This article addresses the nature of contemporary racism and sectarianism in Northern Ireland in the context of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) and its outworking. It responds to the increasing dominance of the 'good relations' model for understanding and addressing race and sectarian division in Northern Ireland. It debunks the gathering support for the notion that Northern Ireland is somehow 'post-sectarian' -finding instead a state formation that hides its incapacity to address rising racism and sectarianism under the fig leaf of 'good relations'. It locates these key developments in the specific new formation of the statelet which has emerged from the GFA.

This article surveys the literature on the global experience of demobilization and reintegration of combatants after wars end. It examines the factors that contribute to successful programmes. Among these, the two most frequently emphasized are the political will of all concerned to ensure the programmes work, and the active participation of ex-combatants in their own programmes of reintegration. The article then examines the situation in Ireland. In ways reintegration has failed, and for the same reasons as elsewhere. At the same time, the Irish case shows elements of success to match the best of reintegration programmes worldwide -not least the contribution of highly politicized ex-prisoners to their own reintegration and to conflict transformation more generally. These similarities have emerged in the relative absence of any involvement of the international community in demobilization and reintegration in Ireland, and indeed without direct comparisons made to good practice elsewhere.

To date there has been little research on young people and sexuality in Northern Ireland. This paper draws on the first major study in this area to analyse the delivery of formal sex education in schools. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were used to access young people's opinions about the quality of the sex education they had received at school. Overall, they reported high levels of dissatisfaction, with notable variations in relation to both gender and religious affiliation. In one sense their opinions mesh well with those of young people in other parts of these islands. At the same time the specificity of sexuality in Ireland plays a key role in producing the moral system that underlies much of formal sex education in schools. Underpinned by a particularly traditional and conservative strain of Christian morality, sex education in Northern Ireland schools is marked by conservatism and silence and by the avoidance of opportunities for informed choice in relation to sexuality on the part of young people.

The article examines the potential and limitations of storytelling for victims of political violence. It rejects the view that storytelling is unproblematic, a way for victims to ‘get things off their chest’. It examines a wide range of literature on storytelling and testimony, from the Holocaust through to contemporary transitional societies. In particular, attention is focused on the experience of victims and survivors telling their stories in formal settings such as truth commissions and trials in South Africa and the former Yugoslavia, as well as at unofficial storytelling processes in Northern Ireland. The authors look at the potential of storytelling as resistance to injustice and conclude that while unofficial processes of storytelling present opportunities for collective solidarity, the stories often go unacknowledged by the wider society. Conversely, they also conclude that, while official mechanisms of truth recovery can ensure wide legitimacy for the stories of victims, this is often at the cost of marginalizing the storyteller and the story.

One promise of formal truth recovery processes, such as truth commissions, in transitional societies is that they present the possibility of a common narrative emerging about the causes of conflict. At the same time, there is now evidence that such processes also create silences; some narratives are not fully represented. One such silence is in relation to pro-state paramilitaries. Drawing extensively on interviews with a number of loyalist paramilitary activists in Northern Ireland, as well as others attuned to the current state of loyalism, this article explores loyalist paramilitary attitudes to dealing with the past, and in particular, the possibility of a truth commission for Northern Ireland. It considers the reasons for loyalist reticence about supporting such a commission, including their belief that the call for truth serves a republican insurgent agenda, their conviction that they have been abandoned by the state to which they have been loyal, and a general sense of confused political identity within loyalism. Finally, the article considers some ways in which loyalists might be persuaded to engage in a truth recovery process, not least through an attempt to produce a tighter definition of truth. If their narrative succeeds in being properly represented, there may be lessons to be learned for similar transitional societies.