"As If We Were Never Here"

We periodically offer talks on themes of public

and scholarly interest and this year we continue

broadcasting via Zoom and Facebook. Our talks

are also available for viewing after the events

through our website and Facebook page. My

name is Laurie Kain Hart and I am Professor

of Anthropology and Global Studies at UCLA and

Director of the Center. I want to warmly thank

our co-sponsors for today's talk, the Department

of Anthropology, and specifically the interest

groups: CPSC - Culture, Power, and Social Change,

and MMAC - Mind, Medicine, and Culture, and give

a shout out too to the Center for Social Medicine

at the Semel Institute. Welcome to those audiences

joining us and thank you also to our staff

Liana Grancea and our new addition Lenka Unge.

The center's primary aim is to support and

disseminate faculty and student research in

our regions of interest and each quarter of the

academic year we celebrate in our talk series

a recipient of CERS funding, a UCLA current or

former graduate student. And today our speaker

is Dr. Matthew McCoy who earned his doctorate in

anthropology in 2020 focusing on Northern Ireland.

Dr. McCoy is currently a medical and psychological

anthropologist at the Center for the Study

of Healthcare Innovation, Implementation

and Policy at the VA Greater Los Angeles.

He's also an implementation scientist

at the UCLA Center for Health Services

and Society. And I'm really thrilled to welcome

Matthew whose work I have been following with

admiration since his student days when I had the

occasion to read and hear presentations

of his incredible evolving fieldwork.

As you'll see, his work offers a compelling

synthesis of political and historical scope and

insight with psycho-social analysis that brings us

truly close to the struggles of his interlocutors.

The work you'll hear today is from his current

book project "All Will Have Been for Nothing:

The Consolation of Pessimism and the Ethics

of Futility in Belfast." The book is based

on ethnographic research conducted with current

and former paramilitary members, ex-combatants,

conflict victims and residents of Irish republican

and loyalists social housing estates in Belfast,

Northern Ireland. And it combines existential and

psychoanalytic approaches to social suffering.

I will also note Dr. McCoy's current

research on gravely disabled homelessness

and outpatient conservatorship in Los

Angeles County and on experiences of trauma,

racial and ethnic disparities

in health care, substance abuse,

suicide trauma and homelessness among us military

veterans. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Dr. McCoy

has been researching a novel, safe camping

site for veterans experiencing homelessness

built on the grounds of the West

Los Angeles VA Medical Center.

He was recently awarded a major grant from

the VA National Center of Homelessness Among

Veterans as the principal investigator

to continue this research. And all of

you who live in LA will know how incredibly

important this is and that yesterday some of the

encampment that was outside the balance of the

VA Medical Center has been incorporated into it.

Really important move. Please feel free

to put your questions in the Q&A at any

time and we will post them to Dr. McCoy at the end of the talk.

So with that, let's warmly welcome Dr. Matthew McCoy

for his talk "As If We Were Never Here:" Political

Betrayal, Cultural Pessimism and the Disappearance

of Loyalists in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Matthew.

Great, thank you and hello everyone! Thank you

for attending today. Thank you to the Center for

European and Russian Studies, and especially Laurie

Hart and Liana Grancea for helping to organize

today's event and for giving me the opportunity

to revisit my dissertation research.

During the course of my

doctoral studies, the Center

generously and regularly funded my research and

I remained very appreciative of this support.

And thank you, of course, to the UCLA Department of

Anthropology for co-sponsoring this presentation.

So I dare not presume that everyone

today is familiar with the national status of

Northern Ireland, so here are some maps of Northern

Ireland, which just celebrated its 100th birthday

in May. As you will notice to the map on the right,

Northern Ireland appears to be part of the United

Kingdom, like Scotland, Wales and, of course, England.

These three countries constitute Great Britain.

Now, Northern Ireland is separated

from Great Britain by the Irish Sea.

For Irish republicans, Northern Ireland, however,

is a colonial name and they consider this place to be

the occupied six counties that should be

reunited with the rest of Ireland, sort of

the subject of my presentation today,

Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom.

Full stop. Some loyalists prefer to call Northern

Ireland the Country of Ulster after the name of

the historical province in which it resides.

Now, political scientists have been publishing

papers on what Northern Ireland is and is not

for a very long time. It's not really a province,

some political scientists call it a quasi-state, but no one really knows what that means. The

famed Irish political scientist Brendan O'Leary

who stringently sticks to usages found in

formal agreements and treatises declares

that the two states that share the island of

Ireland are the United Kingdom of Great Britain

and Northern Ireland. Now, this to me is rather

confusing. It seems like a few too many political

entities jammed into one state. Nonetheless,

the status of Northern Ireland matters at

this current moment because Northern Ireland

shares a land border with an EU member state,

the Republic of Ireland. And the governmental

structure of Northern Ireland came

into place only with the formal backing of the

republic as part of a 1998 Belfast Good Friday

Peace Agreement. The Northern Irish Assembly is

a power sharing legislation between Irish

nationalist or republican political parties, and

pro-UK unionist or loyalist political parties.

After 1998, the political wings of oppositional,

paramilitary organizations now found themselves

legitimized and would subsequently find themselves

sharing power with each other. This peace agreement,

voted on by the majority of people in Northern

Ireland ended a 30-year long conflict, armed

conflict called the troubles between three main

actors: Irish republican paramilitaries, loyalist

paramilitaries, and the British Army. Since 1998

the British army has mostly demilitarized Northern

Ireland, including the border regions. The peace

agreement established the Republic of Ireland

stake in the future of Northern Ireland, while

Northern Ireland remained part of the United

Kingdom unless a majority of their people voted

in a referendum to reunite with the republic,

or to unite with the republic. There are a whole

lot of things that Northern Ireland cannot do

without the Republic of Ireland's input because

of the peace agreement. And one of the things

that cannot be done is the placement

of a hard border between North and South.

Lest we forget what borders can look like,

here are some images taken in 1996 by the

great Irish photographer Frankie Quinn. You will

notice fortified British army watch towers

and helicopters, and you will see a protest of

Irishman at a British army spy post on

the top of a mountain in South Armagh breaking

through the concertina wire fence with an

Irish tricolor in hand. At one time in the not so

distant past, this border was bombed and bloodied.

