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

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.

The impact activities for this project have been conceived and designed with purposeful innovation and creativity, with input from our three partners, Healing Through Remembering (HTR), the Tim Parry Johnathan Ball Foundation for Peace and radio production company Loftus Media. We will work closely with these partners to ensure outcomes and outputs are disseminated widely, thus maximising the impact of our findings to a range of non-academic audiences and communities.

Different groups of users outside academia will benefit in distinctive, though related, ways from the research and its outcomes. At an overarching level, this project will address deficiencies in the public knowledge and understanding of the interrelationship between the NI Troubles and the shaping of distinctive forms of NI migrant subjectivity in Great Britain, and of the significance of the history and memory of the NI conflict in Britain. Through its in-depth examination of hitherto unexplored experiences, histories and memories, the project will produce findings that will inform and promote public debate across the UK and Ireland, using, at its chief tools, a BBC 4 radio documentary and series of podcasts made by Loftus Media. Encouraged by Loftus's impressive track record of programme production and podcast dissemination, and emboldened by strong expressions of interest from senior BBC executives, we expect the documentary and podcasts to appeal to diverse audiences throughout these islands and beyond, particularly at a time when NI and GB are entering a period of connected anniversaries.

The public reach of our research will be further extended by the creation of a project website, hosted and maintained by the University of Manchester, and an archive of the bound transcripts at Manchester Central Library. Subject to the participants' consent, the website will provide open access to individual transcripts and allow for streaming of the associated audio, thereby connecting users to the voices of the interviewees within moments of entering the site. A user-friendly website interface will be developed, with functionality for interactive postings and discussion fora, thus enabling us to exploit 'the digital empowerment of the audio and video in the oral history user experience' (Boyd and Larson, 2014).

Politicians and policy-makers in the Northern Ireland Executive, with which HTR has good working relations, are seen as important stakeholders in this project. The Executive has formally recognised oral history as an important element of dealing with the past in NI, as set out in the 2014 Stormont House Agreement, which commits the Executive to the creation of an Oral History Archive. Through our partnership with HTR, we will seek to ensure that the new body of knowledge that will emerge from our project contributes to the establishment of an extensive resource that can be used for wider education and engagement. Our findings will also be made available to teachers and pupils, which make up another important group of users, in the form of an educational resource pack. This will be freely downloadable from the website and can be used in conjunction with the podcast series. PI Harte and HTR have relevant experience of producing and disseminating similar packs.

The project team believes that the c.90 oral history participants themselves constitute an important group of non-academic beneficiaries of the research. Prompted by feedback from participants in a small-scale study by PI Harte and RF Hazley, which showed that several benefited from the self-reflexivity of the interview process and its aftermath, we will hold a remembrance forum at the Foundation for Peace to which c.20 of the interviewees will be invited, thus creating a space for reflection, dialogue and mutual learning. The insights gained from this forum will yield relevant data for those who embark on future life history projects, particularly the growing cohort of community oral historians.