Public Narratives of the Troubles at the End of Empire

If Jim Callaghan’s decision to commit troops to Ulster in August 1969 initially met with some support in Britain, the onset of insurgency in the months following transformed public attitudes.Footnote ¹⁸ As early as February 1971 the British cabinet considered that “public opinion in Great Britain was beginning actively to resent the situation which was developing in Northern Ireland,”Footnote ¹⁹ and by September feared that “public opinion in this country” would not “tolerate indefinitely” extended British intervention.Footnote ²⁰ Such resentment was apparent, not only in early polling in favor of military withdrawal, but in deteriorating public perceptions of the region itself.Footnote ²¹ “When war ravaged the province from 1969 to 1999,” claims Richard Weight, “sympathy disappeared, and mainlanders came instead to define themselves against the Northern Irish.”Footnote ²²

Why did support for intervention in Northern Ireland evaporate so quickly in 1970s England? And in what sense did “mainlanders” come to “define themselves against” the population of a devolved region of the UK state? From one perspective, the weakening of the union after 1969 merely reflected the outworkings of a longer history of intra-state “Ulsterization,” apparent from the very creation of Northern Ireland in 1920.Footnote ²³ For, while Lloyd George’s settlement of the Irish Question had enabled Ulster unionists to opt out of an all-Ireland parliament at this critical juncture, it did not allow them to opt in to a unitary British state. On the contrary, the creation of a devolved administration in Belfast as part of the terms of the Government of Ireland Act was supposed to insulate interwar Britain from the perennial turbulence of Irish politics, and in its federal dispensation symbolized the inherently ambivalent nature of Northern Ireland’s relation to the rest of the UK.Footnote ²⁴ Thus, while Northern Ireland was accorded full access to the expanding British welfare system after 1921, wider aspects of its internal politics were not discussed at Westminster as a matter of “constitutional convention” and no secretary of state was appointed to report on Northern Irish affairs.Footnote ²⁵ And while Northern Ireland participated as an equal partner in Britain’s wartime mobilization, the province was usually occluded within official accounts of the People’s War.Footnote ²⁶ Fragile support for the union after 1969 thus intimated frailties in its constitution, extending in the first instance from the peripheralizing logic of the partitionist settlement.

As Ian McBride and Stuart Ward both suggest, however, the development of the Troubles at the end of 1960s needs also to be seen within the wider context of British decolonization and the ways this created new discursive lenses for reading the past and present of Anglo-Irish conflict.Footnote ²⁷ If Northern Ireland’s integration into the UK state had always been partial and contested, the idea of “Greater Britain” nevertheless anchored Ulster Britishness within notions of a wider British family, and so the “stripping away of the imperial backdrop after 1945 increasingly cast the province in a very different light.” Although most of Britain’s imperial possessions had been liquidated by the time civil conflict erupted in the North, it was “precisely this advanced stage of imperial decline that posed highly charged questions about the long-term viability of a virulently loyal British outpost in the face of a newly energised nationalist challenge.”Footnote ²⁸ By the 1970s, in effect, Britain’s experience of two decades of imperial retreat had generated its own structures of metropolitan metaphor and myth, and these were readily transposable to the escalating crisis in Ulster.

One way this fed popular English aversion to the Troubles concerned the moral implications of military intervention and the growing postwar currency of languages of imperial conscience. As Erik Linstrum has recently argued, “anticolonial and anti-war politics, isolated or co-opted during the Second World War, acquired new life” in postwar Britain in response to “the moral shocks of counterinsurgency,” and this popularized new ethical and rights-based standpoints from which to critique the excesses of imperial power.Footnote ²⁹ Inscribed as the object of this moral gaze, the “emergency” in Northern Ireland appeared as a late imperial “dirty war” where Britain was engaged in the violent oppression of subject peoples and scandalous human rights violations.Footnote ³⁰ Moral critique of this kind emanated, not only from student campuses and the networks of the extra-parliamentary Left,Footnote ³¹ but percolated through mainstream journalism and Commons debates, via popular music and public demonstrations.Footnote ³² Its impact was registered, not only on opinion polls and in tens of thousands of letters posted to British MPs, but in the British government’s persistent efforts to convince the public of its moral impartiality and even-handedness.Footnote ³³ As Matthew Lord observes, where Britain’s Falklands campaign could be weaponized to revive popular illusions of imperial power over a decade later, moral scrutiny of Britain’s role in Northern Ireland led governments to abolish the awarding and gazetting of military honors since “gallantry awards could project a triumphalist and provocative message of British heroism against the human rights of rebellious citizens.”Footnote ³⁴

On the whole, however, deepening public antipathy toward Northern Ireland in this period had less to do with these moral anxieties than with a second and quite different form of post-imperial mythmaking. Where critics on the Left associated Britain’s role in Ulster with the persistence of imperialism within the postwar settlement, a more pervasive strand of critique identified the collapse of authority in the region with impending national disintegration, exemplifying a generalized process of national decline whereby the combined effects of minority agitation and pusillanimous liberal governance were eroding the social order. The problem that the Troubles posed to British self-perceptions had less to do with the moral repugnance of imperial violence than with its apparent irresolvability and uncontainability: successive administrations appeared incapable of either reasserting authority or negotiating a durable settlement, underscoring the moral weakness of the British state in the face of minority agitation; and in the meantime, as the military death toll rose and republicans brought their campaign of violence to the mainland, the costs to British society and citizens grew. The Troubles in this view were the most violent expression of an endemic pattern of national malaise, which portended the wholesale dissolution of British society during an era of deepening societal divisions and political uncertainty.Footnote ³⁵