Like on other national borders, many vibrant lives

were lost here. Today, of course, there is no border

and residents in Northern Ireland can claim

Irish status with an Irish passport if they so

choose - again, as part of the peace agreement.

Talk of borders on the island, however, is in

the news again and this time it has to do with

the 2016 withdrawal of the United Kingdom from

the EU, known as the Brexit. And the future of Northern Ireland is being questioned again.

And for the rest of this presentation I will

focus on one group in Northern Ireland, that

derives its way

of life from its British identity. I speak of

course of loyalists, those historically

ardent defenders of the union,

whose paramilitaries once fought against

the IRA and other republican paramilitaries

in defense of Northern Ireland and the union.

They are often seen as distinct from what are

called unionists who simply politically

support remaining in the United Kingdom.

And here are some of the more fearsome

loyalists I came across during my fieldwork.

Now, as it pertains to my fieldwork,

which I conducted with both a loyalist and a republican community, social housing community,

during a 17-month period of research from 2015 to

over the phone and video calls to this day.

On the map to the right in front of you, that

hastily drawn green highlights

represent a series of walls that segregates the

two communities which I

studied. The Irish republican or catholic community

is surrounded by peace walls. There it's considered

an enclave, while on the other side of the wall

is the loyalist community called the Inner East.

Here are some ground images. This is from

the catholic or Irish republican side

of my field site and the second is from the

backyard of one of my loyalist participants.

So in March 2020, the Loyalist Communities Council

with representatives of the three main loyalist

paramilitary organizations, including the Ulster

Defense Association, the Ulster Volunteer Force,

and the Red Hand Commandos wrote to Prime

Minister Boris Johnson to withdraw support for

the Good Friday Agreement because they believe the

agreement was leading to an all-economic Ireland

which was one step away from a United Ireland. In

the loyalist communities where banners like this

were erected, the walls were also splashed with

graffiti that read "No Irish Sea Water".

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the conservative

government, the Tories of Boris Johnson, was

attempting to finalize Brexit negotiations. As part

of the withdrawal agreement, the Northern Ireland

protocol would place a de facto border on the

Irish Sea between Ireland and the United Kingdom.

Northern Ireland would remain part of the UK's

customs territory, but to avoid that hard border

between North and South, this protocol would

keep EU single market regulations on goods

in Northern Ireland. So across from the Irish Sea

from Great Britain, Northern Ireland would be an

entry point into the EU Customs Union. So rather

than a hard border on land, scenario recalling the

once militarized zone of the troubles, Johnson's

government instead chose a path that would

infuriate pro-British loyalists who quite clearly

define themselves by their intense Britishness

in opposition to any sort of Irish unity. Johnson

had even once said, in August 2020, there will be

no border down the Irish Sea over my dead body and

so the betrayal, the sense of betrayal, was palpable.

Believing the peace agreement was now a hindrance

to remaining part of the United Kingdom prominent

loyalists now called to abandon it. As one

prominent loyalist Jamie Bryson

said during the pandemic, you cannot be

pro-Belfast agreement and a unionist

because the agreement is designed to end the union.

And he said it is patently obvious that all

the organs of society, both political and civic,

in Northern Ireland have trained their armory

on further assisting in the eradication of the

PUL protestant unionist loyalist culture.

Now, in April 2021 the Belfast riots made

headlines for prominent media outlets

seemingly eager to create a narrative link

between past and present. On Good Friday, April 2nd,

loyalist riot spread to Belfast's loyalist Sandy

Row Community near the downtown of the city.

Loyalists pelted the police with all manners of

crude implements, caught buses and cars on fire and

in general took to the street in protest. And then

on April 7th these iconic images posted around

social media. Mostly young loyalist men ages 14 or

zipped up in North Face or down jackets past

of their noses, tightened hoods over their heads

in turn waited to toss petrol bombs and fireworks

over the Lanark Way Peace Wall segregating

historically loyalists and republican communities.

Amid this loud and blazing spectacle with pools of

fire lighting the blacktop underneath them,

and dazzling fireworks arcing above them,

these hooded initiates revealed

a deep history to their live choreography,

the delicate lighting and sprinting and

pitching of petrol bombs over the walls,

like their brothers, their older brothers, fathers

and grandfathers, a predominantly patriarchal

line of sectarian rioting stretching back to at

least the 18th century on the streets of Belfast.

However, these ritualized acts

are not so easily subsumed

under the historical narrative of loyalism or

of Northern Ireland as caught in a perpetual

sectarian battle with intractable identities,

histories or an ancient escalian blood feud.

Narratives about Northern Ireland, especially

about loyalists, too often cohere around the notion

that violence, hatred and sectarian mindsets

from the past continue to haunt the present.

As will be recounted later in my presentation,

historical events do provide much cultural

material for loyalists to shape their experiential

world, their mourning practices, their political

activism, and to cope with loss, but this by no

means relegates loyalists as behind the times, as

blinkered so thoroughly that they can't see

the present and future possibilities clearly.

If anything, loyalists have a keen understanding

of the rhythms of time. If they are haunted, it is

a haunting that responds to the present and future

conditions of Northern Ireland as much as the past.

One of my loyalist participants I interviewed

told me about how loyalist communities had

been disempowered since the peace agreement.

My participant was in his late 40s, a community

worker, and associated with an East Belfast branch

of the Ulster Defense Association. Again, a

loyalist paramilitary, he describes his view

on how loyalists have unwittingly entered into a

process of marginalization by the peace process. We

aren't at the table, he says. There's no space for

us at the table. There's no one who is creating

a space for loyalism at the table. And whenever

someone comes like myself to represent loyalism,

that's what happens to them, that is they become

disempowered and scapegoated. Myself, various

other leaders from loyalist community,

that's what happens... It comes in cycles.

It comes in cycles and we believe, you know,

the government has been using community

development as a tool to bring communities

on board one at a time. Take them through a

process of community development, disempower the

military side of things, you know what I mean.

