Bonfires ‘an excuse to get monkied’

Thus young Catholic teenagers from Londonderry told two conflict resolution researchers who have now published their findings in the latest issue of the Community Relations Council journal ‘Shared Space.’

Nick McCaffrey and Ulf Hansson wanted to look at the issue of young people and how they might be better engaged in the peace process and conducted a series of focus groups with teenagers to examine their understanding of the past.

The results have been published as “The Troubles Aren’t History Yet: Young People’s Understanding of the Past” and reveal that only 21 per cent of young Catholics selected the Easter Rising as one of their top three historical events whilst just 26 per cent of young Protestants selected the Battle of the Boyne in their top three.

Notwithstanding this the researchers found that history was still a contributing symbolic factor in the lives of young people in Northern Ireland today.

But there was “a massive variation as to the levels of knowledge that young people have about the past.”

The sketchy nature of young people’s understanding of history is typified by an exchange between a group of young Catholic boys - aged 12-16 - from Londonderry who were asked by the researchers to explain the reasoning behind the August 15 internment bonfires held in some nationalist and republican areas every summer.

“Young Person One It’s an excuse to get monkied! (Male, Catholic, 12-14, Derry Londonderry). Young Person Two I don’t know like. Do you? (Male, Catholic, 12-14, Derry Londonderry). Young Person Three I haven’t a clue (Male, Catholic, 15-16, Derry Londonderry). Young Person Two To get drunk and have fun? (Male, Catholic, 12-14, Derry Londonderry),” the teenagers debated.

Equally, “although the Easter Rising was the fifth most selected event the young people felt they had the most knowledge about, in-depth discussions about the extent of this knowledge revealed that specific knowledge of the event was patchy at best,” the researchers recorded.

A conversation between a groups of young Londonderry Catholics ran as follows: “Young Person Two The Easter Rising was years ago, they don’t really celebrate that here? (Male, Catholic 12-14, Derry Londonderry); Young Person One What’s the Easter Rising? (Male, Catholic 12-14, Derry Londonderry); Young Person Four Jesus? (Male, Catholic 12-14, Derry Londonderry); Young Person One What? (Male, Catholic 12-14, Derry Londonderry); Young Person Two No, there is a difference between the Easter Rising and Jesus Rising (Male, Catholic 15-16, Derry Londonderry).”

The researchers noted in the article that the sketchy nature of people’s knowledge of past events was certainly a recurring element - even of those events that one would assume to hold great importance to contemporary communities.