Professor Peter McBride:

There are modern examples of countries which are struggling with this issue, not least our own. This has by no means been resolved in Bosnia and places like that There is still disruption in post-apartheid South Africa. There was a honeymoon period but there are still fundamental problems.

The Second World War is interesting. It is linked to Ms Gildernew's question. At the end of the Second World War there was a winner and a fairly generally accepted shared narrative of what had happened. There was universal condemnation following the exposure of what had happened in the concentration camps. With a few exceptions around revisionist historians which are very minor, everybody agreed that was a terrible thing and that Nazism was wrong. With that shared narrative, people very quickly identified what was right and what was wrong.

There was a sense of due process and justice seen in the Nuremberg trials and that was worked out in a very public way. Germany went through a period of contrition which was reflected in art, literature and poetry and which acknowledged the horrors of what had happened in the Second World War. There was a reaction by the German people to acknowledge that it was wrong and they were a peaceful people. There is evidence of that through art and literature.

I do not think there is a shared narrative in our conflict. One side of the community will articulate its history and story in one way but another part will tell a completely different story. They will not recognise each other's validity. To put it bluntly, for the loyalist and Protestant community the Good Friday Agreement was the end of something. The attitude was, "Thank goodness we have sorted that out, the union is secure and we can breathe a sigh of relief." For the Nationalist and republican community it was the beginning of something and the next phase of a process.

The fundamental narrative difference is important when we come to talk about transgenerational trauma. I had an uncle and grandfather who were killed in the First and Second World Wars. That is talked about in a very matter of fact way in our family. It is not a case of what the damn Germans did to us. The issue is not about storytelling, rather it is about the passion the stories have and the ongoing sense of victimisation.

The impact of trauma is not intellectual. It is not that the stories being retold are the problem; it is the emotional content behind that and the sense of hurt. There is a sense in both communities that they are not understood and one story is not validated by the other side. There is a feeling one side does not accept the fact that the other was abused, alienated, not allowed to take jobs and suffered profound injustice which does not just go back 30 years but 200 or 500 years. There is also a feeling on the other side that one part of the community does not accept that there is a rule of law and it has a particular identity. There are narratives, but there is also sentiment and passion underneath them.

On the question of how we target groups in society, we need to target children and young people and be able to build resilience. Ms Gildernew is absolutely right. I would argue that the process starts pre-birth in terms of preparing parents for parenthood. If we do not deal with this huge social issue, namely, the narratives and sense of injustice which still exists within people's perceptions of themselves, no matter how we change the support that is given the sense of hurt and violence which has been done to people will come through in parenting. We cannot avoid it, it is unconscious.

The sense of being victimised or having a story in which the pain of trauma is still alive in the family cannot be hidden. Children will pick up on it very quickly. This is a complex issue. There is something to be said for getting people to begin to talk in a different way and understand that when we talk about the role of memory in society it is not simply about a different way of telling stories. It is about understanding that the sentiment, passion and emotional experience behind that is where the power lies.

The emotional experience of victimhood, persecution and pain are transmitted. The stories are simply the vehicles for that and have no impact if there is no passion behind them. Every now and again in my family we talk about the relatives who died and it is no big deal. Yet, in many families the stories of family martyrs and the things which were done are alive and it is as if things happened yesterday.

That experience of the present is an absolute consequence of trauma. There is a sense that things do not become a memory but remain alive. That is one of the core attributes of a traumatic experience and that is with what we are struggling.