scholarly journals ‘The situation over there really bothers me’: Ronald Reagan and the Northern Ireland conflict

2017 ◽  
Vol 41 (159) ◽  
pp. 97-116
Author(s):  
James Cooper
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
Ronald Reagan ◽  
Bill Clinton ◽  
American Government ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Transatlantic History ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThe relationship between the Reagan administration and the Northern Ireland conflict is a neglected area of transatlantic history. This article addresses the extent of Ronald Reagan’s interest in the Northern Irish conflict and the manner in which other protagonists sought to secure or prevent his involvement. It will examine the president’s approach in the context of different views within his administration, the State Department’s wish to maintain American neutrality on the issue of Northern Ireland, and the desire of leading Irish-American politicians for the American government to be much more interventionist. These debates coincided with significant developments in Northern Ireland. Therefore, Reagan’s contribution to the Anglo–Irish process encapsulates a variety of issues: the Troubles in Northern Ireland during the 1980s, the 1985 Anglo–Irish Agreement and the internationalisation of the conflict before the election of President Bill Clinton in 1993.

‘Britain's Irish Question: Britain's European Question?’ British-Irish relations in the context of European Union and The Belfast Agreement

2000 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-97 ◽  
Author(s):  
ELIZABETH MEEHAN
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
World Politics ◽  
Global Perspective ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Irish Question ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Eu

If students of world politics can be reasonably accused of ignoring the Troubles in Northern Ireland—in part because they seemed to have little to do with the larger East-West confrontation and partly because they were so obviously about something distinctly national in character—then by the same token specialists on Northern Ireland can justly be accused of a certain intellectual parochialism and of failing to situate the long war within a broader global perspective. The quite unexpected outbreak of peace however only emphasizes the need for a wider understanding of the rise and fall of the Northern Irish conflict. This article explores the relationship between the partial resolution of the Irish Question—as expressed in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998—and the changing character of the European landscape. Its central thesis is that while there were many reasons for the outbreak of peace in the 1990s, including war weariness, it is difficult to understand what happened without situating it in a larger European framework and the new definition of sovereignty to which the EU has given birth.

The Long Peace Process

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Sanders
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Reagan Administration ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
The United States ◽  
Congressional Hearings ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict ◽  
International Fund

This book examines the role of the United States of America in the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process. It assesses Northern Ireland as both an international and a domestic issue in the United States during the years of conflict there. It looks at how US figures engaged with Northern Ireland, as well as the wider issue of Irish partition, in the years before the outbreak of what became known as the “troubles”. From there, it considers early interventions on the part of Congressional figures such as Senator Edward Kennedy and the Congressional hearings on Northern Ireland that took place in the aftermath of Bloody Sunday, 1972. It analyses the causes and consequences of the State Department decision to ban the sale of weapons to the Royal Ulster Constabulary, before considering the development of the US role in Northern Ireland through the Reagan administration and the onset of US financial support for conflict resolution in the form of the International Fund for Ireland. It then assesses the dynamics behind the role that President Clinton assumed following his election in 1992, before examining how Presidents Bush and Obama attempted to seize on the momentum of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement

Introduction: The Northern Ireland Troubles in Britain: impacts, engagements, legacies and memories

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graham Dawson ◽  
Stephen Hopkins
Keyword(s):  
Great Britain ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Political Violence ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
The Past ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict ◽  
History Of ◽  
Opening Up

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.

scholarly journals Richard Bean’s The Big Fellah (2010) and Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman (2017): two plays about the Northern Troubles from outside of Northern Ireland

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hiroko Mikami
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Good Friday ◽  
Good Friday Agreement

During the three decades of the Troubles of Northern Ireland (1969-1998), a remarkable amount of plays about the Troubles was written and almost of them, it seems, had been ‘monopolised’ by (Northern) Irish playwrights. Recently, however, certain changes about this monopoly have been witnessed and those who do not claim themselves as Irish descendants have begun to choose the Northern Troubles as their themes. Also, there have been growing concerns about violence worldwide since 9.11. This article deals with two plays, Richard Bean’s The Big Fellah and Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman, neither of which was written by an Irish playwright and examines whether and to what extent it is possible to say that they can transcend regional boundaries and become part of global memories in the context of the post-Good Friday Agreement and the post 9.11.

