Telling Stories and Navigating Silence in Post-conflict Northern Ireland

• In Event: The macro and the micro: Holistic Approaches to Criminal Policy and their connection with local environments

Abstract

The work explores the lived experience of borders and the everyday ‘criminality’ of people who live at national boundaries. The creation of a border creates a liminal space for crime, a grey zone for illegality. In Ireland/Northern Ireland, one of the consequences of the establishment of the border in the 1920s was the advent of smuggling. This boundary line, which wound its way through hundreds of kilometres of often inaccessible farmland, became a nexus for the smuggling of, among other items, livestock and agricultural goods. The presentation draws on research conducted in a border region in the north-west of Ireland, involving oral history interviews with older men who recalled their engagement in small-scale livestock smuggling from the 1950s to the 1990s. The men’s experiences outlined how these smuggling enterprises were conducted under the spectre of ‘the Troubles’ which erupted in Northern Ireland in the late-1960s. The interviews explored how ‘Ordinary Decent Criminals’ (as some of the men identified) navigated the increasingly securitised Northern Irish state and the militarisation of the border. The research threw up a paradoxical finding; the men were keen to tell stories, but this was couched by the imperative of silence. Participants made sense of their pasts through narrative but in reflecting on matters of political, national and religious identity, the silences of the past remained.

Author

• Lynsey Black, Maynooth University