Professor Peter McBride:

It is a great pleasure to be here. I want to paint a picture for the committee. When people refer to trauma, most of us think of our own ideas of what it means. I will discuss some specifics. In Northern Ireland trauma is discussed a great deal. It is particularly related to the experiences people had around the Troubles. I want to broaden it out. Of the population of Northern Ireland, 66% have at least one experience of trauma. When people were asked, half of them identified an experience associated with the conflict. "Trauma" is a word that is bandied around and I want to challenge to an extent its medicalisation. If I were a medic, which I am not, I would provide the committee with a list of the diagnostic criteria people would need to meet to justifiably describe themselves as traumatised. I acknowledge the view, but it limits our understanding of the relationship between what Dr. Mason has just described and the situation we face in Northern Ireland, which involves a process and a society which are stuck. The experience of trauma is a material component of that stuckness. I intend to paint a picture for the committee of the different groupings of people we have and their interactions with each other.

The first group I refer to in relation to trauma is those persons who describe themselves as victims and survivors of the conflict. They are drawn from both sides of the community and all parts of these communities and identify their experiences of trauma with the Troubles. They are people who were combatants and involved in the conflict actively and who were hurt by it. They are people who saw themselves as the victims of these combatants, people in the security forces and on other sides. They identify themselves as victims and survivors. For them, trauma is a profound psychological experience in which their lives have been deeply disrupted. Apart from the experience of physical injury many of them have, there is also the psychological damage they have experienced, which they argue is disrupting their lives. This is a huge political issue in the North and one that political parties are bandying around. Phrases used include "legitimate victims", which is usually associated with the security forces and the Protestant side of the community. It is a highly contentious issue.

For many of the people concerned, the experience of trauma is perpetuated by the reinforcing of their identification as victims. Due to the politicisation of their experiences, the fact that they are victims is a material part of the importance of what they have to say. Therefore, there is a disincentive for many to move through their experience of trauma, to recover and get back into what might be termed "normal life". There is a sense in which there is an incentivisation. It is almost as if a career can be made out of being a victim or survivor of the conflict, given the importance and significance of that status in the dialogue which is ongoing in Northern Ireland. A new victim and survivor service has been set up, a significant component of which is psychological therapy. The service endeavours to provide support for people who have lived disrupted lives for 20 or 30 years as a consequence of the impact of the Troubles. It is shocking to me that many of the people concerned have not previously accessed services and support, which would have helped them. This says something about the nature of trauma.

There are people in Northern Ireland who only now, after 20 or 30 years, are starting to talk about their experiences. That applies to all sides. After 30 years, people are beginning to say that what happened to them had an impact. They have started to remember things, they are having bad dreams and their lives are disrupted. There is medical evidence to show this is quite normal. The problem is that the events they are describing are 30 years old and the rest of the population has, to a large extent, moved on. For these people, the sense they are stuck in a time warp is a very real experience.

This brings me onto the second group of people, those who were directly affected and who could legitimately described themselves as victims and survivors but who have never accessed services. They have never acknowledged it personally or sought help for their experience of trauma yet their lives are deeply disrupted by it. They never felt confident about being able to access services. I am the chief executive of the Northern Ireland Association for Mental Health and we provide services in a secular environment to people with experience of mental illness. Last year, having been around for the 50 years, for the first time, we conducted research with existing service users. These people have been through the health system and psychiatry, have often been hospitalised and they have severe mental illness. We asked them whether any of them had experience of conflict and conflict-related trauma. Some 60% of them said they had but, of the 60%, not one has been asked that question when a mental health history was taken when they were being dealt with by psychiatrists through the health system. Dr. Gary Mason described the collusion of the churches in the conflict and there was also collusion by society in general to not acknowledge the psychological impact of what was going on at the time. From a psychological perspective, that is completely understandable because of the sense of threat around it.

