‘We have long memories in this area’: Ulster Defence Regiment place-memory along the Irish border

Abstract

A large body of literature assumes post-conflict societies can and should mediate public memory towards frames conducive to a reconciled future. However, this article argues that such a drive marginalises survivors of political violence who narrate the past as still-present wounds. The linear temporality of transitional justice presumes an idealised trajectory through time, away from violence and towards reconciliation. However, this idealised temporality renders anachronistic survivors who depend on the prolongation of traumatic pasts for the possibility of political change. Using the case of former Ulster Defence Regiment in Northern Ireland, this article examines this prolongation through the lens of Ulster Defence Regiment survivors’ resistant place-memory along the Southwest run of the Irish border. Through the performative retemporalisation of everyday places and landscapes, survivors demand that their resistant memories and narrative frames of past violence still belong and still have active political resonance in transitional political space.

Derry, Bloody Sunday, and the “Great Sea-Change”

“…Politically, Sinn Féin seeks simultaneously to retain its antiimperial armed revolutionism credentials whilst simultaneously transforming into a palatable mainstream Irish political party. As Colin notes, Sinn Féin is in a difficult spot when it comes to demanding justice for the perpetrators of State violence as it simultaneously faces justice campaigns for the victims of IRA violence (Robinson 2022).…”

“…The Great Sea-Change's comparatively brief narrative ascendancy was underwritten by a particular form of political temporality that binds or constricts the discursive and material space of political action. It both reflects and contributes to powerful political programs that often depend, for their very authority, on the bracketing of past violence, a severing of the continuity between past violence and present conditions (Bevernage 2012;Robinson 2022). For many people and institutions in Ireland and Britain, including many justice campaigners, particular moments in space and time such as June 15, 2010 represent a narratologically appropriate juncture in which to publicly perform an "over" or an "end, " to impose transition away from past violence as an open wound into a reconciled catharsis (Bentley 2021).…”

The living past in the lives of victims-/survivors of conflict-related sexual violence: Temporal implications for transitional justice

“…He talks about his experiences with Henry, a former member of the Ulster Defence Regiment, who took him to the place where he (Henry) was seriously injured by a bomb planted by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA). Reflecting on this, Robinson (2020) comments, ‘By asking me to witness the violence inflicted here as simultaneously past and present, Henry subverted the dominant narration of contemporary Northern Ireland as an allegedly “postconflict” society’.…”

“…Such an approach to time, however, is flawed, evincing a similarly 'truncated view of memory's temporality' that does not do justice to the latter's complex lived and experiential dynamics. As Robinson (2020) argues, 'Experiencing trauma fractures time and often projects survivors into divergent temporal and narratological realities ' (p. 5).…”