I've analyzed the cycle. Last around eight

years and loyalists are decimated now as far as

community leaders and playing a positive role. They

are demoralized, their leaders have been demonized...

He then says that this cycle of disempowerment

along with discussions of creating an all-economic

Ireland have finally created the

conditions for a united Ireland.

You wouldn't trust a Tory if you brought one

up yourself. Westminster wants to hand Northern

Ireland back. They want to hand Northern Ireland

back. That's a given. Northern Ireland has served

its purpose. It has no financial benefit for

mainland Great Britain. We're costing

them billions and billions of pounds every year.

They want to hand Northern Ireland back and this

is part of the exit strategy. All disempowering

unionists and loyalists and marginalizing them

while empowering republicanism. If I'm reported

on in the press, I'm reported as a loyalist,

murderer, a loyalist terrorist. And republicans are

republicans just. And that's it. There's a totally

different narrative when they're reported about

in the press and we're seeing that on a daily

basis. And that's all part of the exit strategy to

facilitate the republican agenda here in Northern

Ireland, and to ease out quickly, to slip out

quietly. We would have a federal all Ireland

via the EU by default and that would be the

forerunner for a United Ireland. A blind man on

a galloping horse could see it. So this is a common

sentiment repeated by various factions in loyalist

communities, who believe that the peace agreement

was meant to undermine the social structures of

loyalist communities, including the paramilitary

organizations. Sentiments, like my participants, are

often seen as overly conspiratorial by politicians,

the media and academics. And to be sure it does

seem reasonable for a peace process to want to

transition away from paramilitary organizations,

I do want to make the claim, however, that loyalist

susceptibility to the belief that politicians

and that dreaded mainstream media are out

to get them are not simply conspiratorial.

Loyalists, I claim, can teach us about

grief, about obsession in the face of death,

of the death of loved ones, and yes about

conspiratorial thinking that comes to fill

the void left by unspeakable personal and

cultural losses. These losses are as much

in the future as they are in about the past for

loyalists they must face this void, this emptiness

enveloping the right way of life. That

has given rise to a cultural pessimism.

The optimistic hopes of peace and prosperity

promised by peace agreements have been replaced

by what the cultural theorist Mark Fisher

calls the slow cancellation of the future.

The unquestioned belief that things will get

materially and spiritually better is challenged

by loyalists and this is seen most clearly in

how they, many young loyalists, refer to themselves. They refer to themselves as scum. Scum, in my

view, are the great truth tellers revealing the

faltering social political and economic structures.

Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, a great feminist

Marxist and civil rights champion in Northern

Ireland, speaks poignantly about her outreach work

with loyalists. She says

loyalist's hallmark is that it represents the poor,

loyalists or working class, or unemployed,

as the American system disgracefully

refers to some of its poorest people as white

trash, loyalists are perceived within British

nationalism as an underclass. Many from loyalist

communities have internalized that themselves.

When I first work with people from that background,

I'm often surprised that they will

set on the table first - okay, we know we are

no good, we know we are scum. Many young loyalists

have given up on the future. They have been decried

by authorities as engaging in anti-social behavior

often simply by congregating together in

groups. And to be sure young loyalists engage

in routine rioting with young Catholics or Irish

republicans often just to pass the time

they also engage in a practice known as death

driving, speeding recklessly in often stolen

cars, and destroying them or setting them ablaze.

More seriously and widespread, young loyalists are

engaging in what locals call death dealing,

which is dealing illegal and prescription drugs.

Relatedly, becoming a zombie is a popular pastime. You can become a zombie by ingesting

Lyrica, which is an anti-seizure medication, along

with other tablets or laced substances

to rid the mind and body of thought and

feeling. During the coronavirus pandemic,

counterfeit benzodiazepines with fentanyl

skyrocketed in popularity in these communities.

This contributes to what the psychoanalyst

Christopher Bollas calls subjecticide -

when psychic activities, the flow of

internal time, and the awareness of stable

objects necessary to have an experience

become subdued, if not completely suppressed.

Becoming a zombie as subjecticide is the removal

of what we commonly call personal subjectivity.

Now, things were supposed to be different

for this post-agreement generation.

In 1998, the UK Prime Minister Tony Blair said of

the Belfast Peace Agreement that it would usher in

a peaceful and stable future, a well of

economic goodwill and potential inward

investment out there just waiting for the

right opportunity in the right conditions.

And this promise, this contract, loyalists

argue, has been broken time and time again.

As soon as the institutions of the 1998 peace

agreement were underway, a narrative of shared

economic development attempted to take hold.

This narrative elided the unequal distribution

of poverty and violence before, during and after

the conflict. The common discourse holds that the

troubles affected everyone, but this disregards

that half of the fatalities occurred in just

sociologist of Ireland Colin Coulter reminds us

that what these dozen neighborhoods share in

common was that they were as they remain - sites

of grinding, multi-generational poverty. The

promise of American investment and sustained

peace gave rise to the momentary fantasy

of widespread healing through well-paid

employment. What the Irish scholar David Lloyd

calls therapeutic modernity.

Now, the material effects of development have

led to some new, mostly middle-class industries,

low-paying retail, employment opportunities for

the poorer classes, and the partial integration

of traditionally sectarian realms like the civil

and police services. However 23% of working age

adults in Northern Ireland are on some form of

unemployment or simply what is categorized as

inactivity, compared to 13% in Great Britain. At least

form of conflict-related trauma and this number

is over 15 in working class areas, like the Short

Strand or the Inner East. Northern Ireland has the

highest rate of PTSD in any of the 28 countries

that participated in the World Mental Health

Survey. And Northern Ireland's 2000 rate of 18.6

suicides per thousand people is the highest in

the European Union. If Northern Ireland were in

fact its own country, it would rank among the top

And though there is often rhetoric about being

stuck in the past, the fact remains there have been

no South African style truth and reconciliation

committees, and thousands of people never had the

chance to know what really happened to

the loved ones lost during the conflict.

Returning to the issue of suicide, one of my

participants is particularly haunted nightly

by a river just off of her flat, the balcony of

her flat. She has had to call first responders

multiple times after seeing young people jump

into the river Lagan, that borders East Belfast,

over the past few years. It's become more and more

common way for young people to commit suicide.

