Visitors from Northern Ireland

Katie D.

April 27, 2011 - 10:03 AM

Last week we had the amazing experience of having two guest speakers from Northern Ireland visit the University of Oregon. Professor Shaul Cohen in the Geography department is an expert on conflict transformation in Northern Ireland. His researched has focused on space in the religious/ethnic conflict of the past several decades as the British/Protestant members of Northern Ireland have clashed with the Catholic/Irish.

Anna and Nigel are both from the town of Derry/Londonderry. Both are involved in the current peace processes, but both still identify strongly with one side of the conflict, and were therefore able to bring their current perspectives as well as their intimate knowledge of the Troubles to their Oregon audiences. Nigel is Protestant, and was involved in the British military forces during the troubles. His story includes the experience of terrorism against himself and his colleagues at the hands of the IRA and other Catholic paramilitary groups. Now he is involved both in efforts at peacemaking between the communities, as well as being a member of a political party (and is actually standing for election on May 5th). Anna is younger, and was a child at the heart of the violence. She grew up Catholic, surrounded by the low-level violence of being surrounded by military helicopters and British soldiers on the street corners where she grew up. She works for a prominent peace organization in Derry, and was my friend Madeline's boss while she was interning for the summer and fall.

Professor Cohen brings speakers to Oregon each year. Their value in understanding ethnic conflict and responding to long-term violence is enormous. They speak to the depth and pain of the conflict, as well as to the promise and frustrations of peacemaking.

Anna and Nigel spent an evening at the Oregon State Penitentiary with the Inside-Out class I am co-leading with Professor Cohen. After studying the conflict for five months, we finally had voices in the classroom, expressing the depth of the conflict. Our class gathered, as usual, half outside (UO) students and half inside students. We sat in a circle, sitting every-other seat in a mixed classroom. But then, instead of turning to one another to discuss the material and engage in dialogue, we faced our visitors and listened to their stories.

What a profound thing it is to hear stories of pain directly from the participant. Both visitors spoke first about their experiences at the peak of the violence. Nigel spoke about losing colleagues to assassination and torture, even going so far as to describe the day he had to use a shovel to scoop up the remains of a policeman whose car had been blown up. His pain was obvious, as was the depth of his conviction that it was essential to move forward, away from violence and retribution, into some kind of integrated and peaceful society. Anna spoke about the fear she experienced, and the distrust she felt in the police and the authorities, and the way she was raised to know that she, and the others in the Catholic minority, were the victims of state oppression and discrimination. Anna and Nigel also performed a role play for the class, taking on the attitudes and patterns of a "militant member of their communities." It was shocking how fast our polite and educated visitors devolved into snarling, swearing combatants, bringing up accusation after accusation against the other party, and even launching a clear threat (Anna: "Do you still check under your car every morning, Nigel? I know where you live.") It seems that, even those who are working for peace, are still very able to access the bitterness of the conflict.

Both Anna and Nigel expressed their hope that things were moving toward permanent peace, and their profound fear that their country would slip back into violence. The day after our class, a parcel bomb was intercepted on the way to a prominent Catholic sports figure. The violence is not so far distant.

For our class, this visit was of inestimable value. It brought the conflict alive, and into our classroom. We had the chance to ask questions and to see faces, and to hear the way that direct and structural violence shaped both their lives. As our class came to an end, we took a moment to go around the circle and each speak to the value of our meeting that day. The overwhelming sense in the room was one of gratitude. What we expressed was the profound sense that our studies had come alive and spoken with us: that we were looking into the face of the conflict in the past, present, and future. We were asking those questions that were hard to ask, and receiving such levels of honesty that it was nearly painful.

As we move forward with this course, I imagine we will be able to access a new kind of understanding. The conflict in Northern Ireland can feel so distant, and so difficult to understand. But now we have heard how it is all tied up with identity and human needs, and the dispute of governance and authority. It has everything to do with history and the long experience of violence, fear, and the need of cultural expression.

In our classroom, we now have a sense of both the mechanisms of the conflict, and the challenges of peace. With elections in Northern Ireland a week away, this is an exciting time to come into deeper understanding of the conflict. And with the similarities manifest between that conflict and many other contemporary examples of ethnic tensions and low-level violence around the world, the insights gained are of profound interest to me.

As a final example of just how relevant and sustained these kinds of conflict can be, this week we were unable to debrief Nigel and Anna's visit with our Inside-Out class. On Easter a large fight broke out at the prison, involving eighty-one people and resulting in the locking down of the entire prison. The fight began as a verbal argument between two individuals, but rocketed into a brawl because of the tensions of the surroundings and the history of conflict between groups on the inside. It only took moments for the conflict to escalate from verbal altercation to racially motivated brawl.

As Anna and Nigel demonstrated in their role play: history is very near in many ways, and conflict remains a very present threat.