories by William Trevor portray the way in which Irish people in London were affected by the Troubles. For a writer who had established a reputation for his empathetic portrayal of the anomalous position of the Anglo-Irish in Ireland, the political situation of the Irish in London in the 1970s and 1980s provided Trevor with similar subject matter, but in a wholly new context. His stories provide an important corrective to some of the more pervasive stereotypes found in the popular genre of Troubles fiction. They reveal how, during the Troubles, the neighbourhood and the home became heightened political ‘contact zones’ between migrant and host communities. With attention to Avtar Brah’s notion of ‘diaspora space’, I demonstrate how fiction, and the personal and collective narratives contained therein, has a valuable role to play in mediating memories of the Troubles in Britain. This, in turn, can inform the wider discussion of British-Irish relations and contribute to post-conflict understanding.

In the immediate aftermath of the Birmingham Pub Bombings in 1974, the Prevention of Terrorism Act (PTA) was introduced as British politicians struggled to deal with the increasing threat of the Provisional IRA on British soil. This reactionary measure intensified the already contested policy of Internment and would have severe implications for the Irish communities in England. This chapter argues that through the implementation of this legislation, alongside a media campaign that failed to put the conflict into context, a 'suspect community' was created, in which civil liberties were taken away from Irish people simply because of their ethnicity. However, the PTA not only created this 'suspect community' in the eyes of the police and the government, but also - and perhaps most crucially - for the public too. The negative impact this had 'ordinary', innocent Irish people is therefore analysed through the personal experiences of one Irish family as they discuss the institutionalised racism they faced living in Birmingham throughout the period. The chapter concludes by drawing on the importance of oral history, as it has taken almost half a century for the family to openly recount their experiences.

On 30 January 1972, men of the 1st Parachute Regiment of the British Army opened fire on civil rights marchers in Derry, Northern Ireland, killing 13 unarmed and innocent civilians. The event was reported worldwide and was to seen in hindsight as a significant turning point in the conflict in Northern Ireland; the moment when a struggle for civil rights gave way to a war between the IRA and the British state. Yet, as the textual analysis in this chapter shows, the official story of Bloody Sunday was based almost entirely on army lies and propaganda and on the flawed Widgery Report of 19 April 1972, which exonerated the paratroopers and their officers and cast doubt on the innocence of the victims. Newspaper coverage at the time showed a determination to recover the image and reputation of the Army in the wake of the killings. Indeed, even after the Saville Report 38 years later, which vindicated the victims and cast blame solely on the British army, sections of the British press were reluctant to let go of the official version. The explanation for this, we argue, has more to do with a deep-seated, cultural and ideological predisposition than with propaganda or the normative routines of commercial journalism.