In one manifestation of this logic, the threat of societal dissolution compelled a revival of national virility. For the National Front, for example, and a small cadre of unionists on the Conservative backbenches, Ulster was the last bastion and frontline in a wider struggle to preserve the integrity of Greater Britain against international leftist subversion.Footnote ³⁶ Equating decolonization with the progressive depletion of the nation, failure to defeat minority subversion in Ulster entailed the final implosion of the metropolitan center and exposed the “liberal cowardice” at the heart of British decline.Footnote ³⁷ For this reason, the far-right and its supporters in Britian argued for a “mailed fist” policy in Ulster that, in addition to securing military victory, would redeem Britain’s withering self-confidence at time of multiple overlapping “crises” in the history of the nation.Footnote ³⁸

More commonly, however, declinist readings of the Troubles tended to arrive at a quite different solution to the contagious problems the conflict appeared to pose. Attempts to mobilize popular support for a regenerative imperial struggle in Northern Ireland failed in this period, not because of popular moral queasiness or state-led ideological manipulation, but because majority opinion in England came to see extended intervention as a form of imperial liability, injurious in the last instance to the interests of ordinary and deserving Britons.Footnote ³⁹ If decolonization had popularized new ethical standpoints from which to read postwar military interventions, it had also helped crystalize a new language of post-imperial victimhood, which identified incessant involvement in colonial wars as one aspect of a general pattern of working-class neglect and disenfranchisement.Footnote ⁴⁰ Audible already in early responses to the Troubles in 1970, this populist perspective saturated debate on Ulster through 1974–75, fueled by angry reactions to the humiliation of the army during the Ulster Workers Council Strike,Footnote ⁴¹ the high-profile conviction of a British soldier for manslaughter in a Belfast court,Footnote ⁴² and the devastating escalation of the Provisional IRA’s cross-channel insurgency in English towns and cities.Footnote ⁴³ In the wake of these overlapping developments, members of Parliament (MPs) across the country received a tidal wave of personal letters demanding Northern Ireland be “given full independence immediately,” while military families and two national newspapers launched public campaigns for military withdrawal.Footnote ⁴⁴ Observing a surge in the polls for “cutting ties” with Northern Ireland, Conservative backbenchers recorded that “many MPs” were now coming “under constituency pressure,”Footnote ⁴⁵ while “angry demands” for military withdrawal were emanating “for the first time from the right-wing of British opinion.”Footnote ⁴⁶

Climaxing in the mid-1970s, this crisis of representation had profound long-run implications for the consumption of the Troubles within English society. On the one hand, by heightening official fears that Britain was “losing the propaganda war,” growing criticism of the state’s handling of the Troubles fueled increasing government intervention in the national media. As well as the exertion of new pressures on journalistic coverage, this involved a concerted attempt to reset the narrative of the conflict in a manner that dislodged its imperial connotations. Perceiving that the conflict was unlikely to be resolved in the foreseeable future, and fearing the human and political consequences of withdrawal, from 1975 onward successive governments endeavored to normalize the Troubles, recasting it as a struggle between justice and terrorism in a bid to “counter the narrative that Britain was bogged down in yet another bloody anti-colonial struggle.”Footnote ⁴⁷

This, as media scholars observe, did not silence the government’s critics, but it did foster the repositioning of the conflict as a domestic law-and-order story within large swathes of the print and broadcast media. In consequence, suggests David Miller, British audiences increasingly “switched off” from the conflict: after years of repetitious coverage, in which the same rhetorical tropes were incessantly recycled, the reduction of the Troubles to a static iconography and binary formula (justice versus terrorism; Catholic versus Protestant; extremists versus moderates) dissipated public interest, promoting boredom and confusion, resignation and moral indifference, as characteristic responses to the apparently purposeless reign of sectarian violence.Footnote ⁴⁸ Many Britons thus learnt to live with the Troubles via a process of imaginative withdrawal: as one English journalist remarked, “few of us have the monstrous appetite of the Northern Irish for their inherently uninteresting doings.”Footnote ⁴⁹

