Transitional Justice and Legacies of State Violence by Lisa White

Author:Lisa White [White, Lisa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Criminology
ISBN: 9781135981174
Google: gAXwBgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-03-05T05:58:43+00:00

Propaganda and Republicanism

Narrative testimonies exert a social pressure on their audiences in subtle and sophisticated ways. For example, an article about experiences of British State brutality need not make an overt appeal for support for Irish Republicanism, yet that support may still arise as a consequence. The extensive and detailed allegations of British State violence experienced during internment raids in 1971 may have provided the IRA with an effective recruiting tool, which was somewhat sarcastically acknowledged by the movement itself: ‘The Republican Movement in Belfast extends to her Majesty’s forces their heartfelt thanks for the magnificent recruiting drive that they have held on our behalf’ (Republican News 9 October 1971 in Wright 1990: 36; see also Lasmar and Oliver 1998). In addition, An Phoblacht actively encouraged its readers to write in with allegations of state violence and abuse, reminding its audiences that:

vague, generalised complaints about brutality or harassment and optimistic appeals for justice are no use to us or to you. The blunt facts stated tersely are far more valuable.

(An Phoblacht 11 January 1978)

On the occasions where events and their testimonies were deemed inadequate in persuading a Republican audience to show active support for the cause and its means, An Phoblacht’s readership was informed that they should ‘act now to save H-Block and Armagh lives.… Act now. That is your duty’ (An Phoblacht 11 January 1978). Such emotionally coercive pronouncements may have lacked the subtlety and sophistication of former detainees’ narrative testimony alone, yet they still fit clearly within the framework of ‘agitative propaganda’ as defined by Jowett and O’Donnell (1999). When publicised by such organisations amongst a coherent and constant narrative of state violence, these accounts were a method through which the Republican movement could develop, helped by the violent and ‘ill-conceived’ action of the British Army and RUC (Feeney 2002: 261). Informed by the experience of internment, in 1973, a formal ‘Republican Press Centre’ opened in Belfast in order to increase the communication emanating from the movement. However, the collection of narratives of state violence could also have a further purpose, one linked to the operation of the IRA as a military organisation. The detailed recollections of former detainees could have been collected and used by the movement to formulate detailed anti-interrogation strategies. Yet Tommy suggests:

The IRA had no conception whatsoever of what was happening in Castlereagh. They had publicised it many times in the paper, but the IRA Command didn’t understand what was happening in the torture zones.

In this way, the narrative testimonies of Tommy and others subjected to interrogation could have acted as illustrative examples to educate and prepare people about the possible treatment captured detainees could expect to face, but they failed to do so. Coogan (2000) claims that most IRA members were largely unprepared for the possible brutality of the RUC and other State forces, particularly within the closed and confined spaces of the detention systems of Castlereagh Holding Centre. Like Tommy, he argued that ‘The Green Book1 lectures understate the horror which lies in store for a captured IRA man (sic)’ (Coogan 2000: 560, emphasis in original).

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