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Contributor:

Dr Tim Wilson

Talk Title:

Violence: the Human Cost of Partition

Talk Synopsis:

This talk explores the context and nature of the violence that accompanied Partition and the establishment of Northern Ireland and also the lasting effects/significance of the events of that period. It describes the scale of sectarian violence and related disturbances in Belfast and elsewhere, including workplace expulsions, rioting and the forced movement of people from their homes. It suggests that events in Northern Ireland were part of ‘a wider, all-Ireland conflict’ but that they also had their own ’dynamic and… momentum’ and that all of this was ‘complex, shifting [and] layered’. And it details how violence began to adopt the tactics and technology of WW1, local efforts at conciliation and the ways in which this ‘extraordinarily intense period of turbulence’ allowed all sides to ‘glimpse a sort of abyss underneath the constitutional floorboards’ whilst also setting ‘the pattern for events to come’.

Short Biography:

Dr Tim Wilson is the current Director of the Centre for Study of Terrorism and Political Violence at University of St Andrews.

Further Reading:

From Pogrom to Civil War: Tom Glennon and the Belfast IRA – Kieran Glennon
The Northern IRA and the Early Years of Partition 1920-22 – Robert Lynch
Political Conflict in East Ulster, 1920-22 – Christopher Magill
Belfast's Unholy War: The Troubles of the 1920s– Alan F. Parkinson
‘The Most Terrible Assassination that has yet stained the name of Belfast’: The McMahon Murders in Context' (Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 37, 145) – Tim Wilson

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