The inverse of this, however, was that the irredeemably “monstrous” aspect of the Troubles also served as a useful resource in contrasting the relative peaceableness of everyday life in Britain during a period of exceptional political, social, and economic turbulence. Coterminous with the crisis of representation created by the conflict was the focalization of an externalizing gaze that implicitly counterposed the blood-soaked “wasteland” of Northern Ireland to the elevated vantage point of the impartially appalled British onlooker.Footnote ⁵⁰ Apparent across a remarkable range of texts and genres, from tabloid ethnic caricature to current affairs documentaries, from NGO reports to mainstream political thrillers, this widespread consumption of the violent alterity of Northern Ireland registered both the self-distancing and self-differentiating functions of Troubles narratives: as a locus of atavistic extremism and social decay, benighted Ulster set off the rational virtues of English society, averting the impassioned entanglements of British-Irish history while supplying armchair fascination and reassuring normalcy for British audiences during decades when English society was undergoing political upheavals of its own.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, these processes were most explicitly realized at precisely the points where the history of “here” merged with the history of “there.” Where various scholars have drawn attention to the ways in which the impacts of the Troubles stimulated a resurgence of anti-Irish stereotyping in Britain, what is less often recognized is that these same processes of ethnicization were extended to Northern Ireland’s British community to de-authenticate its professions of loyalty.Footnote ⁵¹ For although Ulster unionists had been able to attract British support for their cause before 1914, after 1969 the spectacle of loyalist mobilization provoked ridicule and embarrassment in Britain, propelling a discourse in which the obdurate Britishness of Northern Ireland was both elided and problematized as an obstacle to peace, progress, and rational common sense. In stark contrast to the cross-channel imperial solidarities forged through resistance to Home Rule in Edwardian Britain, popular responses to Ulster Britishness during the Troubles enacted its symbolic dissociation, dissolving its specificity into generic stereotypes of Irish tribalism, while likening its rituals of fervent loyalty to an obscure imperial fossil.Footnote ⁵²

Popular representations of Ulster Britishness, exemplified in Arthur Horner’s caustic depiction of the loyalist-driver Ulster Workers Council Strike of May 1974 (Figure 1), thus extended the differentiating functions of wider discourses in a distinctive way. By serving as a foil for the symbolization of obsolete and discredited forms of Britishness, the consumption of Ulster Protestantism as a strange relic from a disavowed era enabled Britons to see themselves as the antithesis of this bigoted and atavistic community. That is, Ulster Britishness served as a mirror in which Anglo-Britons recognized themselves as post-imperial. The figure of the Ulster Protestant was thus conscripted within the wider reimagining of the nation as a way of marking distance between past and present.

Figure 1.

Arthur Horner, “The Loyalists,” The Sun, 25 May 1974, BCA/26261. © NewsUK.

Encounters Across Difference: Negotiating the Troubles within Migrant Accounts of Everyday Life in England

How did these public imaginaries of the Troubles in England circulate within vernacular narratives of the conflict? And what were the implications of these percolations for the positioning of migrants within everyday encounters with English people? Existing research on the Irish diaspora in this period stresses hostility as the defining feature of social relations. According to this view, British-Irish conflict in Northern Ireland engendered analogous conflict in England, resulting in everyday experiences of hostility that compelled migrants to conceal or play down their Irishness.Footnote ⁵³ For migrants interviewed as part of this study, however, responses to the Troubles in England reflected a more nuanced palette of features, registering a more complex story concerning patterns of cultural accommodation in Britain and their peculiar distancing effects.

Intimating the extent to which the conflict could be screened-out of popular consciousness, many Northern Irish migrants in England, both Catholic and Protestant, were struck by the prevalence of English indifference and the ways in which this foreclosed the potential for everyday conflict. A commonly reported feature of everyday perceptions was an apparent lack of interest in or curiosity about events in Northern Ireland. David Stone, who migrated to Manchester in 1982 to pursue a career in the National Health Service, recalled that while his new colleagues were “really friendly” and “supportive,” they rarely inquired about events in Northern Ireland, except when they impinged directly on local affairs: “I think the only time they were interested was after the Manchester bombing and stuff.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Similarly, John Mitchell migrated to Berkshire to develop his career as a scientist during the first cross-channel IRA bombing campaign in the early 1970s, and at the time had been wary about being identified with Northern Ireland. What he discovered, however, was that work colleagues were “very friendly” and, at times, unnervingly indifferent to the dangerous possibilities he imagined his origins might evoke:

Such indifference often shaded into misperception and misunderstanding of interviewees’ ethnic and national backgrounds. Where most Protestant migrants here regarded themselves as at least partially “British,” everyday habits of categorical ascription routinely misrecognized their ethno-national origins. Often to their surprise, Protestant migrants discovered that colleagues, in-laws, flatmates, and friends did not discriminate between Irish ethnic backgrounds or national allegiances. Philip Alexander, who migrated to Oxford to attend university in 1965, recalled that “people would regard me as Irish and this was actually quite a revelation to me because I thought of myself as, you know, British.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Jane Baird, who migrated to London in 1977, observed that “it upset some Protestants who moved here to be treated as Irish because to English people you’re Irish.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Martin Seeds too, who migrated to London in 1986, remembered that people “didn’t understand the fact that the island is divided into two”:

In some instances, such occasions of misrecognition served to construct shared lineages, creating opportunities for the articulation of common origin stories and histories. Gavin Paul, who migrated to Hull in 1983 before moving to Manchester, recounted that:

