Say something. And keep saying it. On modern processing of The Troubles
Der Essay entstand im Rahmen des Seminars
„Das Unsichtbare schreiben“
From Whatever You Say, Say Nothing
“Northern reticence, the tight gag of place
And times: yes, yes. Of the ‘wee six’ I sing
Where to be saved you only must save face
And whatever you say, you say nothing.
Smoke-signals are loud-mouthed compared with us:
Manoeuvrings to find out name and school,
Subtle discrimination by addresses
With hardly an exception to the rule.”
Introduction
The short stanza from Seamus Heaney’s Whatever You Say, Say Nothing (1975) on the front page perfectly encapsulates the culture of silence that characterised Northern Irish society. Those few lines capture this particular atmosphere of silence that shaped everyday life during the Troubles: a climate of caution, coded speech, and a haunting silence. A silence born not from apathy but from fear. Silence was both instinct and survival strategy. It lingered in family homes, on street corners, in schools and workplaces. A quietness so pervasive that it became
part of the landscape itself.
While I have had the opportunity to discuss the Troubles and the culture of silence with many people, it was a long conversation with a single interviewee, the auntie of my Irish teacher, that prompted me to reflect deeply on these issues and inspired this essay. Síle grew up catholic in Derry as one of ten children in a two-bedroom house in the Bogside. Her mother and nine siblings left Derry when the Bogside protests began to heat up; by the time they returned after the Battle of the Bogside, their home resembled a warzone. Just few years later, she watched
Bloody Sunday unfold.
She described to me how violence had become normalized in everyday life. How she and her friends would watch demonstrations and their violent endings almost as if they were a form of entertainment, and how they sometimes provoked and ran from British soldiers “for the craic of it all.” How there was “funeral after funeral after funeral…”. Yet there were moments when her tone softened, and she would smile and say quietly, “Dear child, I can’t tell you that,” or “Darling, you really don’t want to hear about it.” These hesitations revealed the limits of what she felt able or willing to share, marking a quiet boundary between lived experience and the silence shaped by years of caution and unresolved memory.
This sense of looming silence has stayed with me since I first began reading contemporary Northern Irish literature. Whatever I read or watched, even when it was not directly about the Troubles, seemed shaped by a persistent, underlying quietness. This concealment haunted every story, every novel and series. It felt as if silence was ingrained in the North, shaping almost every part of people’s lives. When I mentioned this to Síle and asked whether she thought the Troubles and its long-lasting consequences were talked about enough, she simply shook her head. “They don’t talk about it enough,” she said.
So I began to think. It is true that politicians do not talk about the Troubles often enough; the Irish language (Gaeilge) remains underfunded; debates about bilingual street signs continue; and Catholic Irish communities are still underrepresented. But does that really mean that no one is talking about the past? Perhaps there are groups, beyond museums and universities, who are breaking the cycle of silence in their own ways. This essay will examine the culture of silence and its historical roots, before turning to contemporary culture in Northern Ireland – specifically Gaeilge rap – to explore how the Troubles and its consequences are being processed today.
History of the north of Ireland
The division of Ireland into the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland is deeply rooted in the colonial history of Great Britain. The British colonised Ireland already in the 16th and 17th centuries through the Tudor and Stuart plantations. Large numbers of English and Scottish settlers settled in Ulster, creating a Protestant landowning class that outnumbered the Irish Catholic population (cf. Mulcahy 2023). The Catholic population was regarded as “less worthy” of land ownership, laying the foundation for centuries of social, political, and economic inequality between Catholics and Protestants (cf. Taylor 2024). This colonial policy ensured that loyalty to the British Crown became tied to Protestant identity, while Catholics were marginalised; a dynamic reflected even culturally in the suppression of the Irish language: Gaeilge (cf. Howell 2016: 21).
Ireland was officially partitioned in 1921 by the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which ended the War of Independence (1919–1921). The treaty established the Irish Free State as a self-governing territory, while six counties in the north chose to remain part of the United Kingdom. This division created the political unit of Northern Ireland with a Protestant–unionist majority, while the South developed into an independent state with a predominantly Catholic–nationalist population, i.e. today’s Republic of Ireland (cf. Knispel 2021; Torrance 2022).
