Who Kills Who? The Social Construction of the N Ireland Conflict
01 January 1991
Who Kills Who? The Social Construction of the N Ireland Conflict
artdoc February=1992
1991 was the worst year for conflict-related deaths in Northern
Ireland since 1982. The 1991 death toll, 94 at the time of
writing, is little short of the 101 deaths in the year of the
hunger strikes (1981), and is much higher than the 1980s low
point of 54 deaths in 1985. The latest wave of killings,
especially the resurgence of loyalist attacks on Catholics in the
second half of the year, has been largely relegated to the
sidelines by the British Press. In Ireland, however, it has once
more raised the question of the nature and status of the conflict
and in particular the meaning and motives behind violence and
murder. It is easy, and even morally comfortable, to dismiss all
such activity as mindless, criminal, repugnant, corrupt and even
the cause of unemployment, to quote some of the popular Northern
Ireland Office (NIO) labelling. This vocabulary about violence
also includes the phrase `tit-for-tat killings' which suggests
that the essence of the conflict is a sectarian scrap between the
forces of loyalism on the one hand - the Ulster Defence
Association, the Ulster Freedom Fighters, the Protestant Action
Force, the Ulster Volunteer Force - and the republican IRA, plus
minor groups like the Irish People's Liberation Organisation.
This characterisation continues with the idea that the RUC (a
heavily armed force) and the military (the British Army and
Ulster Defence Regiment) are in the middle, friends of a law-
abiding community which generally abhors violence. These agents
of the state are said to be acting in the neutral, apolitical
role of upholding the rule of law. Indeed, the British government
itself, as Peter Brooke the current Secretary of State for NI has
emphasised on many occasions, has no partisan or strategic
interest in the North. But serious analysts of the conflict and
the leading protagonists themselves, whether military or
political, depart significantly from the official view. For
example, counter-insurgency and terrorist experts such as Kitson,
Evelegh and Wilkinson know that the violence has political and
ideological roots and is sustained to some extent by popular
feeling and community support. The RUC itself has explicitly
rejected the idea that some killings are of a tit-for-tat nature.
This is not to deny the significant level of popular feeling
which simply wants the violence to stop, whether this stems from
a general saturation with the pain of death, from the war
weariness of the working class neighbourhoods, from the middle
class concern over disruptions to daily life, or from those who
have consciously embraced a peace ideology. It is notable in this
respect that the President of Sinn Fien has not only been
critical of some IRA actions - those involving civilian deaths -
but has been actively developing a `peace process'. This has cut
little ice with the Northern Ireland Office. Adams' latest
initiative drew the following response from Richard Needham: `The
only message I have for Mr Adams is he should call off his
rottweillers and if he ever wants to be remembered for anything
good in his life, he can help to bring peace to this place by
stopping the terrorist activity which his party supports.' But
what is a `civilian death', a `sectarian killing', a `legitimate
target'? How are such categories constructed? A key element in
the representation of the conflict is, to put it crudely, the
question of who kills who. Since the mid-1980s the Irish
Information Partnership (IIP) has been publishing Agenda, a
database covering, amongst other things, incidents of violence
and a catalogue of all deaths arising from the NI conflict which
have occurred since 1969. The Agenda statistics on who kills who
have been used on many occasions by both unionist and nationalist
politicians and have frequently been traded across the floor of
the House of Commons.