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In the Ulster Museum’s new gallery The Troubles and Beyond, the central display showcases a Wheelbarrow bomb disposal robot. This machine was invented by the British Army in Northern Ireland in 1972 and used by officers of the 321 Explosive Ordinance Disposal Squadron (321EOD) to defuse car bombs planted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). This article offers an alternative history of that machine – a dirtier history – that critically assesses its role during the Troubles. Centrally, the article contests the British Army’s preferred account of this machine as a ‘game-changing’ technological innovation in counterinsurgency, and their understanding of themselves as benign peacekeepers. Rather than figure the Wheelbarrow robot as an unreadable ‘black box’ used instrumentally by the superior human operators of 321EOD, this article seeks to foreground the unruly transfers of agency between the machine and its operators as they tested and experimented in the exceptional colonial laboratory of Northern Ireland. The article further explores the machine’s failures during bomb disposal episodes, the collateral damage that resulted, and the multiple and often unruly reactions of local populations who watched the Wheelbarrow robot at work. Providing a ‘dirty history’ of the Wheelbarrow robot is an effort to demonstrate that war can never be fully cleaned up, either through militarized mythologies of technological innovation or hopeful museum displays.

This paper focuses on Irish writer, playwright and television screenwriter Eugene McCabe’s fictional representation of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ in his trilogy Victims, published in the collection Heaven Lies about Us (2005). Living most of his life on his family farm on the Monaghan/Fermanagh border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, McCabe had a deep understanding of the historically entrenched hatreds, bigotry and fundamentalisms of its inhabitants, and his fiction reflects the human tragedy underlying the violence. This paper draws on an eco-philosophical framework to suggest that by capturing the entanglement between the natural and cultural place-world McCabe’s poetics offers, from a liberal humanist perspective, an indictment of anthropocentric patriarchy at the root of violent dispute. McCabe’s literary world, evoking natural and cultural landscapes, encapsulates the absurdity of isolating territories via false political borders, marginalizing the value of bioregion and diversity and ignoring the vital oneness of humanity. Thus, though McCabe’s short stories are indeed culturally and politically specific, in shedding light on the self-destructiveness of human behaviour they are ultimately timeless and universal.

The city of Belfast in Northern Ireland has been made and remade through cycles of violence during its 400-year “history.” The most recent manifestation of violent conflict associated with the city was a low-level civil war euphemistically known as “the Troubles” (ca. 1968–ca. 1998). Alongside the enduring markers of bombings, civil unrest, and attempts to police and disrupt them, presences and absences can also be assigned to forced and facilitated movements of communities, the “planned violence” (O’Neill 2018) of road-building schemes, and what were designated at the time as “slum clearances.” But there have been attempts to disrupt—and reinsert—attempted erasures of conflict when associated with enduring social injustices. This article will examine a site associated with the bombing of McGurk's Bar in 1971 to reveal how the material memory of the past has been “re-presenced” to disrupt attempts to disappear sectarian violence as a form of activism in the contemporary.

Kerri ní Dochartaigh is a remarkably perceptive Irish nature writer whose work, exploring ideas of emergency, interconnectedness and ecologies of care, is sharply truthful, courageous and compassionate. The following interview was conducted online in November 2024. She kindly talked about her two books, Thin Places (2021) and Cacophony of Bone (2023), and about herself as mother, writer and vegetable grower, covering issues such as violence in war, mental health and motherhood. Aspects of her work such as the human, the non-human, the COVID-19 pandemic and her ethics of ecology were discussed as well. The writer offers an array of insightful responses and shares her views on her motivations to write.