Over the course of the 20th century, this confessional divide became deeply embedded in the culture and governance of Northern Ireland. The country was split into two groups: Protestants and Catholics (cf. Whyte 1990; Ruane & Todd 1996). As a territory governed by the British state, most government offices were staffed by Protestants, who were viewed as supporters of the treaty, i.e., pro-British (cf. Rutter 2023). The unionists (those who wanted Ireland to remain part of Great Britain) retained their power through political manoeuvring and structural advantages granted by the British government (ibid.: 8ff). To prevent Catholic nationalists from outnumbering or overtaking the pro-British unionist government, the British state shaped Northern Ireland in such a way that it structurally favoured unionists (cf. Mulcahy 2023). As a result, the majority of government offices were filled by members of the Unionist Party or the so-called Orange Order, which were often interlinked anyway, while nationalists or Catholics generally received few or no positions at all. This plunged the Nationalist Party, and thus Northern Ireland itself, into a political deep sleep (cf. Magill 2020).
The Orange Order became increasingly anti-Catholic, and discriminatory practices were wide-spread. Lord Craigavon, the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, is said to have told the Australian Prime Minister Joseph Lyons, after Lyons remarked that one in five Australians was Catholic: “Watch them, Lyons, watch them. They breed like bloody rabbits” (Rutter 2023: 18).
Catholics were subjected to systematic discrimination. For example, chairmen who employed Catholics were dismissed; one was fired for attending a Catholic mass (which, incidentally, was part of the chairman’s duties); and another resigned after his daughter married a Catholic man (ibid.: 16). As the government became increasingly Protestant and Westminster refrained from intervening, Catholics were pushed into poverty and unemployment, with the small Nationalist Party unable to provide significant help or representation (ibid.: 25ff).
This historical and colonial legacy shaped the social and political conditions of Catholics in Northern Ireland. Given the Protestant-dominated power structures, Catholics remained politically, socially, and culturally discriminated against.
After unsuccessful (but peaceful) political attempts to free Northern Ireland from British rule (Snyder 2022: 11), violence became one of the principal strategies of the Irish Republican Army (the IRA). Whether through external violence or through self-inflicted violence, as seen in hunger strikes or “dirty protests,” the IRA came to view violence as a necessary tool of resistance (cf. Cottle 1997: 5ff; Doughty 2019: 18ff). The IRA was the leading force during what later came to be called “the Troubles” in Northern Ireland; the organisation itself split into two wings: the Official IRA and the Provisional IRA. Both fought against the British state, but they also fought each other. The Official IRA functioned as the political wing of the resistance and condemned the violent methods used and promoted by the Provisional IRA.
The most violent actions ceased by 1972, after the Official IRA gained more public support and, together with Sinn Féin, launched political initiatives (cf. Moloney 2002). Because the violence seemed to be ignored or simply absorbed into everyday life in Northern Ireland, further bloody battles and bombings were condemned as unnecessary and aimless. Yet even after the Good Friday Agreement, the Provisional IRA’s commitment to the cause is admired and even glorified. Murals depicting well-known IRA figures such as Bobby Sands or Brendan Hughes can be seen throughout Belfast and along the peace walls (cf. Larsson 2025). Every year at Easter, the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin is commemorated at Milltown Cemetery with a parade, traditional music, and reflections on the conflict. The commemoration holds particular significance for the former IRA and the republican–nationalist community more generally, where acts of violence from the past are often framed and legitimised as part of a broader struggle for political and national identity.
Culture of silence
The Troubles did not only produce violence; they produced a culture of silence. In NorthernIreland, speech was never neutral. A name, an accent, a school, even the side of the city you came from could reveal more than most people were willing to say aloud. Identities were overheard before they were spoken. In such a landscape, silence became a form of self-protection.
So, the safest words became no words at all.
Anna Burns’s Milkman (2018) captures this atmosphere with unsettling precision. The novel’s protagonist lives in a community where almost nothing is expressed directly; everything is filtered through rumour, implication, and the constant threat of being misinterpreted. People listen for what is meant rather than what is said, because speech itself is a risky move. Burns shows how everyday conversations become tense negotiations, shaped by paranoia and communal pressure. Her characters speak “around things,” never through them – an echo of Heaney’s world, where language bends under the weight of political fear.
This silence is also present in Seamus Deane’s Reading in the Dark (1996). The main storyline consists of the nameless main character, a boy growing up in a nationalist catholic family in the 1940s and 1950s Derry, trying to puzzle together the families’ dark secret – particularly what has happened to his uncle Eddie – and how this is connected to Northern Irelands history. In the novel, an entire family organizes itself around unsaid truths: disappearances, betrayals, buried histories that the adults refuse to name. The child-narrator senses everything but is told nothing, left to assemble fragments into meaning. Deane illustrates how silence becomes generational, passed down like inheritance. The unspoken past shapes identities more powerfully than any open confession. What remains hidden and buried in silence becomes more painful than what is known.
