NI: Who Kills Who? The Social Construction of the N IrelandConflict
01 January 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.
What IIP did was collect information from newspapers and other sources on all the deaths, and to categorise each on the basis of a number of variable