On the weekend a rescue boat sits and waits, and

the water is in preparation for pulling jumpers

out of the water. And these images are of

the bridge memorials to those who were

not pulled out of the water. They began cropping

up on the bridges during my field work.

Despite these structurally violent conditions,

many continued to declare that loyalists are

stuck in the past fighting with ghosts

and shadows after the riots of April 2021.

An opinion column appeared in the Guardian

penned by a prominent writer, aligned with this

past as haunting narrative. She ended with a call

to banish old ghosts full of grievance and rage.

The moralizing tone of this piece is endemic to

discourses about loyalism and often republicanism,

too, especially this post-agreement generation.

Those coming of age are born after the 1998

peace agreement. Yet the loyalists I work with are

subjected to the experiences of crumbling social

life lived under the emotional manipulation of

contemporary economic systems described by Lauren

Berlant, that on the one hand promote possibilities

for good life fantasies, while on the other employ

austerity economics that devastate social services,

and well-paying jobs necessary for meeting basic

needs. Cruel optimism, as she famously calls, it

is structured by an effective configuration

about the good life within the nation that

cannot be attained as more people become

expendable during the forward market progress.

Indeed, loyalists are told to embrace the future

which will release them from their subjugation to

grievances and sectarian culture.

They are asked to embrace what Mary Nancy Frazier

calls neo-liberal progressive morality that shames

ways of life like those of the loyalists, while

implementing the destructive and deregulating

economies that disallow

economic and social stability.

Indeed, loyalists are often called and call

themselves bitter. And as one of my loyalist

participants says of a young loyalist rioter, there

was a wee 14-year old, full on bitter, hateful wee

shite. He wouldn't have a single clue about the

troubles, but the bitterness was well bred into him.

Now bitterness is by no means a new mood in

Belfast. Bitterness is historically meant a

mood for those who harbor sectarian hatreds

against Catholics or Irish republicans.

However, I believe that bitterness has changed

for the post-agreement generation.I believe

that bitterness has become the moral mood

of a cultural pessimism and it has come to

mean something close to what the philosopher

Eugene Thacker calls spite. Thacker says that spite

is the motor of pessimism because it is

so egalitarian, so expansive, it runs amok.

Loyalists, quite flatly, say no to

the future they know will soon come.

The loyalist no draws upon a phrase of

resistance "Ulster says no", uttered over the

decades and speeches blazing on banners

anytime politicians attempt to close

the political economic or cultural gap between

Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland.

And this no is indeed uttered locally and

situationally against certain discourses

of progress that rhetorically at least seek to

erase the loyalist project and their way of life.

But at other times, the force of the

utterance lends the categorical no

towards everything and everyone and this

is a more deeply pessimistic no. Loyalists

with whom I worked in Belfast often

live as if the world had already ended.

Woody, one of my key post-agreement,

loyalist participants in his late 20s

tells me that the political enemies of

loyalists want to proceed as if we were never

here. Now I found this to be one of the eerie

statements I heard during my field work.

As if we were never here. It's not just that Woody

felt that those in authority, and of course the

mainstream media, wanted loyalists to change or

shift their thoughts and beliefs. He believed that

those in power wanted to proceed as if loyalists

never had any existence whatsoever in Ireland.

In this way, loyalists like Woody who say

no, are saying that things are not okay

and that things are going to get worse for them.

Woody believes that he and his way of life are

becoming more and more irreal, or as if

he himself was an accident who should have never

been here in the first place. For the rest of my

presentation I will present a person-centered

ethnography of Woody from June 16th as he tries

to organize a loyalist commemoration of the

Centenary of the Battle of the Somme on July

battles of World War I. The commemoration

is one of his last outreach efforts to young

people in the inner East loyalist community. As his

non-profit organization had lost its funding and

he had been working without pay for several months,

Woody, a self-taught carpenter, planned a

meticulous transformation of a local street,

called Tower Street in the inner East. He renamed

the street Ulster Tower Street. Now Ulster Tower

borrows its inspiration from the actual

Ulster Tower in Thiepval, France,

that commemorates the 36th Ulster Division and their

sacrifice during World War I. Many soldiers from

East Belfast lost their lives in this

particular battle and during World War I.

Now on the morning of June 24th, 2016, the day

after the United Kingdom voted to leave the

European Union, Woody was busily working

on the commemoration. He admitted to me and one

of his diehard, pro-Brexit friends that he

didn't bother voting. He was simply too busy.

His friend was wearing Union Jack socks and

cursed him out for several good minutes for not

voting. As is well known, the United Kingdom voted

to leave the EU 52 to 48 percent, though Northern Ireland

voted to remain 56 to 44 percent. However,

in the voting award of Belfast East,

where I worked, the

majority 51 to 49 percent voted to leave the EU.

Most loyalists were pro-Brexit while

most Irish republicans were pro-remain.

On tower street that day however,

there was little talk about the vote

while the successful outcome of the Brexit

referendum was greed with some guarded

enthusiasm within the loyalist inner East

community, this commemoration took precedence.

The commemoration preparations took

precedence. When I asked residents about the

Brexit, I discovered that they had a muted

reaction. Now quite prescient that stemmed

from a deeply ingrained fear that loyalists

would be forgotten by Westminster politicians.

And anyway their sandbags of jute and hassian

needed to be filled for the final push over the

trenches. There was simply a lot left to do.

Locals were painting posters, fitting period

costumes, raising flags and bunting,

and transforming their street into the trenches.

Woody had been spending most of the day in

this office, which is a repurposed building

just up from Tower Street. It housed his non-profit

organization which was tasked with running youth

programs targeted towards hard to reach protestant

or loyalist young men and women ages 6 to 25.

In the wall across from the window in his office

were numerous awards and photographs, including

one of Prince Charles glad-handing with local

residents. Rising from the floor in the office

was an easel that had all the schematics for

transforming Tower Street into Ulster Tower Street.

Today Woody was eagerly reading aloud to me the

final draft of a street play he finished composing.