Terrorism has large social costs that are difficult to quantify for the well-known problems of eliciting people's preferences for public goods. We use the LSA to assess these costs in utility and monetary terms. Based on combined cross-section time-series data, we estimate the costs of terrorism for France and the British Isles. We find large negative effects of terrorism on life satisfaction that translate into considerable compensating surpluses for a hypothetical reduction in terrorism, in particular for the serious conflict in Northern Ireland. The effects of terrorism are robust and differ across groups in accordance with prior expectations.

violence and sectarianism, unfortunately, represent an encumbering yoke from which Northern Ireland has been struggling to liberate itself for the past fifty years (since the Troubles began in the late 60s). Seamus Heaney’s poetry is no exception. This paper focuses on some of his poems dealing with these issues, especially those written in the years following the first cease-fire in Northern Ireland (1994), which, by revisiting the past, foresaw a new future for Ireland. This move backwards to reach forwards is practised at different levels. Not only does Heaney look back in history (ancient Greece, for example) to rediscover new horizons to the impasse in Northern Ireland, but he also revisits his own poems and personal experiences, positing some sort of magic foreknowledge acquired in childhood which helps the adult poet to come to terms with his troublesome present, as well as to point towards “a new beginning” (Heaney 1996:69) in Irish history.

Like culture war, race has many meanings. It can refer to objective essence, or characteristics that are inherited through genes, blood, or mystical spirits. Conversely, race is conceptualized as a historically changing social construction, a concept whose references and attributes vary according to present needs. In this article, I employ both conceptualizations through two illustrative examples. The first is race and racism in the US, where culture wars are fundamentally racialized. The second is the Troubles, a thirty-year period of violence (1960–1998) in Northern Ireland, a culture war turned into open war, where variants of race and racism were a determining factor. In the latter example, culture war turned into civil war, while, in the former example, extremists hope for the same. In the concluding sections, I identify the steps in a process that turned culture war into civil war, as it has great relevance to the American case.

What accounts for low-intensity intergroup violence? This article explores the determinants of low-intensity sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, which has marked the post-1998 peace agreement period. Low-intensity violence comprises a variety of events from riots to attacks against other civilians as well as against homes and symbolic buildings such as churches. We argue that this violence is more likely and prevalent in interface areas where similarly sized rival communities are geographically in contact with each other. Parity and contact spur intergroup competition and threat perception, and they increase the viability of violence. We use original cross-sectional time-series violence data for the 2005-12 period at a disaggregated subnational level, the ward, and a wide variety of social and economic indicators to test our hypotheses. In particular, we assess the impact of within-ward ethnic composition, on the one hand, and the ethnic composition of neighboring wards, on the other. We find that the number of intergroup violent events peaks in wards where there is parity between groups, and in predominantly Catholic (Protestant) wards that border predominantly Protestant (Catholic) wards. The article makes two main contributions: it shows that microlevel dynamics of violence can expand beyond local territorial units, and it suggests that ethnic segregation is unlikely to prevent intergroup violence.

In March 2017, the first LGBTQ+ history exhibition to be displayed at a national museum in Northern Ireland debuted at the Ulster Museum. The exhibition, entitled “Gay Life and Liberation: A Photographic Exhibition of 1970s Belfast,” included private photographs captured by Doug Sobey, a founding member of gay liberation organizations in Belfast during the 1970s, and featured excerpts from oral histories with gay and lesbian activists. It portrayed the emergence of the gay liberation movement during the Troubles and how the unique social, political, and religious situation in Northern Ireland fundamentally shaped the establishment of a gay identity and community in the 1970s. By displaying private photographs and personal histories, it revealed the hidden history of the LGBTQ+ community to the museum-going public. The exhibition also enhanced and extended the histories of the Troubles, challenging traditional assumptions and perceptions of the conflict.

Although widely applauded for its female centrality, Derry Girls (2018-19) also problematises the displacement of masculine subjectivities in a period when the peace process and the effects of globalisation permeated the renegotiation of the discursive notions of masculinity in Northern Ireland. Intergenerational relations are key to understanding this displacement of male characters like Granda Joe (the hard man), Da Gerry (the new man), or James. With an emphasis on the carnivalesque, liminality, space, and emasculation, this article will investigate the extent to which male characters, who are caught amidst the rapid cultural changes caused by the spatial and cultural negotiations of the ceasefire, represent the collapsing structural dimensions of the social constitution of gender in pre-ceasefire Northern Ireland.