Democratic disruption: Ireland's colonial hangover

The legacy of colonialism continues in Ireland, where the structures of inequality continue to play out and disrupt democratic processes. Professor Bill Rolston looks at Ireland’s past and present-day legacy of colonialism and its parallels with other post-colonial nations

The Troubles: five historical back stories

This year much has been made of the fiftieth anniversary of the start of ‘the troubles’. These fifty years are bookended by two events involving an organisation known as the Apprentice Boys. To understand the intricacies of what happened and the current politics of Ireland, Professor Bill Rolston looks at five historical ‘back stories’, essential elements of the full story as part of the Gender, Justice and Security Hub research

Control of tansy ragwort in western Oregon pastures with 2,4-D

Published January 1978. Facts and recommendations in this publication may no longer be valid. Please look for up-to-date information in the OSU Extension Catalog: http://extension.oregonstate.edu/catalo

Contemporary Art and Transitional Justice in Northern Ireland: The Consolation of Form

Abstract Contemporary artworks in Northern Ireland are explored here as critical constellations, in Walter Benjamin’s sense, that engage the cultural processes of transition through their problematisation of it. It is argued that the artworks become sites in which the assumptions of transition are opened up for critical reflection, requesting attention to the foreclosing of the meanings of memory, of past-and-future, of community. A mode of critical questioning of the present renders the present problematic not in terms of exclusions nor with reference to a past that cannot or will not be erased, but in terms of the present’s inability to be conceived through a linear conception of time. That is, the past and its relation to both the present and to the future are set in oscillation as artworks explore the complex temporalities of a present self-consciously attempting to narrate itself away from the past. The artworks, ‘without the bigotry of conviction’ as Seamus Deane put it, suggest that the task of dealing with the past is flawed wherever the past is conceived as a history that can be rendered present to be judged by subjects who are thereby placed beyond it. That is the illusion of a present ‘no-time’ that dovetails with the desires of commercial enterprise and neo-liberal conceptions of freedom. If this suggests an unceasing restlessness, the consolation is that this questioning does take a form, not as judgement or political decision but as artworks which by definition, remain open to reinterpretation and new understandings. These issues are discussed with reference to the work of four artists in Northern Ireland: the paintings of Rita Duffy, the photography and installation work of Anthony Haughey, and the sculptural works of Philip Napier and Mike Hogg

‘Trying to reach the future through the past’: murals and commemoration in Northern Ireland

Ireland is sometimes said to be cursed with a surfeit of history; memory is seen as one of the principal causes of an endless cycle of violence. In contrast, this article focuses on collective memory and examines the way in which this was drawn on as a resource by republican and loyalist communities in terms of identity and endurance during almost four decades of conflict. These identities were displayed in various commemorations and symbols, including wall murals. During the peace process these murals have been judged officially to be anachronistic, leading to a recent government-funded scheme to remove them, the Reimaging Communities Programme. This article questions the political motivation of this programme. It considers the attempts by people in republican and loyalist areas to come to terms with the peace process by emphasizing traditional symbols of identity, while at the same time reinterpreting them for a new era. Symbols can be the bridge between the past and the future which makes the present tolerable. </jats:p