For each character in this play, he voices

individual dialogue and inhabits each unique

persona. And his reading really gripped my

attention. I imagined he would find easy work

as an actor. He had gravitas and good looks and

a disarming earnestness, contiguous

with his tattoos. His newest ink in fact was

still red and puffy on the back of his hand,

a clock with roman numerals. The hands

marked the precise moment he met his fiancée.

Now his historical play was about

two real brothers from the inner East,

Paul and Damian. They are in the early

the trenches during the Battle of the Somme

in 1916. And Woody's plan was for the young

people in the inner East to act out

this play during the commemoration.

I want to summarize the play, that what he read

aloud to me, and then explain how I started to

understand this play not necessarily as the

glorification of nationalistic sacrifices

of British soldiers for the United

Kingdom. I've come to see Woody's

eerie play as demonstrating the kind of

cultural pessimism I've been speaking about in the

face of losing loved ones, cultural devastation

and the disappearance of loyalists in Belfast.

In the first scene of Woody's play,

Paul convinces his younger brother

Damien to enlist in the army with him. Damien

is very fearful and he doesn't want to enlist

but finds himself coerced by his brother. As

the play progresses, Damien whom Paul calls an

empty head becomes more and more worried

about the trenches. For Paul war represents

the adventurous possibilities of finally leaving

Belfast and seeing the world beyond. Damien, however,

worries about leaving home and most of all he's

terrified of the stories he's heard from the front.

The tension between the two brothers builds

throughout each play of the scene: waiting

in the queue to enlist, finally enlisting face

to face with the sergeant arriving in France,

marching onto the battlefield, and then finally

engaging in battle around the river Somme.

Paul's romanticism continues to conflict with

Damien's realism and Damien begins

to question more insistently his decision to

enlist. Finally, on the morning of July 1, 1916

the two boys are sent headlong into the

maelstrom. Together the brothers rush over the

trenches and artillery shells begin to fire, to

fall. As gunfire seems to come from all sides

Paul is the first to get hit through his left

thigh from a German rifle round, fracturing his

tibia. He is rendered immobile waiting for help

to arrive. Damien however continues to advance

and within Paul's line of sight he can see his

brother's fate. I want to read from the end of

Woody's play. The narrator says: Lying waiting

on help Paul could see his brother advance,

watching on he heard the whistle of a German

shell and right before his eyes it fell where

where his brother stood. Paul says: Dee Dee. No,

my brother, please no. The narrator says: While

Paul was being tended to at the dressing station

his brother Damien was not so lucky. The shell

slammed into the position he stood, leaving no

trace of him when they went to recover his body.

And the narrator continues: The nurse never found

Damien as his body was never recovered from no

man's land, one of the brave men and women that

paid the ultimate sacrifice in the great war.

Paul recovered from his injuries and went back

to fight on the front line in the battle of

Combrai in 1917, but when the cold of winter struck,

it affected his wound and was extracted from the

line duties. In January 1918

he enlisted in the labor corps as he was unfit

for front line duties. Paul returned home to

Belfast after being discharged in March 1919.

He enlisted a healthy man along with his

brother to go on an adventure, to see the world.

Little did he know he would return with a terrible

leg injury and without his younger brother.

And the flute plays Abide with Me. Paul had called

Damien an empty head earlier in the

play and this has now been transformed to sheer

emptiness, leaving no trace of him. A negative space.

It is as if Damien had never existed. Paul

returns to Belfast with wounded body and without

his brother. Not even a corpse that would allow a

sight for grieving. This is the future that Damien

himself had worried about and in Damien's absence

the past becomes reconfigured for

Paul. Though he returned home, his world had been

shattered. Paul wanted to see the world, expand

his possibilities and this future took so much

from him. Now Woody reads this epilogue by the

narrator with extreme solemnity and the drama

ends on an uncomfortable and ambivalent note.

What Ulster has sacrificed after all often leaves

no trace just like soldiers,

like Damien used his fodder during World Wars or

those lost during the troubles. But also

those losses occurring with startling

frequency in working class areas like the

inner East since 1998, Northern Ireland has lost

over 5,000 people to suicide and after getting to

know Woody's own path working with young

people, which he narrates as a kind of redemption

art from being a drug addict and involved with

paramilitaries at the age of 11 to finally

becoming a youth worker, I see echoes of Paul and

Paul's loss of Damien echoed in his own life.

Woody is often interrupted by what he calls

his sore stomach. This is an understatement

for the crippling pain that suddenly seizes him. In his stomach, he believes, he holds

his anxiety, depression and stress a remainder and

reminder of the damaged temporarity of redemption

arcs in Belfast. Though Woody likes to speak of

himself as overcoming his struggle, he admits this

is just for the appearance and this is just an

appearance for the sake of maintaining a positive

attitude for his three children and the youth that

he mentors. During the first months of knowing him,

Woody briefly alludes that the reason that he's

a community worker is because of the suicide

of his best friend when he was 14. Over time he

speaks more openly about the impact of this loss

on his life, an absence I can't help but compare to

Paul's loss of his brother Damien and Woody's play.

Woody says that he began drinking and using

drugs at age 11 which soon led into harder drugs

eventually anabolic steroids and

he began to incur drug debts from

local drug dealers. Drug dealers often operate

under paramilitary banners. They co-opt even

the traditional paramilitary style punishments

familiar to those who live through the

troubles. A common paramilitary punishment for

drug debt is kneecapping. Kneecapping

involves being taken from one's house and shot in

the knee. The victim, most often under the age of 18,

is usually resigned to this punishment and parents

must often negotiate for more lenient punishments.

Now as Woody narrates his time dodging his own

drug debts at 14, he tells me about how he lost

his best friend. He says:

basically got involved in drugs and obviously

got in debt with drugs. I'm a strong enough

person. I'm hard enough person to accept that.

I was anyway. He wasn't. We got ourselves into drug

debt. Anyway, to cut a long story short, my mate

hung himself. My mate hung himself. He couldn't deal

with the pressure of owing the paramilitary, so he

hung himself. Did you have any idea that was coming?

What kind of pressure did they put him under?

