The Pave Project Report - Queen's University Belfast

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The PAVE Project Report
Early studies that showed the psychological impact of the Troubles were largely
ignored and at times their accuracy even questioned. For example, the study of
survivors of the Remembrance Day bomb in Enniskillen in 1987 (Curran, Bell,
Murray, Loughrey, Roddy, & Rocke, 1990) showed that, 6 months after the incident,
nearly 50% of people who had witnessed the bomb showed symptoms of posttraumatic
stress disorder (PTSD). Dillenburger (1992), in her study of long-term
traumatic bereavement, showed that by 1985 over two thirds of the widows in her
sample who had lost their husbands due to the Troubles suffered significant
psychological health problems, even 10 years after their loss. Regardless of this kind
of evidence being available, nothing much was done to help those who were most
severely affected by the trauma of the Troubles or to support the small number of
existing voluntary victims groups (Darby & Williamson, 1978)
However, with the beginning of the Peace Process in the mid-1990s, further research
confirmed significant long-term psychological suffering. For instance, the Cost of the
Troubles Study (COTTS; Fay, Morrissey, Smyth, & Wong, 1999) found that about
half of the sample reported that the Troubles had a significant impact on their lives
and presented symptoms of emotional distress, such as sleep disturbance (Smyth,
1997). In a study of relatives of those who died on Bloody Sunday in 1972, Hayes and
Campbell (2000) suggested that, even 25 years after the incident, there was a
relationship “between the general emotional health of this group and PTSD resulting
from the Bloody Sunday trauma” (p. 718). More recently, O’Reilly and Stevenson
(2003) pointed out that there is “a positive and graded relation between the extent to