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The Legacy of the Good Friday Agreement pp 153–172Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Making Hope and History Rhyme? Dealing with Division and the Past in Northern Ireland After the Good Friday Agreement

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Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict ((PSCAC))

Abstract

The past is individual, it is collective, it is about looking back, it is about looking forward and sideways, it can create unity and it can create division, it concerns truth and it concerns construction. All these facets are key elements in the continuous discussion about the role of the past in Northern Ireland. This chapter presents a close reading of three reports on how to deal with division and the past after the Good Friday Agreement: ‘A shared future’ from 2005, ‘The Report of the Consultative Group on the Past’ from 2009, and the ‘Programme for Cohesion, Sharing and Integration’ from 2010. How are the past, present, and future conceptualised and linked in the documents and what is at stake in the different conceptualisations? The chapter discusses and compares the reports’ notions of identity and their proposals on how to prevent the turbulent past from engendering future division.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Paul Dixon has challenged this, arguing that the Good Friday Agreement is best characterised as an integrationist variant of power sharing (Dixon 2005, 365).

  2. 2.

    McGarry and O’Leary point to several types of accommodation, see McGarry and O’Leary (2009a, b, 16–17).

  3. 3.

    He particularly points to the challenges regarding the sacralising of place, the battle for the commemorative landscape and the hierarchy of victimhood that goes with commemoration, and a parallel process of forgetting ‘the less valuable’ dead (Graham 2011, 95–96).

  4. 4.

    He claims that it began with the public consultation exercise in 1999, which culminated in the Harbinson report in 2002 championing a ‘cohesive, but pluralist society’ (Hughes 2011, 8; see also Graham and Nash 2006, 259 and 260).

  5. 5.

    Cf. Tony Blair’s speech at the final negotiations before the Good Friday Agreement on 7 April 1998: ‘A day like today is not a day for soundbites, we can leave those at home, but I feel the hand of history upon our shoulder with respect to this, I really do.’

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Western Norway University of Applied Sciences, Bergen, Norway

    Sissel Rosland

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  1. Sissel Rosland
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Correspondence to Sissel Rosland .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway

    Charles I. Armstrong , David Herbert  & Jan Erik Mustad ,  & 

  2. Kingston University, London, UK

    David Herbert

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Rosland, S. (2019). Making Hope and History Rhyme? Dealing with Division and the Past in Northern Ireland After the Good Friday Agreement. In: Armstrong, C.I., Herbert, D., Mustad, J.E. (eds) The Legacy of the Good Friday Agreement. Palgrave Studies in Compromise after Conflict. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91232-5_9

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