Gender, peace and reproductive justice.

AuthorStafford, James

Northern Irish politics is in flux - and not just because of Brexit. At the time of writing, devolved government remains suspended. The shocking murder of the 29-year-old journalist Lyra McKee during rioting in Derry/Londonderry drew widespread attention to the continuing activities of dissident paramilitary groups. Demands for social and reproductive justice, sharpened by a decade of austerity, are still being sidelined by an ossified politics of communal identity. Renewal met Claire Pierson, an academic and trade-union researcher campaigning for the reform of Northern Ireland's notoriously restrictive abortion law, to discuss the prospects for change.

James Stafford (JS): Lyra McKee's death has already assumed a kind of historic significance for Northern Ireland in this post-Brexit era. But do you think people are right to draw that kind of link to the broader political context? What's the significance of dissident paramilitaries in contemporary Northern Irish politics?

Claire Pierson (CP): Lyra McKee represented the future of Northern Ireland rather than the past, and that's what makes her death particularly poignant and particularly tragic. The murder of Ian Ogle, which was also carried out this year, by suspected Loyalist paramilitaries, was much less publicised in the British media.

What both murders show is that the paramilitaries are still able to intimidate and control and silence communities. But this could also be breaking down. Since McKee's murder, the PSNI have said that they've had hundreds of calls with information, in an area of Derry which traditionally wouldn't engage with the police. That's really heartening. Essentially, with a lot of these groups, what they're really there for is control of communities and control of organised crime. We need to de-politicise their role. They're not there for maintenance of the Union, or for a united Ireland. They're there to control communities.

It's also heartening to see what McKee's friends have been doing since her death: making red handprints on the headquarters of Saoradh, the political wing of the New IRA, who have accepted responsibility for her death.

You can contrast that with the men who had been sent, I suppose, to intimidate those young women, standing around with their arms crossed.

That has happened in the past - if you think about the Peace People, and the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition, it is always women who come out. The question is how much they're then able to build traction on that, and use that in the future. It tends to happen at a specific moment - and these moments are really powerful, they have a lot of resonance, but continuing that feeling and creating momentum, that's much harder.

The young women who came out for Lyra McKee, and the women in East Belfast who organised a march against paramilitary intimidation in East Belfast and the silencing of the murder of Ian Ogle by the Ulster Volunteer Force [UVF] - it's those women who need to come together.

The problem is that women are often excluded. The recently set up 'Flags, Identity, Culture and Tradition' Commission, appointed by the Office of the First Minister and Deputy First Minister, includes fourteen men and one woman. (1)

Gender and consociationalism

JS: Does this point to broader problems about the way in which gender and social justice are sidelined in the 'consociational' framework of the Northern Irish political system, which prioritises representation of ethnic and religious groups?

CP: There has been a lack of acknowledgement that gender is important, and that gender is an issue of peace and an issue of security.

This is something that is recognised in academic work and the international sphere, but it hasn't translated down to any large extent in Northern Ireland.

There's a lack of consideration of how much consociationalism and the power-sharing arrangements embed and prioritise our ethno-national identities. Those are still there, they're still what people vote on - even though the majority of DUP voters, for example, agree with...

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