Attitudes towards a Truth Commission for Northern Ireland in Relation to Party Political Affiliation

Abstract

A BSTRACT In Northern Ireland there has been a long-term and often heated debate, particularly within civil society, about how to address the legacy of the conflict and unresolved issues of the past. This paper critically examines the first large-scale survey to focus specifically and in depth upon the question of a possible truth commission for Northern Ireland. The paper analyses responses in relation to self-declared support for Northern Ireland's five main political parties (Ulster Unionist Party, Democratic Unionist Party, Alliance Party, Social Democratic and Labour Party and Sinn Fein). The results of the survey reveal a mixed picture on attitudes towards a possible truth commission but suggest that despite obvious, sometimes serious, community and party political differences on a number of important issues, there are also clearly grounds on which consensus exists.

Victimhood and Attitudes towards Dealing with the Legacy of a Violent Past: Northern Ireland as a Case Study

“…Thus, at least as far as the views of victims are concerned the results are clear: it is focused support for victims followed by community based initiatives which emerge as the most favoured mechanisms to deal with the legacy of Northern Ireland's violent past. These preferences replicate earlier survey findings among the general public concerning the ‘importance’ of such mechanisms for dealing with the past (Lundy and McGovern ).…”

“…Similar divisions are suggested when attitudes toward the establishment of a truth recovery mechanism are considered, such as a truth commission (Lundy and McGovern , ; Hayes and McAllister ; Lawther ). Many nationalists have publicly welcomed such an initiative, including many republican ex‐combatants, who, as one of the main perpetrators of the conflict, not only see it as a way of drawing a line under their violent past but also as a mechanism to finally establish the truth about the involvement of the security forces—either directly or indirectly—in the death of family members (Rolston ; Smyth ) .…”

Spectres of History: Nationalist Party Politics and Truth Recovery in Northern Ireland

“…For example, the transitional justice scholar Brandon Hamber of the University of Ulster ‘facilitated’ the Eolas Consultative Paper, while two other University of Ulster sociologists, Bill Rolston and Patricia Lundy, were also involved in the project 5 . This community and academic work tends to promote the idea that truth recovery is necessary to build peace and achieve reconciliation: ‘For advocates of truth recovery, dealing with the past and uncovering the truth is regarded as a key cornerstone and basis upon which trust can begin to be built and society can move forward’ (Lundy and McGovern, 2007, p. 323).…”

“…Reasonable and laudable as the ideals of building trust and moving forward are, they are also nevertheless structurally biased (McGrattan, 2009; Patterson, 2009). This is revealed in their intensely political framing of the debate in Northern Ireland in which concern for due process and the punishment of terrorist and state crimes or ideas about historical accuracy are downplayed or ignored in favour of an over‐theorised dichotomy between ‘restorative’ and ‘retributive conception[s] of justice’ (Lundy and McGovern, 2007, pp. 321–2).…”

“…The progressivist commitment to a ‘holistic, community‐oriented approach’ misses the point: it is wishful thinking to suppose that such an approach may ‘open up’‘spaces of controversy’ and ‘allow testimony to be translated into an exchange of trust’ (Lundy and McGovern, 2008a, p. 62) when the overriding fear of unionists is that ‘imposed, manufactured history by Irish republicans (with assistance from the British and/or Irish governments) would elide’ individual and collective ‘biographies of suffering’ (Simpson, 2009b, p. 115). Furthermore, the structural bias of the progressivist approach recurs in the complaint that ‘[s]ome of the strongest opposition to truth recovery has come from within unionism and loyalism’ (Lundy and McGovern, 2007, p. 323). This is in fact a common nationalist trope in which a community that repudiated violence and espoused democratic means of resolving the conflict is coupled with terrorists – a trope that, it should be said, is also mirrored in the Protestant community vis‐à‐vis nationalists/Catholics and the Provisional IRA (O'Connor, 1993, p. 144).…”