No, Woody says. And I'll tell you why I didn't

know that was coming. We had a sort of routine

so everybody met up at six o'clock. No sign of

Toby, so I tried phoning Toby, get ahold of Toby.

Toby's not answering. The phone kept trying and

trying. No answer. So I went and rapped his door.

Toby still wasn't answering, so we automatically

thought Toby had went home, got himself washed

and fell asleep and we couldn't get him up. Then I

got the phone call and it was his mom. And it was

his mum in hysterics and I says: What's wrong. Toby

hung himself. He's hung. He's hung. He's hung himself.

Woody delivers this hurried and disturbingly

reported speech from Toby's mother told him

merely moments after she found her son. After this,

Woody tells me, he became extremely sad and his

sore stomach became unbearable. After all Toby

and he were going to be there for each other.

And this is another example of what I call the

disappearance of loyalists in Belfast and also

what I think Woody means when he

says: As if we were never here. What remains

of Woody's cancelled future with Toby exists

in the excruciating pain of his sore stomach.

Woody says that he had no one

to depend on for help, for his depression.

And regarding this Woody reflects: I had to

look, sit myself down and go.You're sad because

you're going to end up like this. I struggled

for years after that with depression like.

I had another bad bout of depression around 25 as

well. Yet again, through illegal steroids. I

started using steroids and they didn't affect

me in any bad way, but when I

stopped taking steroids, I see myself

sort of losing size and losing muscle mass,

and I started getting depressed again then, too.

Woody then turn to youth work which he

realizes was a strange and perhaps disingenuous

decision, because as he said: a good portion

of youth work in Belfast is helping children

through their own depression. He says that helping

others are basically out teaching people how

to deal with these sorts of issues, how to deal

with their depression and what's

the best way to deal with it, and take time and

what to do. Now I was never doing that for myself.

This is a common contradiction among community and

youth workers in Belfast who must necessarily cope

with their own form of psychic wounds while

caring for others going through similar situations.

Woody knows that many of the children

faced pressures like he and Toby once did.

He knows that many of the boys and girls in the

inner East suffer from untold mental health issues

like him. And indeed, while working on the

commemoration, a local girl who was to participate

had been hospitalized due to complications from

an eating disorder. Woody felt deep empathy

for her situation. Woody had once developed what

he called a body image problem. For decades after

Toby's death, he told me quietly, he would look at

himself in the mirror and he would go: "You look

like nothing" to himself. Woody spoke of looking at

himself in the mirror this way quite a few times.

Looking at himself in the mirror was an

example of him at his most despairing

and I could not help but think of the scene from

Jean-Paul Sartre's Nausea when Roquentin looks in the

mirror and cannot recognize his own face. His face

loses meaning for him and he says of this nausea: I

felt it out there, everywhere around me. I am the

one who is within it. So too Woody's despairing

encounter with his face as nothing, extended

through his stomach to the characters in his

play, to the death of his best friend and the other

dead loyalists from past conflicts, or from suicide,

or from grinding poverty was mirrored there. For

Woody, the cultural script of loyalism stave off

this meaningless and senseless world where

he and loyalists are precisely nothing.

Woody's commemoration is a form of care

at the end of their world. And so for a few months

he tried to keep this nothing at bay and gave

the community in which he worked

something like a community spirit not defined by

negativity, and senselessness, and

sectarianism, but by a deep

and poetic meaningfulness.

During the early morning of July 1st, Woody and

his friend James dressed themselves in World War I

infantry costumes. By seven in the morning

the commemoration began. After checking the

smoke machine, microphone, speaker, along with

some impromptu horseplay with some of the

younger neighborhood boys who dressed as soldiers

pretended to engage in a rifle fight with Woody,

everyone is ready to begin. Teenage girls are

dressed as British Red Cross nurses and several

men are dressed in infantry uniforms. The crowd

count has reached around 100 people and this

number includes local politicians, and prominent

community workers, and paramilitary leaders.

The morning is at first sunny and bright

but minutes into the commemoration,

as is so often the case in a Northern

Irish summer, the winds pick up and blow a

darkening cloud over the performance. And the mood

becomes somber. And I sense people straightening

their backs and becoming more solemn and

grave. The commemoration begins with

a two-minute silence in front of a massive

Ulster Tower mural that Woody had painted.

It is a magnificent mural under which has been

affixed six plaques from those

residents from Tower Street who had

died during the Somme. A flutist breaks the

two-minute silence by performing an instrumental

version of Willie McBride, also known as No Man's

Land - a folk song about the gravestone of the

Ulster soldier killed during World War I.

Another local woman, Elizabeth, dressed in a

black morning dress and hat welcomes everyone.

She says: Welcome this early morning to

Ulster Tower Street, Belfast. We have come

together on this day, July 1st, 2016 to

remember and honor those who answered the call,

took up arms and fought in the name of

freedom. There are further narrations of

the song that morning and then Woody

plays sound effects from his laptop -

the whistling and crashing of artillery shells

blared from the speakers, the tattoo of rifle fire,

and then the Church of Ireland vicar takes

to the microphone and recites the Gospel of John.

Finally, several prominent loyalists lay wreaths

of intertwined crimson poppies at the base of

the mural. And then there is a bugle call. The

last post. And the commemoration is finished.

The event lasted about 30 minutes, then

neighbors lined the street with tables

and treats, two small merry-go-rounds among other

entertainment for children. The mood of the area

was of resolute pride. For most of the people

there on Tower Street this had come as a surprise,

a genuine shock. There was a sense that something

new had happened. Residents who had not spoken

publicly took to the microphone to recite lines or

they dressed in period attire and stood in front

of the crowd. It was a shared

moment of generative pride in their way of life.

I returned to Tower Street a few days after the

commemoration. A few of the residents were tidying

up the area. The night before had been another

resident's birthday and neighbors had found an

old rusted stove to place in one of the huts they

had built to keep warm. Willie

tells me that they sat, drank and celebrated

in the hut with each other into the late hours.

I listened to the emotion expressed here. Grown men

and women expressing a childhood they never had,

playing fort, having a laugh. One woman even scolded

children for stepping on the sandbags instead of

walking around them. She was protective and keen to

keep the structures in respectable shape. Another

neighbor proposed building a memorial tribute to

the community for having come together in this way.