Commemorating bonds of Union: remembering the Ulster Special Constabulary at the National Memorial Arboretum

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. J. Armstrong
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Active Role ◽  
The Other ◽  
Remote Site ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Local Service ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Grant Scheme

In 2006, two acts of commemoration took place to the memory of the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC). One was staged in a public site of national commemoration at the National Memorial Arboretum (NMA) in Lichfield, Staffordshire and the other was a very local service in the remote site of Mullaghfad Church, Co.Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. Both of these events were state-funded under the terms of the ‘Victims and Survivors Befriending Grant Scheme’, but engaged in very different modes of remembrance. This chapter focuses on the USC memorial at the NMA as a strategic site of memory for the Ulster unionist community. Drawing upon interviews with members of the Ulster Special Constabulary Association (USCA) present at the commemoration, it explores the active role Britain plays as a physical and symbolic site of ‘respite’ for Ulster unionists. In contrast to the private, divisive nature of memorials to the USC in Northern Ireland, the NMA site enables the USCA to locate its role in the Troubles in terms of British heroism and sacrifice, alongside memorials to other UK police units. The chapter suggests that historians should look more closely at the active role Britain plays in commemorating the Northern Irish Troubles.

scholarly journals ‘Agitate, educate, organise’: partisanship, popular music and the Northern Ireland conflict

Popular Music ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 39 (2) ◽  
pp. 233-256
Author(s):  
Sean Campbell
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Popular Music ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Specific Performance ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict ◽  
Performance Strategies

AbstractThis article explores popular-musical invocations of the Northern Ireland conflict (1968–1998), focussing specifically on the period between the IRA hunger strike of 1981 and the British Government's Broadcasting Act in 1988. Whilst most songs addressed to the ‘Troubles’ were marked by (lyrical) abstraction and (political) non-alignment, this period witnessed a series of efforts that issued upfront and partisan views. The article explores two such instances – by That Petrol Emotion and Easterhouse – addressing each band's respective views as well as the specific performance strategies that they deployed in staging their interventions. Drawing on original interviews that the author has conducted with the musicians – alongside extensive archival research of print and audio/visual media – the article explores the bands’ songs in conjunction with salient ancillary media (such as record sleeves, videos and interviews), yielding a more nuanced account of popular music's engagement with the ‘Troubles’ than has been offered in existing work (which often assumes the form of broad surveys).

Medbh McGuckian

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Hanna
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Late 20Th Century ◽  
Medbh Mcguckian ◽  
Paul Muldoon ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Queen's University ◽  
Ciaran Carson

