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Notre Dame multimedia research into Northern Ireland's 'Troubles' - VIDEO

Research looks at interviews with 70 survivors and examines massive amount of information on Northern Ireland

ANTOINETTE KELLY,

IrishCentral.com Staff Writer

Published Thursday, April 28, 2011, 8:49 AM

Updated Thursday, April 28, 2011, 1:26 PM

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A professor at the University of Notre Dame is conducting new research on Northern Ireland’s “Troubles”

A professor at the University of Notre Dame is conducting new research on Northern Ireland’s “Troubles” examining videotaped interviews with some 70 people about their lives before during and after the conflict.

Christian Davenport, a peace studies, political science and sociology professor has spent months picking his way through the interviews, legal cases, newspaper articles, human rights reports, government records and eye-witness testimony from Northern Ireland during ‘The Troubles”.

His aim is to identify what took place. He said "No one has ever brought this information together to see how it’s all related,” Davenport says. He wants to provide a deeper understanding of the conflict and its impact on the communities and political systems.

Davenport's plan is to create an interactive website as an installation at Notre Dame. It's his aim that all this information is accessible to the public. In the future it is his hope that he will create similar installations in Northern Ireland and Britain.

For further information visit the project's site here.

Nster.com

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Aughavey | May 02, 2011, 06:05 AM EDT

Perhaps buffloirishman is unaware of the IRA`s involvement with FARC in Columbia, with Fidel Castro in Cuba, with the PLO in Palestine, with ETA in Spain / France and with Colonel Gadaffi of Libya? Or involvement with the North Korean super dollar plot?

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Aughavey | May 02, 2011, 06:03 AM EDT

The University of Ulster CAIN website is the authoritive Troubles archive. The IRA were responsible for two thirds of all deaths and logically therefore responsible for the creation of a large majority of victims during the Troubles, a figure usually glossed over here. Infact the IRA killed more `Catholics` than the security forces ever did (Northern Irish Loyalist paramilitary terrorists killed the most Catholics, about 1200 people, the IRA killed 2500 people) Much grief on all sides.

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buffaloirishman | Apr 29, 2011, 07:52 AM EDT

What was the Protestant side going o tell the media? "We're good at terrorism - we know how to do it. We've screwed up people and countries around the world." Clearly the Protestants had everything to hide and nothing to share.

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pilib04 | Apr 28, 2011, 08:08 PM EDT

This research should be interesting. Presumably the civil rights movement and the subsequent vicious attacks on the civil rights marchers will be included. Also, it should be interesting to see how Bloody Sunday and Ballymurphy are handled. That should be enough to at least begin the research.

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GeorgeDillon | Apr 28, 2011, 04:46 PM EDT

Monaghanjack: You might want to go see a doctor about that amnesia. "Initially', to use your word, it was about the police attacking nationalist areas. The first funerals were of nationalists killed by the police or the police's loyalist henchmen. The other big amnesia you're suffering from is that you wrote a whole paragraph about the origins of the conflict and you never mentioned the Crown Forces. For those who don't know this, and that appears to include AmnesiacJack, the British Army was effectively at war with the Catholic population--and that meant killing a lot of them--from the summer of 1971 onwards. Any history of this conflict which ignores the role of the British Army as a protagonist is garbage. Like yours, AmnesiacJack. Go read up on it, you don't have a clue.

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monaghanjack | Apr 28, 2011, 02:43 PM EDT

Initially it was "attending funerals" mainly of Policemen. I recall clearly that I worked two or three days per week as the trouble increased. At some stage, I decided that I should work & allow only relatives to attend the funerals. It was clearly a situation of tit for tat and as one side gained an advantage the other side would retaliate in some way. The extreme behaviour of the Catholic side was obviously driven by an organisation while the Protestant side could only retaliate, usually by some ridiculuous act. Nobody knew what had caused the trouble or what was needed to make it end. We could only listen to both sides and try to make sense of what they told us. It seemed that the media was used better by the Caztholic side whereas the Protestant side had very little input to the media.

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