Themes and Narrative Patterns in Conflict-Related Intrafamilial Storytelling in Northern Ireland: An Oral History of the Ceasefire Generation

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All families are mnemonic communities that make use of self-referential narratives - family stories - to construct a collective identity. As well as forging cohesion and identification between family members, such stories 'give messages and instructions; they offer blueprints and ideals; they issue warnings and prohibitions' (Stone, 2017). When such stories no longer suit a family's purpose, they are forgotten. In the wake of a sectarian conflict, especially one which has spanned multiple generations, this process is both more complicated and more vital; questions of identity, especially along religious, political, or cultural lines, take on a more urgent significance. This project will compare the themes contained in the conflict-related stories that are told within families in Northern Ireland. I will conduct interviews with individuals from across religious, political, and socioeconomic boundaries, all of whom were born in the years following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. I will ask participants to reproduce the conflict-related stories they have been told within their own families and will examine whether the stories they have been told contain common themes, both within and across cultural and class boundaries. Research into intrafamilial storytelling in Northern Ireland is limited and has exclusively focussed on stories relating to significant traumatic events. This project adopts a more holistic approach, drawing on a wider pool of narratives, to explore whether the stories told are predominantly those related to traumatic events. This interdisciplinary oral history project seeks to build on existing work relating to family stories and understand how a long-running conflict situation impacts on the stories that a family holds and their temporal scope, and how the reproduction of such narratives is used by families across cultural and class divides in similar or dissimilar ways.