Spectres of History: Nationalist Party Politics and Truth Recovery in Northern Ireland
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2011.00908.x |
| Date | 01 June 2012 |
| Author | Cillian McGrattan |
| Published date | 01 June 2012 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
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P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S : 2 0 1 2 VO L 6 0 , 4 5 5 – 4 7 3
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2011.00908.x
Spectres of History: Nationalist Party Politics and
Truth Recovery in Northern Irelandpost_908455..473
Cillian McGrattan
University of the West of Scotland
This article critically explores the idea that resolving ethnic conflicts requires some form of truth recovery mechanism
to ensure accountability for past actions.While the truth recovery model suggests the need for a pluralistic, inclusive
approach to peace building, I argue that its intersection with party and identity politics means that it has the potential
to destabilise settlement processes. Using the Northern Ireland case as an example, I describe how the truth recovery
model can trigger a contest over the past in which ethnicised understandings of the past and the present come to the
fore. An essentially disruptive element in peace building, truth recovery conjures into existence alternative historical
narratives, counterfactual historical scenarios and, in an ethnically divided society, may actually narrow the space for
debating ‘peace’ and thereby reproduce entrenched and polarised identities.
Keywords: truth recovery; spectres; history; Northern Ireland; Irish nationalism
The idea that truth recovery is necessary for resolving conflict is intuitively attractive. It
seems logical to extrapolate from the idea that the re-establishment of peaceful interper-
sonal relations requires some kind of coming to terms with and working through the
actions and events that caused a breakdown of harmony to the idea that inter-communal
or inter-state relations can and should operate in a similar way. Indeed, mechanisms for
ensuring public accountability for crimes and acts of violence are commonplace in societies
moving from dictatorial regimes across Latin America and Europe towards nascent democ-
racy. These mechanisms range from the truth recovery commissions (appointed by new
regimes or external institutions such as the United Nations or the Catholic Church), to war
crimes tribunals and public inquiries, which have been set up at state and transnational
levels, to more grass-roots or ‘bottom-up’ storytelling initiatives that have flourished among
victims’ and survivors’ groups ( Barahona de Brito et al., 2001; Grandin, 2005; Hayner, 2001;
Subotic´, 2009).
A common query relates to how facing the truth about past conflicts and abuses can be
balanced against current political exigencies. Thus, on the one hand, principles such as the
need to recover facts about violent events and actions together with the legal and normative
imperative of granting rights and a ‘voice’ to victims are held as (almost) sacrosanct. In this
view, affording a voice to victims of violence and terror not only fulfils an ethical duty to
remember and recall past injustices ( Booth, 2006), but it may also contribute to a deeper,
more critically informed polity in the present (Simpson, 2009a, p. 35). On the other hand,
these principles come face to face with what might be called more ‘political’ concerns such
as balancing the allocation of resources, the need to avoid continuously ‘stirring up’
contentious and divisive memories, and the very real possibility that politicians will try to
manipulate the operation and findings of truth commissions to suit their own transient
interests (Ignatieff, 1999; Ricoeur, 2004; Rigby, 2001).
