Conflict, Memory and Migration: Northern Irish Migrants and the Troubles in Great Britain

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Whether framed as an internal state conflict or Britain's last colonial war, the Northern Ireland Troubles, which claimed almost 4000 lives across a thirty-year period, have existed in constant tension with the dominant narratives of modern Britishness since the late 1960s, posing enduring problems of representation and legitimacy for British politicians, policy-makers and opinion-formers. However, very few scholars of Northern Ireland or historians of modern Britain have examined the history and memory of the conflict as it has impacted upon the state, culture and society in Britain, nor have they systematically investigated the meanings of the conflict for ordinary people living in Britain. An area of particular neglect has been the distinctive migrant journeys of Northern Irish people who settled, worked and raised families in Britain in the years before and during the Troubles, a period when the political and discursive contexts surrounding the North and its people and politics underwent complex change. This project will undertake the first ever investigation of the experiences of such migrants, using their memories of settlement to discover how the meanings of conflict in Northern Ireland have been articulated within British culture. These memories will be examined alongside an analysis of popular discourses on, and cultural representations of, the Troubles in Britain, paying particular attention to press, film and television coverage from the conflict era (c.1969-98), the significance of which will be reassessed from a post-conflict vantage point. By these means, this project will use the Northern Irish migrant experience as a lens through which to glean new insights into the domestic significance of the history and memory of the Troubles in Britain, while at the same time using this case study to evolve new theoretical understandings of the relationship between the dynamics of the migrant experience and wider societal processes of religious-ethnic conflict, cultural reception and popular memory.The investigators will address research questions concerned with the impact of formative experiences of sectarianism within Northern Ireland on the migrant experiences of Protestants and Catholics, unionists and nationalists, in Britain in the years before and during the Troubles; the role played by differences of gender, socio-economic background, educational attainment, generation and place of settlement on the shaping of distinctive forms of Northern Irish migrant subjectivity in Britain; the extent to which processes of cultural acceptance or othering produced particular problems for Northern Irish people's resettlement and adaption strategies; and the ways in which different responses to Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics in Scotland and England suggest regional differences in the cultural effects of the Troubles and the performance of Britishness in Britain.The project will break new interdisciplinary ground by combining research methods derived from oral history theory, memory studies, cultural studies and psychoanalytical theory. In-depth semi-structured interviews will be conducted with c.90 Northern Irish migrants and their offspring settled in the areas of London, Manchester and Glasgow, using this three-way comparison to illuminate the different social and cultural implications of the Troubles within different regional contexts. Discourse analysis will be used to account for the shifting ways in which the Troubles and Northern Irish ethnicities have been represented within print and visual media in Britain. Our third investigative tool is the most innovative: an interactive remembrance forum involving a selection of the research participants. The project findings will be disseminated through a co-authored monograph, journal articles, a journal special issue, book chapters, conference papers, an international conference, a BBC 4 radio documentary, a series of podcasts and a project website.