Hanging Flower Baskets, Blowing in the Wind? Third Sector Groups, Cross-Border Partnerships and the EU Peace Programmes in Ireland

The EU’s Peace programmes in Ireland have promoted the cross-border activity of Third sector groups. Potentially, such activity gives substantive meaning to regional cross-border governance and helps to ameliorate ethno-national conflict by providing positive sum outcomes for ‘post-conflict’ communities. The paper mobilizes focused research conducted by the authors to explore this potential. It finds that while regional cross-border governance has indeed developed under the Peace programmes, the sustainability of the social partnerships underpinning this governance is uncertain and its significance for conflict resolution is qualified by difficulties in forming a stable power-sharing arrangement at the political elite level.

(Un)settlement: Political Parody and the Northern Irish Peace Process

This essay examines Tim Loane’s political comedies, Caught Red-Handed and To Be Sure, and their critique of the Northern Irish peace process. As “parodies of esteem”, both plays challenge the ultimate electoral victors of the peace process (the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Féin) as well as critiquing the cant, chicanery and cynicism that have characterised their political rhetoric and the peace process as a whole. This essay argues that Loane’s transformation of these comedic pantomime horses into Trojan ones loaded with a ruthless polemical critique of our ruling political elites is all the more important in the context of a self-censoring media that has stifled dissent and debate by protecting the peace process from inconvenient truths. From these close and contextual readings of Loane’s plays, wider issues relating to the political efficacy of comedy and its canonical relegation below ‘higher forms’ in Irish theatre historiography will also be considered.

Policing for peace in Northern Ireland: Change, conflict and community confidence

The fundamental change in policing that began in 2001 was a critical part of the Northern Ireland peace process. Seventy years after its establishment the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) remained distrusted and unrepresentative of the Catholic – nationalist community. This book explores how policing changed and the significant contribution that overhaul made to the most successful conflict transformation process in recent decades. It looks at policing from an organizational perspective and focuses on leadership, strategy and culture as it traces the journey from RUC to PSNI. In this way it reflects the views of many key figures inside the organization and of key political decision makers outside of it. This book will be of tremendous interest to those seeking to explore the underlying dynamics of one of the most radical and challenging change processes in recent history and is a must read for anyone interested in the Northern Irish peace process.

War, peace and suicide: The case of Northern Ireland

Durkheim’s idea that war reduces suicide through greater social and political integration has been used to explain suicide trends during the Northern Ireland conflict and in the period of peace. The applicability of Durkheim is critically evaluated through a case study of suicide trends by age, gender and cause of death over a forty year period. The key finding is that the cohort of children and young people who grew up in the worst years of violence during the 1970s, have the highest and most rapidly increasing suicide rates, and account for the steep upward trend in suicide following the 1998 Agreement. Contrary to Durkheim, the recent rise in suicide involves a complex of social and psychological factors. These include the growth in social isolation, poor mental health arising from the experience of conflict, and the greater political stability of the past decade. The transition to peace means that externalised aggression is no longer socially approved. It becomes internalised instead.

So Why Did the Guns Fall Silent? How Interplay, not Stalemate, Explains the Northern Ireland Peace Process

The precise rationale for, and timing of, the Northern Ireland peace process of the 1990s and beyond, which developed after more than two decades of conflict, has yet to be fully explained. It has been a common assumption that it arose from a stalemate involving the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the 'regular' pro-state forces of the British Army and Royal Ulster Constabulary and the 'irregular/ultra' pro-state loyalist paramilitary groups of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association (UDA). Under this interpretation, military/paramilitary deadlock led to ripeness for peace, amid reappraisals by all parties to the conflict of the utility of violence accompanied by reinterpretations of earlier political orthodoxies. The IRA could not remove the British sovereign claim to Northern Ireland; British forces could not militarily defeat the IRA and loyalists and republicans were engaged in a futile inter-communal sectarian war. This stalemate thesis has obvious attraction in explaining why a seemingly intractable war finally subsided, but is less convincing when subject to empirical testing among republican and loyalist participants in the conflict. This article moves away from 'top-down' generalist narratives of the onset of peace, which tend to argue the stalemate thesis, to assess 'bottom-up' interpretations from the actual combatants as to why they ceased fighting. It suggests an asymmetry, rather than mutuality, of perception that there was 'military' cessation by the armed non-state groups, with neither republican nor loyalist interpretations grounded in notions of stalemate. The article concludes by urging a wider consideration of the important and persistent interplay of the military and political in conflicts such as Northern Ireland.