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C I L L I A N M C G R AT TA N
I begin with the contention that despite these debates an under-researched, under-
appreciated and perhaps insurmountable problem exists within the truth recovery paradigm
– particularly when it is applied to a site of an ethnically divided society such as Northern
Ireland (see also Stanley, 2009; Subotic´, 2009). Thus, even in the midst of promoting a
pluralistic vision of a quasi-utopian ‘shared future’, the truth recovery paradigm may trigger
ethnicised understandings of identity and, in the process, reproduce the narratives that
inspired conflict in the first place. This is because the past – or, more accurately, ideas about
the past – tends to play important binding and bounding roles in ethnically divided
societies: it gives ‘us’ a sense of who ‘we’ are and also who ‘we’re’ not, gives groups
coherence, self-recognition and informs their common aspirations – it also serves to
distinguish one group from another by giving narratival substance to claims of victimhood,
grievance or of a higher moral standing. In other words, since our identities are bound up
with ideas about what constitutes ‘our’ history, truth recovery, dealing with the past and
historical accountability are inevitably saturated with political considerations (Pocock,
2009). However, as the Northern Irish case demonstrates, this does not happen in a
straightforward fashion: it is not simply the case that ‘outbidding’ explains how and why the
most radical, ethnic voices gain hegemony over more moderate alternative narratives
(Horowitz, 2001). Nor is it not simply the case that fear of the ethnic ‘other’ and the
perception of opening political opportunities are the key mechanisms of mobilisation
(Petersen, 2002). Rather, intra-bloc competition also occurs around the (re)production of
emotive narratives that play on individuals’ feelings of guilt for abandoning the purported
ideals of communal forebears. Again, neither is it the case simply that a ‘soft’ or moderate
nationalist identity conspires with a more hard-nosed, politically expedient version
(O’Brien, 1988); rather, the question of violence itself remains an issue dividing ‘soft’ from
‘hard’ nationalists.
This article argues that the Northern Irish case demonstrates that the language of truth
recovery and societal reconciliation implies alternative and divisive visions of history and of
politics. By creating a discursive space in which ideas about the past and the future become
contested, the truth recovery paradigm is, in fact, a disruptive presence within settlement
processes: it conjures into existence ideas about communal identities, visions of the future
and narratives that describe how alternative presents could have been reached or remain lost
in the past (Derrida, 1994; Gordon, 2008). In other words, the very debate about truth
recovery and reconciliation alters how we experience time and how we articulate our
identities simply because to do so introduces fluid and erstwhile ungraspable elements into
political discourse (McGrattan, 2009). As Marysia Zalewski points out, the Derridean
examination of ‘haunting’ speaks to this uncertainty as it reveals or ‘captures’ aspects of
social life that typically evade ‘mainstream social scientific devices’ (Zalewski, 2005, p. 204).
While Jacques Derrida’s exposition of the ‘returning’ ghosts of Marx[ism] post-1991 is
founded on an ethical imperative regarding the need to historicise justice ( Brown, 2001,
p. 147), this article seeks to build on two ideas from the ‘hauntological’ literature in order
to shed light on the limitations of the truth recovery paradigm. First, I wish to borrow from
Avery Gordon’s insights into how ‘spectres occur when the trouble they represent and
symptomise is no longer being contained or repressed or blocked from view’ (Gordon,
2008, p. xvi). I argue that truth recovery in ethnicised societies facilitates this haunting in
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intensely problematic ways. Second, I explain that it does so because the past itself exerts
(perceived) moral demands on individuals and groups in the present. In other words, by
encouraging the return of ghosts from the past, truth recovery necessarily involves battles
over interpretation, mourning and memory – thus ‘we’ receive or inherit ways of behaving
and thinking from our forebears that we must ourselves live up to: ‘Inheritance is never a
given, it is always a task’ (Derrida, 1994, p. 54, emphasis in original). Concentrating in
particular on nationalist politics in Northern Ireland, this article demonstrates how this
‘haunting’ plays out in an ethnically divided society and describes how events and stories
from the past merge with contemporary explanations of political identity, creating an
ethnicised political dynamic which effectively negates the hope of stability, inclusivity and
pluralism that resides at the heart of the truth recovery model.
The idea of truth recovery has taken on considerable importance in Northern Ireland
where, since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, political elites have attempted to move
beyond violent confrontation and made tentative moves towards operating a devolved
power-sharing administration (McGrattan, 2010a, pp. 156–80). The prevalence of historic
grievances and ‘recriminations’, the depth of residual distrust between those elites and the
resilient and entrenched sectarianism at the societal level, have given credence to the notion
that a thorough reappraisal of the events that constituted the Northern Ireland conflict is
necessary in order to ‘allow the society to move on’ (Guelke, 2007, p. 363). The reasoning
runs as follows: since the aims of truth telling are ‘the reconstitution of the social and
political environment’ through the ‘forging [of] “shared narratives” ’ about the past, not only
is this a good idea for a society such as Northern...
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