Now Woody's play about Damien and Paul was

never performed. There simply wasn't enough

time or funding to organize it. The first and only

performance was his one reading in the office.

When I recently brought up the play to

him, he said he'd forgotten all about it

and hadn't thought about it since the day

he read it, but in the end Woody's Ulster

Tower Street project brought people out of

their homes a seemingly unremarkable act so

extraordinary that residents desire to find a way

to remind themselves that it indeed had happened.

Even though the commemoration was finished, it was

as if they had seen a world where the loyalist

way of life meant something out of the tired

tales of sectarian hatred, a glimpse of something

so incredible that they wished, in a bittersweet

moment, to commemorate the commemoration itself.

All right, thank you so much to everyone

and that's the end of my presentation.

Thank you so much, Matthew, for

this extraordinarily moving and

suggestive talk. I think it has relevance

not only to Northern Ireland, but across

Europe, to other situations with

other such entities as

you described. We have a question. I'll

start with this question from Alex Thompson.

And it's about the intersection of the

military side of things with community building.

So he says: Is your consultant saying that

the neutralization of the military side of

things undermines community-led community

building? That the military side of things,

the negative, is necessary for community

well-being, the positive aspects of

the community? So I think it's a question

about the relationship of those two things.

Yeah, I think so. I think that

paramilitary organizations - that sounds sort

of scary, I wish there was a better word - from the

kinship networks in which

primarily sons engage with their uncles and

fathers, and sort of join up,

there are fraternal and maternal

aspects to these organizations. And then

the idea that you, sort of, police your own

community is important for both loyalists and

republicans, neither of whom really like

the police forces and feel that the police

are too heavy-handed in their communities.

So yeah, that militaristic side is

much more than militaristic. It's

kinship relations, it's familiar, it's

community, so yeah, that's in the

sense that he meant it. And to be

sure there's many in the community that don't

want to go back to armed paramilitaries

on the streets and things like that. But in

their absence, there have been these groups

that sort of fall under paramilitary banners,

that only want to deal in drugs, so drug debts

are a huge deal. In fact, paramilitaries used

to keep drugs out of these communities before

the peace agreement and now sort of, in a twist,

quote-unquote the new paramilitaries have brought

drugs into these communities. So yeah, thanks

for the question, Alex. It's good to hear from you.

To follow up on that just a little bit more,

I'm curious about Woody's trajectory.

Your earlier interlocutor is sort of dissing

community work and what then is

Woody's relationship to armed conflict

in relationship to that sort of trajectory that

he's gone through. Yeah, that's a great question

and you know I talked to him recently about this.

He's certain, as most loyalists are certain,

that a united Ireland is coming. That's

a kind of thought. I don't know if it is or not.

That's not my expertise. He goes

back and forth. Well, he did join

a paramilitary in his youth and still has

certain obligations to that sort of organization.

Really, it's more like being a bouncer at a club, or

setting up festivities or something pretty.

It's not really like

training with guns or anything, but he does

have to decide. He's talked to me how he has to

decide whether if organizations decide

to arm themselves again, which may

happen, that's always the fear, whether he will

accept doing that, ending up dead and going

into prison when he's got three children.

And he in moments of sort

of, I don't know if they're bluster or not,

he quite certainly says: I'm ready to go to

jail to defend the union's place

in the United Kingdom. So that's a decision that

he's making, that a lot of loyalists are making.

He doesn't think it'll come to that. He

thinks the loyalist communities, like

my other participant, have been too

watered down - too many drugs, too many other

distractions to really

engage in an armed conflict again. But

that is a discussion that he and his

friends and family members are having.

Thank you. A couple more questions. One

has to do with the relationship between

the two communities and mourning in the

two communities, because what you're suggesting

is that what the loyalists are

mourning is the present and the future, and

not only the past. And I've been wondering if

you could just say a few words on the counterpoint

since you've worked in both communities of

what mourning is like for the other community.

It wouldn't be mistaken

to think that there's a lot

of worry about the past. There's memorials on every

street, every rock - just paraphrased from

the great Irish folklorist Henry Glassie - has two

narratives: one loyalist, protestants two, in

entirely different histories and memorials.

Mourning practices in the other community

take on, you've seen some of my

presentations, take on a much more religious,

salvific tone. That ties into Catholic

theology a little bit more, although not totally.

It is this idea that Ireland which

is always personified as a she, as a mother, and it

has been throughout the 20th century, will deliver

her children, the Irish republicans, in the future.

A united Ireland, there is that belief amongst

mainstream republicans, that these losses will have

been redeemed and everyone

who's lost during the trouble, they have

their images and memorials all throughout

the small community - plaques, commemorations...

Anyone who was lost. And that's how you

also keep the families who lost

sons and daughters, you keep them

with their eyes towards that future where

their sacrifice would have been redeemed.

Now there are dissenting republicans

whose lives are not grieved, who don't follow

the peace agreement. Republicans who believe

you can do it through political means and

still are dissidents who would arm themselves,

who don't agree with the agreement

themselves. And if they have died or if they

go to jail as a terrorist,

they aren't celebrated or grieved or mourned.

There is, in republican communities particularly - and

this is I think a little different than in loyalist

communities - unequal distribution of who gets

to be mourned and who does not get to be mourned.

If you bought in to the political movement of the

IRA Shinn Féin, that we're gonna

deliver this in this political way, then

you are mourned, but oftentimes those who

opted out are forgotten. Even to the point

- if they once were lauded, if they had

a break, they are sort of backgrounded.

I hope that answers the question.

Yes, thank you very much. Maybe as a final

question, oh no, we have two more questions. Sorry.

Let me read the comment

from Philippe: Thanks for an interesting and

effective approach to understanding the

effects of British and Irish colonialism.

You imply a parallel between the affective

experience of the two most polarized, violent

sides of the conflict, that is paramilitary

unionists vs paramilitary republicans.

How do the militant republicans experience

the disappearance of the need to fight?

Are they less tortured by current history debts?

