Introduction

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Melanie Swiatloch
report. This report was meant to clarify the exact circumstances of the events on
30 January 1972 that lead to the deaths of fourteen innocents as the examination
unfolded. Still this declaration of guilt does not mark the end of years of bloodshed.
“The absence of conflict at one point in time should not imply that this is a
permanent state of affairs,” A.M. Gallagher warned as well (9). On Saturday, 14
August 2010, according to national and international news a bomb exploded in a
residential area in Lurgan, Northern Ireland, injuring three children. It went off
during a Protestant parade. Another bomb in the same district luckily failed to
detonate. Although officially settled – the Provisional IRA was disbanded in 2006,
British military presence was ended and a power-sharing government has been
established in 2007 (Keating-Miller 58) – these incidents show that the Northern
Ireland conflict, also referred to as ‘the Troubles’, has not come to a final, peaceful
resolution yet. Although by far less severe than in the hottest phases of the 1970s
and 1980s, remnants of the old conflict are still up to date.
Many contemporary Northern Irish authors have been dealing with major and
minor effects the conflict has brought. Thousands of people saw their family and
friends die in bomb attacks planted by paramilitary groups, experienced tensions
between Catholics and Protestants and saw how prejudice and group belonging
reorganised whole neighbourhoods. These sides of the Troubles are focused on in
manifold ways, thereby showing different possible identities. In addition, attitudes
have changed during the course of the time. While authors of the 1920s and 1930s
put a stronger emphasis on nationalist aspects, authors of the 1980s and 1990s try
to give a larger picture of society and highlight the miseries of the conflict itself,
and not so much the struggle for independence. Eve Patten ascribes this change
to the emergence of a new generation.
In recent years, however, fiction from Northern Ireland has begun to
change dramatically. This is a manifestation, firstly, of the emergence of a
new generation of writers who have come of age since the beginning of the
Troubles and whose reconstructions of childhood experience effectively
undercut the moral baggage and creative paralysis of their predecessors.
Secondly, it marks the overdue exploitation of literary strategies such as
perspectivism, ambiguity and displacement which, though categorically
post-modern, may also be perceived as attributes of a sustained constitutional
and psychological identity crisis germane to any representations of a
contemporary Northern Irish self-image (Patten 129-130).
These new strategies necessary for the depiction of a Northern Irish identity she
talks of – perspectivism, ambiguity and displacement – are also made use of by the
authors talked about in this paper: Robert McLiam Wilson (Eureka Street), Deirdre
Madden (One by One in the Darkness), and Lucy Caldwell (Where They Were Missed).
Very different characters such as Protestant profit seekers, Catholic radicals or
people without a certain standpoint are given a voice here. The resulting multiper-