We live in a society where there is a formal mechanism, through victims and survivors services, for those willing to acknowledge the impact of the conflict but there is a group of people who have been directly affected by the conflict, and who have direct exposure to conflict-related trauma, but have never sought psychological help for that. Often, they have acted out their experience through other kinds of illness such as depression and accessing other mental health services but not acknowledging the root of their experience as a traumatic event.

I classify myself within the third group of people I want to talk about, namely, the rest of society. All of our society has been disrupted by trauma. I never experienced personal trauma and never had a member of my family murdered or killed and never lost anybody or witnessed a killing or a bomb but my sense of my own self is that my life has been disrupted. At university, I used to tell people about when I was growing up, when my father worked in Belfast and I lived in Downpatrick. I used to watch the news and then stand at the window watching for my father to come home. I remember feeling anxious because I had seen something happen in Belfast on the news and I worried about him being hurt. My argument is that it is not normal for a child to experience that so therefore I, like many other people, had a sense of general disruption. The point I want to make is that if it is true, it goes partly towards explaining what people think is really weird looking in on Belfast or Northern Ireland. I refer to the flag dispute. Most right-minded people looking in on the situation ask why it is so important and why people feel these things so deeply. It is my contention that the reason there is such a reaction to these triggers is the sense of disruption caused to the society over the past 40 years. Viewing matters through the lens of seeing people's experience of trauma and understanding how it affects people, some of this starts to make sense. Some of the symptoms of trauma in a medical sense start to make sense, if the committee members will forgive me for pushing the analogy.

One of the key components of trauma is re-experiencing something. When someone has been through a car accident and is traumatised, the person will be sitting chatting to someone and will get a flashback and will remember the vivid detail of the car coming towards them. We live in a society that re-experiences trauma. We do it through our rituals and the social mechanisms we have to remember. To some extent, those mechanisms also re-traumatise when they bring things back. Every time a bomb is mentioned in the news in Northern Ireland, a picture of La Mon comes up. I know some of the people injured in it and, for them, it re-traumatises them. Remembrance, in the broadest sense, is very important in terms of the things we remember from our history. We must remember that part of it is restimulating trauma and bringing it back into consciousness.

The link to what Dr. Mason was saying is transgenerational trauma. There are children who grew up in Northern Ireland who never had any direct experience of living in a society that was at conflict. They know nothing of what it was like in the 1970s, 1980s or 1990s. However, through the storytelling of fathers and mothers and the history of their family, they have been imbued with the trauma of what their family experienced in terms of persecution and injustice. While young people do not have a direct experience of trauma, their lives are disrupted because the trauma of their parents and their families is communicated to them. When the flag dispute comes up, they are primed and ready to act on it. The emotional energy is there, the hurt is there and the sense of personal hurt and victimisation is already present, transmitted through their families and able to be acted out when the opportunity arises. There are many links with deprivation and the economic situation. As those things start to kick in, people revert to a more primitive, atavistic way of living and that experience of hurt, victimisation and pain is more easily activated.

When we start talking about the future and reconciliation, one of the phrases that occurs frequently is "dealing with the past". I struggle to know what that means. The implication is that we do something and it goes away. What we have is people living with a deep sense of hurt and a huge sense of victimhood. This will not go away with simple action but needs to be processed. We live in a society that needs to be brought through a process. While the Good Friday Agreement brought in the appropriate institutions and gave us anything we could wish for from an institutional point of view, what will bring us forward from where we are sitting at the moment is not institutional but relational. It is about starting to deal with painful truths that are emotional, that concern how we see ourselves and know ourselves, and to do with what we have done to one another. Finding a way to begin to process that and talk about and deal with it is what dealing with the past is about. That is by far the hardest thing to do. It cannot be written down or legislated for but it involves courageous leadership, political leadership and, if I can pick up on the point made by Dr. Mason, it involves the churches acknowledging their role in this and saying sorry for it. It involves people saying that they have done wrong here or hurt people and that they are sorry and that we need a new future. That is very difficult.