Creating Personal Memorials of Northern Ireland's Violence Shifts How Students See History

Richard Hargy, a history teacher in Northern Ireland, reflects on tackling the issue of commemoration with a group of young women from violence-torn communities. The creative project changed his students’ sense of how their own lives fit with national history—and also changed their teacher’s expectations.

In October 2010, I was approached by WAVE to facilitate a study into Memorials and Commemoration in Northern Ireland. WAVE is a cross-community organisation which supports the needs of people traumatised as a result of violence in Northern Ireland. At the core of this project lies a challenge: memorials to those who died in the conflict here have the potential to powerfully raise both emotions and tensions in our communities.

The group that I was going to work with contained young women aged between 16 and 24. For the next three months we explored the group’s immediate past, while placing it within the context of the crucial decade 1912 - 1922 that shaped 20th century Ireland.

Beyond our historical study, the group also took on the special challenge of creating a new community memorial that would reflect a society on its way to becoming integrated, but that at the same time would not deny communities the right to honour their dead in a respectful manner.

My ‘mission’ was clear: to attempt to open spaces for dialogue around how we might live together. This kind of dialogue would then hopefully shift mindsets and attitudes towards ways of remembering and commemoration that are non-threatening and inclusive.

I was relatively well briefed on who the twelve young women would be before I met up with them for the first time. They were all from areas located in the north-eastern part of Northern Ireland. They were a mix of both Protestant and Catholic, and they all had been affected in some way by the conflict. That said, however, nothing could really prepare me for what was in store.

These were young women who openly admitted their dislike for history at school. Their knowledge of 20th century Irish History was weak, and their attention-span for a one hour evening class was short, to put it mildly.

On the first evening we explored what monuments/murals actually are and why they matter. The following week we investigated different types of memorials using the relevant Facing History resource. Then, using plasticine/play-doh the girls worked in pairs to create their own monuments. This could have been on anything they wanted. They just had to bear in mind when presenting their monuments the following key questions:

1. What is the purpose of the memorial?
2. What is its audience? (who will visit it?)
3. Why is this event / person being remembered?
4. What would you like people to feel when they see your monument?

I had learned about this activity when attending Facing History’s international seminar in London, Holocaust and Human Behaviour.

Whilst completing this task we had our first major breakthrough. Unbeknownst to me at the time I had asked two girls to work together who had been experiencing some difficulties back home. It transpired they had been involved in a serious fight in a location notorious for sectarian problems, and there was a pending court case.

Though their relationship had been volatile up to this point, on this evening these two young women worked together in an amazingly effective way. Without any coaxing from me, they produced a mini-monument based around community reconciliation and friendship. In doing this they created space for dialogue for themselves. Both women challenged each other when applying the four central questions for their monument. They knew all too well about sectarian violence and bitterness. Through their work they managed to create a monument that challenged the other young women in the group to think critically about difference, and how creating a shared space can help to break down barriers of distrust and ignorance.

This positive level of work continued over the next few weeks. We examined monuments and commemorative murals in Northern Ireland that portrayed historical events, but whose sole intention was to instil fear into residents of the community or outsiders coming into them. It was during this time that one young woman designed her own mini-wall mural which would not only have been quite intimating to an outsider, but was also deeply personal to her. It was a picture of a gun with blood running out of it.

When presenting this mural, she opened up and shared an experience from her past that was both distressing and terrifying. She revealed to us she had been the victim of a sectarian shooting in her neighbourhood. She had been shot in the back when she was eleven years old. This had occurred during a loyalist paramilitary feud in Northern Ireland about ten years ago. A group of men came to her home intending to shoot another family member inside the house. They opened fire from outside, firing through the window. They missed their intended target and shot this young woman instead, a mere child at the time. She spent a long time in hospital and thankfully survived. The bullet is still inside her.

When telling this story she was both composed and detailed in her description. She displayed no bitterness or hatred. The group listened in silence as we were informed of this horrific and disturbing event, which was an all too familiar happening in Northern Ireland’s bloody past. Soon afterwards she told me that her experiences taking this class and using some of Facing History’s resources had helped revive her interest in history and had encouraged her to want to learn more.

This whole experience was a major revelation for me personally. I saw first-hand how many young people from deprived areas, which have been scarred by the sectarian conflict, leave school with pitiful knowledge of important national history. This kind of ignorance fuels the continuing sectarian spiral of fear and distrust that blights our country. Our school curriculum requires us to teach the period of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. But the conundrum remains: how do we do this properly and effectively? There is a dual narrative to our past, but that does not mean there should be a dual teaching strategy.

Facing History resources offers innovative ways to challenge students’ perceptions and beliefs about this period of history. It presents teachers with new lesson strategies that can help create a classroom environment of enquiry and dialogue rather than facts and revision. It is an invaluable resource and one I am privileged to be able to use.