Medbh McGuckian (born Maeve McCaughan on 12 August 1950) is one of the most prominent members of the second generation of poets who emerged from Northern Ireland during the course of the Troubles (an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland during the late 20th century). Her work is often considered alongside that of her Northern Irish contemporaries Ciaran Carson, Paul Muldoon, and Tom Paulin. After receiving her secondary education at a Dominican convent, she studied for an English degree at Queen’s University Belfast (1968–1972). She was taught, along with fellow students Paul Muldoon and Frank Ormsby, by Seamus Heaney. She received her Master of Arts (MA) degree from the same university in 1974. Her first poem, “Marriage,” was published in The Honest Ulsterman in 1975 and, under the pseudonym “Jean Fisher,” she won the National Poetry Competition in 1979 for her poem “The Flitting.” She published two chapbooks in 1980, Portrait of Joanna and Single Ladies: Sixteen Poems, and she received an Eric Gregory Award in the same year. Her first full collection, The Flower Master, was published by Oxford University Press in 1982. Since then she has produced over a dozen single-authored collections of poetry, as well as chapbooks, anthologies, collaborations, translations, and prose works. Her collections of poetry include Venus and The Rain (1984), Marconi’s Cottage (1991), Captain Lavender (1994) and, most recently, Love, The Magician (2018). She was the first woman to hold the post of writer in residence at Queen’s University Belfast (1985–1988) and she has also held a visiting writer position at the University of California, Berkeley (1991). Her early work is notable for its focus on the female body and femininity and, while not relinquishing these, she has turned toward increasingly explicitly political themes since the mid-1990s. The reception of her work has been complicated by two distinguishing divergences from typical practice. The first is the variance of her compositional techniques from that of most of her contemporaries. She frequently employs a collagistic approach, often constructing her poems by combining lines from source material. Several critics (notably Clair Wills and Shane Alcobia-Murphy) have strenuously defended her from the potential accusations of plagiarism that might arise from this practice, focusing instead on the alchemical potential of her techniques of selection and combination. McGuckian’s admirers have drawn attention to the ways in which the words of others are reborn and given new identities and meanings in her poetry. McGuckian has also joined defenders of her work, notably Shane Alcobia-Murphy, in asking why male authors who have engaged in similar practices have not been subjected to the same scrutiny as she has. The sometimes divergent answers that she has given in her many interviews with critics have conditioned the reception of her work. Unsympathetic responses to her strange, discontinuous poems started to appear in the early 1980s and continue in the early 21st century. However, despite the necessity of, at times, challenging routes to its appreciation, her poetry has been widely praised and recognized as well, with several critics hailing her as a major contemporary voice in Irish poetry.

The Northern Ireland Conflict: New Wine in Old Bottles?

2000 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 307-322
Author(s):  
Sabine Wichert
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Social Identity ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Cambridge University ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Northern Ireland Conflict ◽  
History Of

James Loughlin, The Ulster Question since 1945 (London: Macmillan, 1998), 151 pp., £10.99 (pb), ISBN 0–333–60616–7.David Harkness, Ireland in the Twentieth Century. Divided Island (London: Macmillan, 1996), 190 pp., £9.99 (pb), ISBN 0–333–56796–X.Thomas Hennessey, A History of Northern Ireland, 1920–1996 (London: Macmillan, 1997), 347 pp., £12.99 (pb), £40.00 (hb), ISBN 0–333–73162–X.Brian A. Follis, A State Under Siege. The Establishment of Northern Ireland, 1920–1925 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 250 pp., £35.00 (hb), ISBN 0–198–20305–5.Dermot Keogh and Michael H. Haltzel, eds., Northern Ireland and the Politics of reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 256 pp., £35.00 (hb), ISBN 0–521–44430–6.William Crotty and David Schmitt, eds., Ireland and the Politics of Change (London/New York: Longman, 1999), 264 pp., £17.99 (pb), ISBN 0–582–32894–2.David Miller, ed., Rethinking Northern Ireland. Culture, Ideology and Colonialism. (London/New York: Longman, 1999), 344 pp., £17.99 (pb), ISBN 0–582–30287–0.Anthony D. Buckley and Mary Catherine Kenney, Negotiating Identity: Rhetoric, Metaphor, and Social Identity in Northern Ireland (Washington: Smithonian Institution Press, 1996), 270 pp., £34.75 (hb), ISBN 1–560–98520–8.John D. Brewer, with Gareth I. Higgins, Anti-Catholicism in Northern Ireland, 1600–1998: the mote and the beam (London: Macmillan, 1998), 248 pp., £16.99 (pb), ISBN 0–333–74635–X.During the last three decades, and accompanying the ‘troubles’, the literature on Northern Ireland has mushroomed. Within the last ten years two surveys have attempted to summarise and categorise the major interpretations. John Whyte's Interpreting Northern Ireland covered the 1970s and 1980s and came to the conclusion that traditional Unionist and nationalist interpretations, with their emphasis on external, that is British and Irish, forces as the cause for the problem, had begun to lose out to ‘internal conflict’ interpretations. He felt, however, that this approach, too, was coming to the end of its usefulness, and he expected the emergence of a new paradigm shortly.

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