Victimhood, Truth Recovery, and Public Forgiveness in Northern Ireland – some Interdisciplinary Reflections

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Public forgiveness in Northern Ireland, if it has a place at all, still lies in the future. The Northern Ireland Executive's recent policy statement, Strategy for Victims and Survivors, once again kicks the can down the road with regard to deciding on a definition of who was a victim and on a truth recovery process. Strategy for Victims and Survivors lowers expectations for reconciliation and proposes that victims discuss and give input on the character of a future truth process. Is this tantamount to concluding that no process leading to public forgiveness will happen in Northern Ireland? This paper explores this question, highlighting the deeply divided nature of Northern Ireland society, which provoked the conflict in the first place, reduces the likelihood of a truth commission, and hobbles those in leadership from making reconciliatory gestures. Paradoxically, public forgiveness in Northern Ireland will have to come from the grass roots, given the challenges of Northern Ireland's “consensus” politics.

NORTHERN IRELAND AFTER 1998

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 found a formula, through power-sharing, by which two long opposed parties engaged in a zero-sum conflict could work together. It did not, however, represent new found political solidarity. Both parties retain, unaltered, political goals that are antithetical to one another. These political goals are shored up by narratives that draw on a rich history of successive violent events. From both perspectives, victimhood is part of the political narrative. Though nationalists view the 1998 plan more positively than unionists because they see power-sharing as a way-station en route to the eventual unification of Ireland, neither politicized group considers the current constitutional arrangements to be a long term solution to its aspirations.

Tensions got so bad in 2002 that Westminster took back into its own hands the running of Northern Ireland. The Stormont government was restored in 2007, with the Reverend Ian Paisley as First Minister and former IRA operative Martin McGuinness as Deputy First Minister. Paisley has now given his place to a younger colleague, Peter Robinson.

Despite political tensions, the work of rehabilitating the society after its thirty years’ war continues, by many measures quite effectively. Foreign investment and job creation have helped lift the economy despite persistent high unemployment in certain areas most associated with the conflict.