And how did each side understand you going back

and forth between them? I think that

reverberates with some of the things that

you've just said, but perhaps there's something

more. So the militant republicans

have a problem with it. They

did during 1998. There were lots of schisms.

And republicanism is nothing but schisms. I've

talked about the IRA, but there's a few other groups.

They still adhere that the peace agreement is not in line

with the 1916 proclamation, which James Connolly and Roger Caseman -

they led that insurrection and were executed. They have a hard time with it and their experiences. Many of them still continue

to do operations and some of them end up in jail.

Again more bluster. The security

in Northern Ireland is pretty advanced

and they usually catch any bombs before they go

off, but during my field work a bomb went off

that killed a security guard at a prison.

And other squabbles were happening between former

paramilitary mates and one guy shot

another one in the head and then that was that.

So there's these things working themselves

out. Sometimes if you're in, say you're

in this organization, and sometimes

you can get together and talk because your cousins

or brothers or those kinship relations,

then you can sort of argue it out. I was

privy to many conversations. He had

conversations about why Sinn Féin has

just joined the British establishment in order

to enrich themselves. Another part of this story

is those who signed on to the peace agreement, who

were in higher ups for these organizations - both

loyalist and republican were paid very well

with community worker positions. So you've

sort of paid off some of these folks and

that unequal distribution in these neighborhoods

really caused some schisms, too.

It's like well, I fought and I was

in jail for 12 years and I was a blanket protester

or a hunger striker or whatever. And this guy

has a holiday home in Santa Ponsa, he didn't do

much for the cause. So there's those situations.

I think that sort of answers the question.

And how do you decide to understand

you're going back and forth. Well, some

did not like it and wouldn't speak to me anymore.

And some understood that I was a fair

broker. You just have to

establish relationships with people

like you're doing field work, but it was

scary and you never knew if they were gonna

turn on you and not let you interview them.

One day they would send me images of myself

walking up and down particular roads and say:

We're sort of keeping an eye on you.

It wasn't actually a very pleasant experience

sometimes, because you were monitored.

You wouldn't want one person to tell

the other person secrets, but for the

most part they understand research in

Northern Ireland. You can do

it, but some people simply wouldn't speak to

me because they knew I was talking to a loyalist

or to a republican and that a republican

would have killed their loved one

and that's too much to bear.

Thank you! So now as a kind

of final question - you're probably familiar with

some of David Scott's work on the conflicts

in Grenada from the past. He's written,

like you, on the kind of transference of

violence across the generations.

transfers of pain, and senses of spite,

and senses of grief over the generations for the

losses. Again from a conflict that seems to

have been a failure. Nobody really won.

The question that I have for you is that

he noticed among the younger generation,

the youngest generation, a kind of rejection

of this legacy of memorialization

and regret and the reproduction of

this sort of trauma over the years.

And so I'm wondering. Part of that is

a new generation responding to

the obsessions of their parents. I'm wondering

if you see anything of that kind despite the

structural circumstances in Belfast. Or do the

structural circumstances simply overwhelm any

possibility of that? Well, I think I sort of hinted

at it a little bit with becoming a zombie,

or sort of having spite towards everything.

It is different, I think.

Like you said, one of the folks that

I quoted. They don't know anything about the

troubles, but at the end of the

day there's a keen sense of where I grew up

and who I don't associate with.

Are there a lot of inter-marriages? Yes.

Is there a lot of hanging out together in

the clubs? Yes. Those sorts of things.

Is loyalist community still 90% loyalist? Yes.

Or Catholic schools.

Do Catholics go to Catholic schools? 90% of them yes, right?

So there's still that extreme segregation.

We did this sort of training with

young loyalists aged 10 to about

would like to see in East Belfast in 2023. And they

just sort of word diagrammed for us. I didn't

present this, but I have some of their answers.

They said no religion and what they mean

by that is sort of getting rid of this past,

this Protestant, Catholic nonsense they know

nothing about. They don't attend church.

Then they said like USA

with polite people, better education,

and bigger, modern houses. So again the

idea is - yes, I think there is a sense like

they're over it, but they're

still sort of caught in it,

as well. And those rioters that we saw

were young men. They weren't

the old, the combatants from the

troubles, their walkers or anything.

These were young folks, so there's cultural

script that then gets latched on to and can

sort of build up that aggro. But again I'm sort

of making the argument that it's not just about

green versus orange. There's

something else there that really didn't work

out in society. Thank you! There is one more

question, so I'll put this last one to you.

That is really a question of the sort

of comparative despair. Which side was the most

unemployed? Or I suppose is the most unemployed? You know sort of rejected from lump and rejected

from the the workforce. And is that the crux of the

disorder to you? I think historically,

of course some academics contest, but

there's a general sense that Irish

Republican, Catholic communities were the most

impoverished and that's led to a

squash civil rights movement in 1969 that led into

a wider support for the paramilitaries, the IRA and

so on. Didn't have voting rights, gerrymandering,

all the things that come with being... Didn't have

access to jobs like the shipyards, but once

Thatcher who was actually cautious in

de-industrializing Belfast during the troubles,

she slowly sort of de-industrialized

the shipyards. The Titanic

was built in Belfast. And all sorts of

ships. She slowly de-industrialized it by about 1987.

It started becoming privatized and all those

good, protestant, paying, working-class jobs in East

Belfast went away. By the 90s

you have equal poverty in both

communities. Irish republicans still claim

because of the historical situation

to have been the more aggrieved, but

most statistics show that these communities are

pretty equally having a hard time.

Thank you so much for those answers and this

wonderful and really important talk. I think

there's no time more than now, where we need

to understand the sense of

injury and the toll that the conflict has taken

for the future. So thank you!

Thank you, Matthew McCoy, for this wonderful presentation and also to our audience and staff at the Center. Please check

our website for our upcoming lecture on Tuesday,

November 16th at noon where we continue the

discussion of Brexit as we celebrate

International Education Week when professor

John Holmwood from the University of Nottingham

will speak to us about Public Higher Education

and the Market: Britain, Europe and Resilient Higher

Education after the COVID-19 Pandemic. So hope to

see you there. And once again, Matthew, thank you so

much! Good afternoon from all of us. Take care!