In other cases, misrecognition involved the marking of ethnic boundaries and the expression of racial hostility. Although Susan McCaughan, who migrated to Sheffield in 1981 and later worked as a probation officer in Greater Manchester, considered that English people were generally “not bothered” about Northern Ireland, she recounted how “colleagues and service users” subjected her to “criticism about being Irish” in the weeks following the 1996 Manchester bomb.Footnote ⁶⁰ More dramatically, Amanda Robinson, who migrated to Middlesex in 1996, recalled how the sound of her accent provoked an irate fellow passenger to brandish a knife while traveling to Covent Garden with English friends on a night out:

Most commonly, however, Protestant accounts of misrecognition identified misperceptions of their identity with Anglo-centrism and ingrained indifference to the union as a locus of shared national belonging. Although unionist and loyalist communities in Northern Ireland might view the Troubles as a civil conflict fought to preserve a common British heritage, most Protestant migrants in England came to acknowledge that English people did not see themselves reflected in this struggle. In some cases, this was expressed through articulations of the remoteness of Northern Ireland and a concerted reluctance to engage with unionist perspectives. Gareth Aiken, who moved with his family to Welwyn Garden City in 1960, considered that “people in this island have never really accepted that Northern Ireland, whether you like it or not, is actually part of the same country as England.”Footnote ⁶² Similarly, when David Anderson migrated to Liverpool in 1988 he imagined he was joining a community of “kindred spirits”: “I suppose being an Ulster Protestant, you think I’ve come to the motherland.” Once, however, “the penny dropped” he “quickly realised” that English people “don’t give a toss”:

In other cases, English disidentification with the “Ulster Protestant” position manifested symptoms of aversion focused on the varied costs of the conflict to a selectively defined national “we.” Thus, where the violence of the conflict potentially endangered English lives, “Northern Ireland” evoked danger and fear. This was apparent, not only in relation to the impacts of republican attacks in England and the experiences of British soldiers, but in responses to the mere prospect of crossing the Irish Sea. John Cotton, who migrated to Wales in 1971, recalled how his future wife’s parents “were very concerned about her going over the first time,”Footnote ⁶⁴ while Iris Stevens, who migrated to Manchester in 1980, remembered how members of her English husband’s family “wouldn’t come” to their wedding in Bushmills, Co Antrim, “cos they thought they’d get shot.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Likewise, when Tanya Boyd, who migrated with her parents to Leicester in 1982, decided to marry in Belfast in the early 1990s she discovered that her in-laws and their family friends were “very anxious”:

More generally, popular aversion expressed itself via a critical swathe of vernacular discourse that actively contested Britain’s political involvement in Northern Ireland and explicitly rejected unionist entitlement to British nationality. In these cases, while interlocutors recognized that Ireland was a divided country, they also regarded Britain’s involvement as politically and economically misguided or morally unjustifiable. Mervyn Busteed, who migrated to Wales in 1967 before moving to England in 1969, perceived “that if one of the major political parties had finally concluded it was time for Britain to withdraw from Northern Ireland, there would be a fair amount of public sympathy for that” given how “expensive” the conflict was “in terms of lives, in terms of national resources and in terms of national prestige on the international stage.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Laura Hodson, who migrated to Manchester in 1984, likewise considered that English people “couldn’t see any reason why people were fighting to stay, keep Northern Ireland part of the UK” and disliked “their people” being “over there, putting themselves at danger for no reason.” One night she overheard “derogatory comments” at the bar:

For Gavin Paul, what such sentiments pointed to was a widespread perception of Northern Ireland as a national burden and source of embarrassment: although English people were often “very anti-IRA,” he never “encountered anyone in England” who argued that “we need to hold on to our territory, that being the six counties of Northern Ireland”:

Negotiating Disavowal in Personal Narratives of Settlement in England

What Northern Irish migrant accounts thus evidence is the importance of disavowal (rather than antagonism) as a defining feature of English attitudes to the Troubles. This perspective allowed the problematic aspects of the conflict to be rendered impotent or remote; tended to accentuate the “otherness” of Northern Ireland as a locus of incomprehensible violence; and it worked overall to disarticulate the Britishness of Ulster, which manifested in routine habits of misrecognition and renunciation. What, however, were the subjective implications of this process for the personal adaption of Ulster Protestant migrants? For migrants who had grown up in an environment where Britishness was often consecrated as a sacred birthright, how did the disavowal of Northern Ireland in England feel, and how were these feelings negotiated as part of efforts to formulate a coherent narrative of belonging?

For many such migrants, personal interactions with English narratives of the Troubles created complex dilemmas of identification, motivating attempts to use the interview dialogue to evaluate the self’s relation to conflictual discourses of Britishness and Irishness. At one end of the spectrum, experiences of cultural encounter could engender feelings of alienation where processes of popular disavowal were associated with personal betrayal. Sarah Hamilton migrated from Antrim to Manchester in 1981 and, like many Protestant migrants, recalled how work colleagues often spoke “disparagingly” about “Northern Ireland,” “basically condemning the British intervention and saying that that wasn’t a good idea.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Unlike most other migrants, however, such encounters left her feeling “angry,” “upset,” and “quite attacked.” Such “raging emotions,” as Sarah described them, were liable to ignite in any context where the contested meanings of the Troubles formed an object of discussion, and shaped perceptions of England as a space of besiegement and embattlement:

