This chapter suggests that a discernible trend in post-Troubles Northern Irish fiction and drama is to revisit and revise the “love across the barricades” plot and, in this way, to (re)imagine new forms of political community beyond the communitarian divide. It argues that friendship may offer an alternative model for a political reconciliation than suggested by the peace process and outlined by the 1998 Agreement. Drawing on Andrew Schaap and Hannah Arendt, I propose a distinction between a filiative and an affiliative politics of reconciliation: between one that is predicated on the ideal of a stable community with a common identity and one that foregrounds the establishment of new forms of relationships, presupposing the irreducible plurality of viewpoints as a basis for dialogue about the common world. Focusing on Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street (1996), Glenn Patterson’s The Rest Just Follows (2014) and Mary O’Donnell’s Where They Lie (2014), this chapter suggests that all three novels consider friendship as a political principle that can give rise to an affiliative reconciliation in invoking a not-yet community beyond ethnonational lines.

Considering novels, poetry, drama, and non-fictional prose, this chapter examines how writers represented the Troubles and the gradual gains of the peace process between 1980 and 1998. It considers the historical displacements of Brian Friel’s Translations and Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996), the realism of Ciaran Carson’s The Irish For No (1987) and Belfast Confetti (1989), the staging of women’s lives during the Troubles in Anne Devlin’s Ourselves Alone (1985), the phantasmagorias of Paul Muldoon’s poetry and the metaphorisations of war and violence in Medbh McGuckian’s verse, and the Belfast panoramas of Glenn Patterson’s Fat Lad (1992) and Robert McLiam Wilson’s Eureka Street (1996). Contemporary Northern writers contextualise the conflict by illuminating the country’s colonial past; they narrate structures of trauma by examining how history invades the present; they present palliative correctives to the vicious linearity of the conflict; and they project possible resolutions to the exhausted (il)logic of sectarian strife.