Part 3: Free Derry Museum

Lastly, we visited the Free Derry Museum, which outlines Derry’s history in The Troubles, specifically highlighting Bloody Sunday when a British soldier opened fire on a peaceful anti-internment protest. The exhibit brought about themes of framing, both applicable to communications and peace and justice studies, as the British claimed that the protestors were violent gunmen, only to admit the truth in 2010. This also reflected the withholding of information by the British government, as we also saw at the Pat Finucane Centre in the cases that they encounter. The British are seen as framing this conflict in specific ways that undercut the violence and wrongdoings they inflicted upon people during this time. Framing is a powerful tool in both fields as it can encourage beliefs and biases that can be based on untrue or incomplete information. As Smith and Petty explain about framing in communications, “the extent to which messages are elaborated can be increased by employing message framing that is unexpected… a negative frame will induce greater processing when people expect positive framing, and vice versa” (1996, p. 267). This supports that the British government’s initial framing of Bloody Sunday may have limited public scrutiny until decades later, when the truth was finally revealed. As Benford and Snow note regarding framing in peace studies, “social movements are not viewed merely as carriers of extant ideas and meanings… Rather, movement actors are viewed as signifying agents actively engaged in the production and maintenance of meaning for constituents, antagonists, and bystanders or observers” (2000, p. 613). The Free Derry Museum, in this sense, acts as a counter-framing institution; it restores agency to the people of Derry, whose stories were once suppressed and bulldozed by Britain. 

Learn more about The Free Derry Museum: https://museumoffreederry.org/ 

At the museum, we had the honor of speaking with Caitlin Askin of the Bloody Sunday Trust about her experience as a first- and second-generation child of conflict in Derry. She spoke mainly about the transgenerational trauma that exists in Derry and how a lack of conversation leads to never reconciling with the horrors that the conflict created for this community. She said that the culture of “saying nothing” causes children to have to educate themselves as their parents do not deal with the traumas they have experienced as a result of The Troubles. Kids are left with unanswered questions and passed-down biases and beliefs. This is echoed in research which found that “the children of survivors interviewed expressed that their parents’ attempts to shield them from the conflict and from the parents’ experience of it were not successful. These children knew that something was happening with their parents, but did not know what” (Hanna et al., 2012, p. 73). Caitlin feels that while addressing the past must be done in order to move forward within communities, the reproduction of issues is an international challenge, as similar conflicts exist in other parts of the world, too. The report supports this view, noting that “the socio-psychological processes that have been implicated in the transmission of ‘trauma’ from one generation to the next are equally likely to apply in the Northern Ireland context as in any other conflict situation where the research has taken place” (Hanna et al., 2012, p. 21). If discussion, reconciliation, restorative justice, and peacebuilding can exist within Northern Ireland, the rest of the world may be better off for it as well. 

Learn more about Catitlin and the Bloody Sunday Trust: https://museumoffreederry.org/bloody-sunday-trust/ 

References

Benford, R. D., & Snow, D. A. (2000). Framing processes and social movements: An overview and assessment. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 611–639. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.soc.26.1.611

Hanna, D., Dempster, M., Dyer, K., Lyons, E., & Devaney, L. (2012). Young people’s transgenerational issues in Northern Ireland. Commission for Victims and Survivors. https://www.cvsni.org

Smith, S. M., & Petty, R. E. (1996). Message framing and persuasion: A message processing analysis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22(3), 257–268. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167296223004