Yet, although Sarah found the views of work colleagues objectionable, her “raging emotions” did not compel a verbal defense of unionist constitutional principles or claims to British national belonging. As Sarah explained, while she “felt” her views “so strongly” and would have liked to “say something intelligent and appropriate,” she did not feel able to “articulate” her perspective in dialogue with critical others:

One way of making sense of these themes of suppressed rage and inarticulacy in Sarah’s account concerns the unavailability of a public framework of intelligibility. Historian Penny Summerfield contends that “ordinary people who have memories that do not fit publicly available accounts” often “have difficulty finding words and concepts with which to compose their memories.” Where narrating subjects “cannot draw on an appropriate public account, their response is to seek to justify their deviation, or to press their memories into alternative frameworks, or to be able to express their stories only in fragmentary and deflected accounts.”Footnote ⁷³ On this reading, the difficulty Sarah experiences in self-expression in England is linked with the wider marginalization of Ulster British narratives within English culture: in the absence of a widely disseminated representation of unionist or loyalist perspectives, in which personal histories, political views, and emotional dispositions are coherently articulated, Sarah struggles to locate a subject-position from which to project a coherent version of self, and so elects instead to privatize her personal views and feelings. Viewing this as a form of personal failure, her “deviation” is explained in terms of personal intellectual inadequacy.

From another perspective, these aspects of Sarah’s emotional experience also refer back to the personal impacts of the Troubles in shaping the emotional development of the pre-migration self. The language of attack, threat, and embattlement Sarah employs to represent situations of cultural encounter in England are here imaginatively linked with the standpoint from which she experienced conflict-related violence before departure for Manchester. As she explained, while the Troubles left a “deep and lasting impression” on her life, this was not due to fears for her own physical safety; rather, she was “terrified” for the safety of her father, who took employment with the Royal Ulster Constabulary in the early 1970s following the termination of his career within the local linen industry:

Moving to England in 1981 removed Sarah from the immediate context of violence in Northern Ireland, but it did not insulate her from the conflict’s emotional effects. This was because she continued to “worry” about the physical safety of her father who, as an RUC officer, was a target for republican attacks.Footnote ⁷⁵ The visceral charge of Sarah’s “raging emotions,” triggered in response to “disparaging” remarks about Northern Ireland, can here be read as a displaced by-product of existential fears for her father’s life. By disparaging the idea of the union, Sarah’s colleagues also devalued the ideal in terms of which RUC families justified profound risks to the lives of members on a routine basis over many years. For Sarah, this justification was not an abstract political argument, but a narrative framework enabling the rationalization and containment of her own anticipatory fears of loss. The disavowal of the union in England is experienced as an “attack” because it destabilizes an emotional defense implicated in how Sarah manages ongoing conflict-related anxiety related to her father’s vulnerability.

These different aspects of Sarah’s personal history have had extended implications for her adaption to life in England. Lacking a public framework within which to situate her experiences in England, Sarah also made reference in her narrative to the enduring importance of familial norms of emotional self-disciplining for containing destabilizing thoughts.Footnote ⁷⁶ As she reiterated throughout the interview, although she was “terrified” for her father’s safety, her parents “did their best to shield me and my brother from everything” by ensuring “it was never talked about in the house”:

Reliance upon these techniques of emotional containment survived the migration process with the result that Sarah learned to compartmentalize those aspects of her past that could not be safely articulated in England:

Martin Seeds negotiated these problems of memory, emotion, and belonging in a very different way when he moved to London in 1986. Growing up in a working-class Loyalist neighborhood in East Belfast, like many other Protestant migrants, he was surprised to learn he was regarded as “Irish” in England. Yet, while this realization could “mess with your head,” misrecognition was not experienced as a personal affront: English “ignorance,” rather, was frustrating and confusing, producing disorientation and, finally, self-misunderstanding:

As Martin’s ironic and self-parodic treatment of this episode suggests, cultural adjustment for him involved a process of self-effacement designed to establish emotional distance from difficult and disorientating questions of belonging. Where Sarah’s “raging emotions” registered an intense investment in the cultural politics of British-Irish identity in England, Martin endeavored to sublimate this politics in order to transcend the forms of personal dissonance it produces. At one level, this involved fencing off the past:

At the same time, it involved the embrace of newness and the radical refashioning of the self via immersive investment in the stimulations and opportunities of the neo-liberal metropolis:

Where Sarah came to see her move to England as a “mistake,” for Martin migration to London marked a formative episode in the remaking of the young self. Arriving in the capital during the era of the financial “big bang,” when the city’s bourgeoning IT industry began to boom, Martin found work as a computer programmer, working for a series of large banks and pharmaceutical companies before becoming a freelance consultant in the 1990s. This, as he emphasized, supplied access to a “high end” lifestyle, comprising lucrative career opportunities and a hedonistic social life, but it also formed a context in which the constraints of the past could be transcended and the boundaries of the self reimagined. Where Sarah associated Manchester with besiegement and the persistence of anxieties linked with the Troubles, Martin associated London with expanded horizons and creative growth:

