narrative

Future Ireland / Unity: Telling a Different Story

Damien Mullan on November 3, 2018, 9:00 am

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“There was never any moment in our history when slavery was not a sleeping serpent. It lay coiled up under the table during the deliberations of the Constitutional Convention. Owing to the cotton gin it was more than half awake. Thereafter, it was on everyone’s mind though not always on his tongue.” – John Jay Chapman. THE QUESTION The ‘national question is insolvable’, according to Fintan O’Toole. What O’Toole is referring to is the prevalence of irritants and grievances, imagined …

Ireland needs new stories for a stable social compact in a protean digital era

Mick Fealty on August 21, 2017, 3:54 pm

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Good to see Fintan O’Toole dig a little deeper into the narratives which have helped construct Irish public life and, more importantly, sustain its public imagination and self-conception. This from the first in a series that assays some seriously under-regarded ground: …people do need a sense of collective purpose, a sense that there is something that they belong to and that belongs to them. All the evidence is that if one set of stories no longer makes sense, people do …

If Republicanism is running out of road, doesn’t it need a new narrative roadmap?

Mick Fealty on July 26, 2017, 1:34 pm

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As we get closer to family holidays, it gets harder to find anything coherent to write about when it comes to Northern Irish politics.[Columnists have to write to earn a dollar, you don’t! – Ed] Some are taking a quiet Twelfth as a good sign for the autumn. But as Steven Agnew pointed out at the John Hewitt Summer School, all urgency is draining from a set of talks with the ever expandable deadlines. That could make a restart unlikely. However …

“Perhaps it’s time to rethink toughness or at least detach it from hardness…”

Mick Fealty on September 3, 2016, 9:47 am

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Alex Kane talks about the role of Omerta in Sinn Fein’s success. It’s a pejorative description (in common usage) which ties the party to the Tony Soprano end of politics. So, the reasoning goes, there is no hope of clarity on the McKay-Bryson affair because everyone will stand to and keep quiet. But there’s another side to success in politics, and that’s an anchor in a shared common purpose. It applies to most successful political parties, Sinn Fein and the DUP …

On Peace Process™ narrative and how some injustices subconsciously disappear along with any sober consideration of the future…

Mick Fealty on July 10, 2016, 12:32 pm

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It’s fascinating how narrative works. It’s not just about storytelling (which the Greeks called diagesis), but the actions that give it substance and meaning, (or mimesis). It’s possible to understand stand most of the power plays in NI which often come over as puzzling cultural power plays in our local politics. So mimesis is Rosa Parks refusing to sit at the back of the bus, or Peter Thatchell performing a citizen’s arrest of Robert Mugabe. In each case the action …

The Legend of Enda of the (wild whild) Wesht…

Derek Mooney on October 30, 2015, 4:51 pm

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TALL TALES: Enda’s ‪#‎armygate‬ saga has had pundits of all hues falling over themselves to explain, or even excuse, how and why An Taoiseach went to a recent EPP gathering in Madrid and told a story about the Irish Defences Forces being on standby to protect ATMs back in 2012.

Shame, Guilt, Narrative and Twitter: “I mean just try to see it human, see it human…”

Mick Fealty on March 16, 2015, 10:43 am

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There was fascinating discussion on BBC Radio Four’s Start the Week, on the scaling of public shame. It should be available later today as a sound file. Core to the conversation is Jon Ronson, and the thesis in his latest book is that Twitter has taken shaming to an extravagant and social destructive extent. Despite advocating the positive use of public shaming (she gives a powerful example of it’s use in California to get tax refusers to cough up what …

Friday thread: “In this country we need to be extremely vigilant about the stories we choose to tell ourselves”

Mick Fealty on March 21, 2014, 12:50 pm

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So whilst we’ve been indulging in the usual northern recriminations over St Patricks Day, and getting hot under the collar over the Alliance Party Euro candidate making a pitch for the liberal nationalist vote, southern audiences were treated to some great content on St Paddy’s Day in We Need to Talk About Ireland. I was particularly struck by this contribution from the playwright Bryan Delaney on the critical importance of storytelling and why it matters to the future of Ireland: …

SF’s obscurantist use of ‘narrative’ and untying the knots in language to understand what is really being said…

Mick Fealty on March 18, 2014, 2:37 pm

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As mentioned at the time, Declan Kearney’s blog for the BelTel was remarkable for a number of reasons, not least that apparently disjunctured reference to ‘narrative’. Nowadays there are academics in place who study narrative not as part of literature, but as part of a separate study of how stories affect the way we perceive the world. Interestingly Dan Hodges recounts his first encounter with the phenomenon in New Labour: When I used to work for the Labour Party much of our time …

Zero sum narratives

Turgon on November 23, 2013, 8:03 pm

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The recent BBC documentary on The Disappeared has been picked over in detail. It is, however an example of the continuing “War of the Past” we have been having recently in Northern Ireland. Frequently this has been described as an attempt to create a “Narrative of the Past” in which case we seem to have a Zero Sum Narrative developing. The battles over these narratives seem analogous to trench warfare with attacks on the other side’s position being variously repulsed …

With all this regressive hyperbole about NI’s past, is it time for a new sustainable narrative?

Mick Fealty on October 28, 2013, 9:57 am

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Good piece from Tom Kelly in the Irish News this morning, which subtly identifies the problem with the exaggerated claims of recent stories in the media. At a time when voter registration is falling right across the board, it’s an impoverished narrative to be offering voters who are already switching off from Stormont in droves. He tops out his analysis with a reference to the enormously useful pre publicity Gerry Kelly’s been getting on the 1983 break out from the Maze …

Irish Coalition needs a political story that matches their actual efforts

Mick Fealty on December 20, 2012, 6:58 pm

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Brendan Keenan has clearly been cogitating on our quaint northern mess we call politics, and it takes him back to stories, narrative and selling your own (albeit austerity locked) virtues: The story which the Coalition set out to tell – most of which it inherited from the previous government – is no longer true. The facts have changed. Keynes observed that when this happens you must change your mind. But you must also change your story. The original story called …

Does ‘FOI’ privilege the contingency of ‘now’ over a ‘complete record’ in the future?

Mick Fealty on June 2, 2010, 11:45 am

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There is a fascinating exchange (transcript below) on the BBC Radio 4 PM programme last night between the historian Anthony Beevor, and Open Democracy’s Anthony Barnett. It arose out Beevor’s rather feisty remarks at the Hay Festival in which he noted: …with journalists wanting to write history on the hoof there is a tremendous pressure on people wanting to protect themselves and their reputations for the future; and they are weeding out information before it gets to the archive, or …