Anthony McCann.

Though we have several mutual friends, I've never met Anthony McCann.  A scholar, teacher, coach, consultant, poet, and musician in Belfast, he occasionally "likes" articles I post to Facebook. I apparently like a majority of his life's work. He's the guy, after all, in describing a workshop he facilitates, who said, "What happens if we link conversations about heritage to conversations about social innovation? Make heritage less a thing of the past, and more a conversation about possible futures and future possibilities." My kind of thinker.

A trip to Belfast during a cease-fire in the mid-nineties still shapes my thinking about cities and towns and the way people actually use them. Some barricades had been removed owing to the then temporary peace but others remained. Residents would start down a road or path they hadn't been able to use in quite a while, somewhat surprised to find them open. Often, though, they'd end up having to turn another direction at some point anyway, a direction they didn't necessarily want to go, but one they were in some cases more used to.

As I wandered around trying to learn all I could about The Troubles and the people impacted, my accidental informants ranged from an IRA member to a group of nuns. More than anything, though, I remember a group of kids I encountered on the street. Those kids seemed to know the exact location of every hole in every fence and how to get their quickly. I watched them for as long I could until I, too, became suspicious. I wondered what else they could tell me.

McCann has recently started blogging. In this essay, he considers storytelling within the context of post-Troubles Northern Ireland and makes some fine points I think relevant to anyone who has experienced trauma.

Other Stories, by Anthony McCann

Maureen Heatherington has written, “Within the field of peace building in Northern Ireland, it has become apparent that the ‘healing work’ has not been adequately dealt with” (2008:51). Even though different groups have competing versions of history in Northern Ireland, it could be argued that those competing narratives have in themselves become our “single story”, “… the conflict-saturated relationship narrative in which people are often stuck” (Winslade and Monk 2008:8).This is understandable. In Northern Ireland, between 100,000-140,000 people live in households where someone has been injured or killed in a Troubles-related incident (Fay et al., 1998, p. 59).

It has been suggested that 12% of the Northern Ireland population may be diagnosable with PTSD (Healey 2008:59). A more recent study suggests that figures may be higher, and that Northern Ireland may have the highest levels of PTSD in the world: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-16028713. Personally, I feel this is playing very fast and loose with the notion of PTSD, which, as my wife Emma reminds me, is a complex clinical diagnosis, and one which even a psychiatrist would be loathe to label someone with too readily.

People often speak of the last forty years in Northern Ireland as ‘The Troubles’ or ‘The Conflict’, characterising this time as a continuous experience of intense conflict. Most recently, this was highlighted by the opening of “The Troubles Gallery” at the Ulster Museum. For me, this easy shorthand influences us with a subtle gravity that often leads us, in our retellings and characterisations of life in Northern Ireland, to frequently and predominantly place the emphasis on hostility, trauma, and on incidents and contexts of violence. By doing this I would suggest that we pay the high price of effacing many other aspects of our lives. More helpful aspects of everyday life over the past forty years have been rendered discursively invisible.