As such reflections imply, however, Martin’s sense of the transformative potential of London was inextricably bound to a counterposed view of the place left behind. Although moving to London allowed Martin to recontextualize the restrictive “parameters” of Northern Ireland’s tribal politics, the idealization of London in his account depended upon negative comparison with his home city and its people. His efforts to compose the migration journey as a story of self-transformation relied upon a persistent denigration of origins, producing a rift in the self that surfaced within troubling feelings of irresolution. While Martin reveled in the consumption of the capital’s cultural diversity, this only threw into sharp relief the “disappointment” of Belfast’s “suppressed” approach to difference:

And while playing up Northern Ireland’s cultural impotence set off the creative growth of the migrated self, it also betrayed cultural “arrogance,” inducing feelings of “guilt” because it involved demeaning “people”:

These points of irresolution were finally brought into clear view for Martin following a life transition that saw him disengage from his “high end” London lifestyle. While this lifestyle was in many ways “quite lovely,” it had also become “dull” and “boring,” as Martin realized that he had become “wrapped up in the money”: “I had all these things and it’s like, I just realised they’re just all meaningless.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Seeking to reignite that “sense of enthusiasm that I had when I first moved from Belfast to London,” Martin decided to develop his life-long interest in photography, taking a series of night classes before enrolling for a three-year degree program at the University of Brighton in 2007. Here, Martin’s tutors soon spotted his “cultural baggage,” leading to “pointed conversations” about the direction of his research:

These “pointed conversations” catalyzed the opening of a new dialogue with the past for Martin, signaling the advent of a second transitional phase in the composure of the migrated self. At first, having registered the plausibility of his tutors’ perspective, Martin evolved his photographic practice as a method of inquiry into the past, providing a pretext for reexamination and reinspection. As Martin explained, his final year project, a documentary study entitled “I have troubles …,” involved frequent return visits to photograph his home city, enabling him to refamiliarize himself with places he had avoided for many years. Thereafter, however, these initial explorations evolved into a committed process of critical review, leading to the creation of a series of Troubles-focused exhibitions and, more generally, the building of a new career as a professional photographer and university lecturer. As part of this life transition, photography took on a reparative function, serving as a “technology of self” via which Martin began to recompose the splitting effects of his initial efforts to negotiate problems of belonging in 1980s London.Footnote ⁸⁷ This took the form, not of reinvestment in metanarratives of Irish or British identity, but of using the “universal” standpoint of the artist to reconnect alienated parts of the self, even as it supplied new ways of mastering and standing over the past:

These processes of self-renegotiation took yet another form within the migration history of Julie Marchmont, who migrated to Exeter from Belfast in 1970 to undertake teacher training. Like most other Protestant migrants, Julie recalled her early years in England as a period of shifting self-perceptions, during which she was led to reevaluate her relationship to Britishness. As she explained,

Unlike most other Protestant migrants, however, Julie used the interview to redramatize this quest for belonging as an engagement with Irishness. Where Martin and Sarah described how they contained, effaced, and sublimated the destabilizing effects of cultural encounter on arrival in England, Julie narrated her early settlement experiences in terms of new self-realizations: “I got to England and that’s when I realised I was Irish, not just Northern Irish damnit, I was Irish.”Footnote ⁹⁰

In one version of this settlement history, Julie’s realization of an Irish identity was shaped in response to experiences of Irish stereotyping that marked differences between herself and English people. In these stories of encounter, English attitudes serve as foil for the elaboration of a narrative of Celtic subalternity set off against the imperious ignorance of English interlocutors. As Julie explained, although she had thought of herself as “liberal” and “a rebel” back in Belfast, on arrival in Exeter she experienced a “culture shock” due to the very different way she was regarded by English college lecturers and students:

One impact of these attitudes was that Julie initially struggled to adapt to life in England: “I had a bit of a difficult first year” because “they knew nothing.”Footnote ⁹² At the same time, however, Julie’s developing sense of difference vis-à-vis English people also included a burgeoning sense of affinity with other similarly situated Irish people. Although there was only one “Northern Irish girl” in her training college, once Julie completed her course and began searching for work, she instinctively sought out other Irish people as friends and allies.Footnote ⁹³ She recalled, for example, how one of her first job interviews produced a Celtic alignment:

Similarly, Julie recalled how English attitudes to Northern Ireland in the teacher’s staff room fostered a sense of affinity with other Irish-born teachers:

Julie’s narration of these episodes as formative of an Irish self constitutes a distinctive response to the peculiar problems of cultural adjustment negotiated by Protestant migrants in England. Recurring throughout Julie’s memories of her early teaching career, these stories of initial adaption document how processes of cultural stereotyping could foster investments in Irishness as a means of making sense of subjectively destabilizing aspects of everyday adjustment. In this they suggest how, within particular contexts, the impacts of the Troubles in England could enhance a sense of Irish belonging on the part of Protestants routinely misrecognized as Irish within English culture.

At the same time, however, the manner of Julie’s mobilization of distinctively Celtic formulations also registers a highly performative dimension to memory composure within her account. While her memories of cultural encounter show how Irishness could be employed to make sense of experiences of “othering,” they also dramatize instances of English-Irish antagonism to project and perform a conspicuously stylized form of Celtic belonging based on themes of subalternity, rebelliousness, and cavalier non-conformity. In this, they endeavor to authenticate a claim to Irish belonging and so express a desire to be recognized as Irish.

