Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 22 March 2018
Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement
Legacy Issues Affecting Victims and Relatives in Northern Ireland: Discussion (Resumed)
2:10 pm
Dr. Anna Bryson:
I do not have a whole lot to add. I am pretty much in agreement with what has been said.
I absolutely agree with Senator Frances Black about the importance of young people and the intergenerational issues. In particular, as Dr. Morrow states, there is, through PEACE IV, quite a big focus on young people. One will now see in victims and survivor services, VSS, intergenerational projects coming to the fore.
I would add that it is an area where the oral history archive can play a particularly important role because it is not time bound. The Independent Commission on Information Retrieval, ICIR has to do the Implementation and Reconciliation Group, IRG within five years. They are very much time bound. It is the one that can take that longer view and can acknowledge that people's stories unfold. Within families, they unfold. One might want to revisit the same story. Alan McBride will tell one that he was frozen as the Shankill bomb widower, that was his story in the media; that was how he was positive and when he engaged in that kind of storytelling work, he was able to put it in the longer context that he grew up in a loyalist estate in north Belfast. He stated that was important but it happened over a period of time. One can see then, when one has that facility, younger people can respond to that within the same family. That mechanism could create the space, if it is designed properly, for some of that work to develop. That is really all I have to add on that.
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