Abstract
Northern Ireland after the 1998 Good Friday or Belfast Agreement has been diagnosed with a surfeit of memory and a lack of analysis, most recently by Cillian McGrattan, who suggests that the privileging of particular memorial narratives can engrain and strengthen communal division, particularly between Protestant/Unionist and Catholic/Nationalist groupings. Although the agreement established a devolved power-sharing government in an important move towards a post-conflict state, it is clear that the violence of the preceding years continues to unsettle and disrupt the present moment. This paper draws out the methodological and ethical debate over memory and community as it relates to the practice of oral history in Northern Ireland, particularly through McGrattan’s recent work on this topic. It will use as a case study the Prisons Memory Archive (PMA), a recently-launched multimedia storytelling and oral history project that collated memories from two prisons in use during the Northern Irish troubles, the Maze and Long Kesh Prison and Armagh Gaol. It will suggest that McGrattan’s critique, while useful, disregards some of the formal and methodological attempts of the PMA to disrupt binary identity narratives in Northern Ireland. Before moving into that debate, however, it will attempt to provide some context, firstly for the conflict in Northern Ireland generally and secondly for the relationship between oral history, community and religious identity as it has developed in the post-conflict state.