This desire for recognition alludes to the articulation of a second dynamic regarding Julie’s engagement with Irishness within her interview. Where Irishness is associated with self-realization in relation to English attitudes during her early years of settlement, at other points in her narrative Irishness appears as something denied or unattainable. In these memories, the Troubles is portrayed, not as something that binds Irish people together in England, but as a source of dissonance within efforts to compose a coherent version of Irish selfhood.

In some stories this dissonance is linked with how English perceptions of the Troubles generalized the tribalism of Northern Irish society. Although Julie emphasized how moving to England accentuated her sense of Irishness, she also stressed the culturally hybrid character of her “liberal” middle-class Protestant childhood in Northern Ireland in order to demonstrate that her Irishness had deeper roots:

As Julie suggests, however, in England such forms of “blended” Irishness were largely invisible. While Julie found herself categorized as Irish in some contexts, binary perceptions of the sectarian nature of the Troubles could also work to obscure or negate the ways in which pre-conflict narratives of Protestant belonging might articulate British and Irish identifications simultaneously. This negation was apparent in the attitudes of work colleagues, but it was often most pronounced in relation to nationalistic Irish people resident in England. While Julie usually presented her relations with other Irish migrants as filial and fraternal, she also made three references to encounters with a “second-generation Catholic Irish chap” who challenged her family’s right to reside on the island of Ireland:

As such reflections suggest, Julie’s sense of the occlusive aspects of English perceptions were imaginatively connected with a more general anxiety concerning the wider discursive impacts of the Troubles for the definition of Irishness. Her reference to the “bitterness” and “resentment” of the stereotypical “second-generation Catholic Irish chap” here tacitly alludes to her wider understanding of the Troubles as an apocalyptic event that radically intensified sectarian animosities. Although Julie “never” called herself “a unionist or a loyalist,”Footnote ⁹⁸ she regarded the Troubles as an abomination that, driven by self-interested “crooks” seeking to “bully their way through,” hijacked the development of an emerging liberal consciousness among “educated middle-class Catholics and Protestants”Footnote ⁹⁹ and ultimately “destroyed a country.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Contrasting her religiously mixed bohemian lifestyle in pre-Troubles Belfast with the fear-wracked society that emerged after 1969, Julie explained how the escalation of the conflict destroyed trust between communities, closing down space for social interaction and the hybridization of cultures. In relation to her own personal history, she recalled how the conflict obliterated the local Belfast folk scene and scattered her circle of “arty farty”Footnote ¹⁰¹ friends via emigration, and how her younger sisters, unlike herself, “wouldn’t mix” with Catholics as the violence intensified. This latter aversion evolved in response to fears for the safety of their father, who was subjected to persistent paramilitary intimidation due to his employment as a civil servant in the local magistrate’s office.Footnote ¹⁰²

Over the course of Julie’s account of settlement, the polarizing legacies of this history of ethnic violence gradually surfaced via the articulation of a sense of grievance and dispossession. This was expressed via acknowledgment of intense feelings of hatred toward militant republicans:

It manifested most clearly, however, in expressions of unbelonging that signaled Julie’s ultimate failure to locate terms for the composure of a coherent version of Irish selfhood. In the last instance, reflections upon the Troubles engender dissonance within Julie’s account because they disclose the supreme difficulty of securing recognition for a culturally “blended” history given the post-conflict entrenchment of ethnicized narratives of communal belonging in Northern Ireland. Militant republicanism is singled out as the most threatening aspect of the conflict for Julie precisely because its violence was predicated on a racialist reading of Irish history, which insisted upon the absolute separation of British colonizers and Irish natives, and that identified Ulster Protestants as cultural outsiders. Acknowledging the powerful influence of this exclusivist narrative upon vernacular constructions of ethnic Irishness, Julie is led to imagine that the “Northern Irish” are neither English nor Irish:

These reflections upon the implications of the Troubles bring into clear view the full complexity of the process of subjective composure at work within Julie’s migration story. On arrival in England, the initial disjunctures of the settlement process challenged her understanding of her place within the British family, prompting a gravitation toward Irishness as a solution to the problem of belonging. Celticism here supplied a resource for making sense of destabilizing experiences of “culture shock,” and of composing a relation of subjective continuity between hybrid forms of pre- and post-migration selfhood. The problem, however, is that ultimately Julie was not able to insulate the identifications fostered through these post-migration experiences from the wider cultural implications of the Troubles as an event that fundamentally challenged her ability to claim even a hybridized Irish heritage. As for other Northern Irish migrants, the Troubles traveled with Julie to England, but in her case the implications pertained to a sense of dispossession related to the polarizing logic of ethnic violence: where processes of “othering” in England pushed Julie toward the embrace of an Irish identity, the wider ethnicization of Irishness as part of the Troubles subverted this development, radically restricting Julie’s capacity to understand and represent herself as authentically Irish.

