Northern reticence : articulating a culture of silence in Northern Ireland

Abstract

"Ironically, and paradoxically, too, what I want to discuss here – “a culture of silence” – has been widely publicised, and often talked about – by many loquacious individuals. It seems that any discussion of silence is fraught with such paradoxes. The theme for this essay comes from a poem by Seamus Heaney, a poem that came out in his 1975 North collection. The poem is called “Whatever You Say, Say Nothing”. I want to quote its third part, which yields an image of Northern Irish society prior to and during the Troubles. What comes to the fore in Heaney’s description is an injunction to preserve a conspiracy of silence imposed on society by paramilitary organizations, especially by the Irish Republican Army. The republicans demanded that their members never disclose any information about their organization or about their membership (and thus their actual identity) to people outside the inner circle, not even to their own families. The republican code of silence constituted a supreme law, trumping any other obligations and commitments, very much like the Sicilian omerta or the secret codes of loyalty within the Catholic Church which prevent the clergy from talking openly about sexual harassment or the paedophiles in their midst." (fragm.)