Historical Dialogue and Memory in Policing Change: the Case of the Police in Northern Ireland

This paper explores the complex relationship between organisational change and historical dialogue in transitional societies. Using the policing reform process in Northern Ireland as an example, the paper does three things: the first is to explore the ways in which policing changes were understood within the policing organisation and ‘community’ itself. The second is to make use of a processual approach, privileging the interactions of context, process and time within the analysis. Thirdly, it considers this perspective through the relatively new lens of ‘historical dialogue’: understood here as a conversation and an oscillation between the past, present and future through reflections on individual and collective memory. Through this analysis, we consider how members’ understandings of a difficult past (and their roles in it) facilitated and/or impeded the organisations change process. Drawing on a range of interviews with previous and current members of the organisation, this paper sheds new light on how institutions deal with and understand the past as they experience organisational change within the a wider societal transition from conflict to non-violence.

Exploring the Views of Police Officers on the Use of Video Taped Evidence in Child Abuse Cases in Northern Ireland

This paper sets out to explore the views and attitudes of police officers in the Greater Belfast area, concerning the process and use of video taped interviews with child witnesses, subsequently used as court evidence in child abuse cases. The information was collected by means of a postal questionnaire, completed by police officers who had all experienced joint interviews with social workers of child witnesses. With the increased use of video evidence as an alternative to the distressing experience of a child appearing in court to give evidence, the research findings and conclusions provide clear messages about future developments both nationally and internationally.

Shifting Thresholds, Contested Meanings: Governance, Cross-border Co-operation and the Ulster Unionist Identity

Cross-border (North/South) co-operation between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland was an indelible feature of the form of governance provided by the Belfast Good Friday Agreement (1998). Previous efforts to establish North/South co-operation had all foundered but the establishment and initial operation of the Agreement's cross-border institutions proved to be uncontroversial. However, during its implementation, other areas of the Agreement gave Ulster unionists more pressing cause for concern. These areas of concern included the release of paramilitary prisoners, police reform, the 'decommissioning' of Irish Republican Army (IRA) weaponry, and the unionist perception that the 'Britishness of Northern Ireland' was being actively eroded. These concerns served to emphasise and strengthen political and cultural borders between communities at a regional and local level within Northern Ireland. They also threatened the pro-Agreement unionists' contestation of unionist ideological orthodoxy, a contestation that was undertaken in an attempt to adapt the Ulster unionist identity to the shifting thresholds of the state.