The outcome is that by the end of the interview Julie has begun to reorient her quest for authentication away from the English-Irish dichotomy toward an alternative aspiration for resynthesis:

As Julie explains, following her retirement she has used some of her free time to further investigate the question of where she belongs by “going into the DNA and Irish history.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ This genealogical inquiry has enabled her “to feel ten times better” because it has opened a way of reading the past that establishes both the longevity of her family’s presence in Ireland and the integral role of ongoing migration and exchange between Britain, Ireland, and Europe in syncretizing Ireland’s biological and cultural heritage. Retirement and the popular availability of new technologies of historical consciousness have thus initiated a new phase of (re)composure at the tail end of the migration journey: if the dichotomy of native/colonizer continues to frustrate Julie’s quest for authenticity, genealogical inquiry appears to make possible the excavation of a mongrel history that mirrors back and affirms impurity as the leitmotif of a distinctive “Northern Irish” experience, and that establishes a different kind of origin story on which to rest a claim to belonging.

Conclusion: Alterity, Relationality and the Troubles in Late-Imperial Britain

For Northern Irish Protestants who left home during the period of the Troubles, migration to England often raised ontological questions. While many assumed they were settling among a historical community of “kinsfolk,” everyday encounters with popular English perceptions of Northern Ireland frequently suggested otherwise. When David Anderson left for Liverpool in 1988 he imagined English people would “be like me,” but, having “discovered” that the English did not really “want us,” he came to realize he was “not like British people in Britain”: England was the scene, not of a family reunion, but of a journey of revelation and self-interrogation, prompting reflection upon “what” he is and “where” he belonged.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

In part, these journeys of self-interrogation reflected the unsettling impacts of the Troubles upon English self-perceptions. Protestant migrants in England discovered that the English did not really “want” them because the conflict in Northern Ireland fueled and was interpreted through wider postcolonial anxieties concerning social disintegration, popular disenfranchisement, and national decline. The history of Ulster Protestant subjectivities in England here registers the deeper cultural impacts of the Troubles in Britain, showing how the postwar implosion of Greater Britishness shaped aversion to the conflict, and revealing how the popular disavowal of Northern Ireland developed as a key cultural legacy of this process. The life histories of Protestant migrants thus suggest new ways of situating the Troubles within the historiography of postwar Britain by showing how the conflict was constitutive of the arguments that divided English society in the 1970s and 1980s, and of the recalibrated forms of national self-perception that crystalized as an outcome.

Yet, if Protestant histories help illuminate the shared cultural conflicts of English society in this period, they also point to the complexity of their experiential effects. While the ontological insecurity expressed in David Anderson’s account was common to most, if not all, Protestant narratives, this instability was experienced and negotiated in different ways by differently situated migrants. The manner in which migrants constituted themselves as subjects of belonging was not determined by the popular disavowal of Northern Ireland, but by how this fact was interpreted and incorporated within the context of composing individually specific histories of the self. This specificity reflected the particularities of individual migrant histories and the contexts created for recomposing the self via the migration process, but it was also dynamically produced via the workings of personal memory. The dynamic force of memory here lay in its dual role as a transmission belt that extended the subjective impacts of migrants’ earlier lives as children of the Troubles into routines of cultural adaptation in England, and as a process of retrospective evaluation by which these legacies were resignified in response to new life experiences and major lifecycle transitions. Given the complexly articulated character of these relations, migrants’ subjective responses to the impacts of the Troubles in England were necessarily diverse and mutative, giving rise to distinctive personal solutions to multi-sided dilemmas of belonging.

What does thinking about historical subjectivities in these terms add to critical understanding of the recent history of British-Irish relations? Beyond registering the importance of internal decolonization for understanding Britain’s experience of the Troubles, historicizing the relational constitution of subjectivities illuminates the deep roots of Northern Ireland’s cultural estrangement in contemporary England while shedding a complex light on the human impacts of the conflict and the ways these mutate over time, across space, between cultures, and through life experiences. With particular reference to the impacts of the Troubles upon the Irish diaspora in Britain, the dynamic shaping of Protestant subjectivities illuminates the critical limits of binary emphases on ethnic antagonism and “suspect communities,” illustrating the need for more sophisticated research questions concerning both English responses to the conflict and the subjective processes by which Irish people interpreted their own experiences. A history that centers the articulation of these elements holds out the prospect of a more nuanced and comprehensive assessment of the human legacies of the Troubles, not only for English society and people of Irish heritage resident in England at the time, but for individuals and communities affected by the conflict more broadly.

What such a history in turn alludes to are the general possibilities of a multi-relational perspective for thinking through critical questions concerning the representation and analytic labor of “identities” within historical accounts of the Troubles and the wider contemporary history of British “multiculturalism.” The tendency to treat bounded communities as protagonists in both contexts simplifies how historical subjects experienced the past, skews explanations of historical process, and restricts the possibilities for historical interpretation. A multi-relational analysis pluralizes the past, not only by diversifying the standpoints from which it is experienced, but by bringing into focus the creative evolution of subjectivities, showing how they work through contradiction, ambivalence, and silence, and how they embed complex possibilities for feeling, thinking, and acting at any given time. In this, the analysis developed above presents a suggestive framework for reading reflexive individuality back into histories of “ethnic identity,” and for revealing the unpredictable work of alterity in shaping “how newness enters the world.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