A similar dynamic appears in Michael Magees novel Close to Home (2023), where the intimate geography of Belfast, i.e. streets, houses and neighbourhoods, speaks louder than the people inside them. Silence functions as a boundary. What you do not say about where you live, who your friends are, or what you have witnessed becomes a form of self-protection, signalling either belonging or danger. Magee’s novel also gestures towards another, more private dimension of silence in post-troubled Belfast: the silence surrounding trauma, mental health, and the alarming rise in suicide rates, specifically amongst young men in working-class communities. These deaths often remain unspoken about in families and neighbourhoods, forming a quiet continuation of conflict-era coping mechanisms. The previously mentioned Milltown Cemetery, on which the protagonist is forced to work on, becomes an even bigger symbol in this context. The cemetery becomes a place where the legacy of public violence and the quieter epidemic of private suffering lie side by side.
In these texts, silence is not emptiness. It becomes a language in itself, one learned early and mastered quickly. Passed down as if it were part of one’s genetic inheritance.
But this literary silence is not invented, it is not pure fiction; it reflects the lived reality of the conflict. In workplaces, pubs, buses, and school corridors, politics was rarely discussed openly. Asking Where are you from? could be interpreted as probing for religious identity. Neighbourhoods were marked not by dialogue but by murals and flags that silently announced who belonged and who did not. Suspicion of informers, so-called “touts”, meant that even private conversations carried risk. People learned to weigh every word, to speak carefully and to swallow opinions entirely. Families often protected children by telling them nothing at all, creating a generational pattern of secrecy and anxiety.
Silence also came from above. Broadcasting restrictions in both the UK and the Republic of Ireland meant that the voices of certain political groups (especially Sinn Féin and other republican representatives) were literally muted on television and radio. Between 1988 and 1994, the British government’s broadcasting ban prohibited radio and television outlets from broadcasting the voices of individuals associated with organisations deemed to “support terrorism.” As a result, broadcasters had to dub over interviews with actors so that the public could hear the words but not the original voices. One famous example is Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Féin, whose voice was consistently replaced by an actor’s narration during BBC broadcasts. So, even at the institutional level, the conflict was shaped by what could not be said.
The result was a society where language became fragmented, cautious and coded: a society Heaney recognised intimately. Silence, in this context, was not apathy. It was strategy, necessity, and sometimes simple exhaustion. Yet it also left deep emotional and psychological marks.
Modern Processing of the Troubles: New Voices, New Languages, New Ways of Speaking
If the Troubles were marked by silence, caution, and fragmented storytelling, contemporary Northern Ireland is increasingly marked by a willingness to speak and by new forms of cultural expression that challenges and re-narrates the past. While not all voices agree on how the conflict should be remembered, the act of articulation itself represents a shift away from the culture Heaney critiqued. In the decades since the Good Friday Agreement, artists, musicians, writers, film-makers, and community groups have found innovative ways of engaging with the conflict’s legacy. Taken together, their work creates a mosaic of memory that is layered, varied, and still very much alive, and loud.
A central aspect of this shift is the deliberate challenge to long-dominant hegemonic narratives. The revitalisation of the Irish language provides a striking example. Irish was only officially recognised in Northern Ireland on 6 December 2022 through the Identity and Language Act, which finally repealed the 1737 ban on using any language other than English. The fact that such a prohibition remained intact for almost three centuries reveals how deeply linguistic suppression was woven into political control, and how silence was enforced not only socially,
but legislatively.
The removal of the ban has sparked a wider cultural curiosity and a reclamation of Irish voices, especially among younger generations who see language revival as a means of speaking back to history. In this sense, learning and using Irish has become an act of resistance: a refusal to accept imposed silence, and a reclaiming of identity previously pushed to the margins.
This resistance is best embodied by the Belfast rap/hip-hop trio Kneecap. Formed in 2017, the group gained international recognition after their semi-fictionalised film Kneecap premiered in 2024. While the film dramatizes the group’s origin story, its deeper thematic focus lies elsewhere: in the survival of minority languages under colonial pressure and the necessity of keeping them alive as an act of political defiance. By choosing to rap predominantly in Irish, the group transforms the language from a symbol of rural tradition into a vehicle of radical, urban self-expression thus dismantling the old stereotype that Irish belongs only to classrooms or the Gaeltacht.
Kneecap’s work represents a direct challenge to the culture of silence. Their lyrics are irreverent, political, often profane, and deliberately provocative. Precisely, their lyrics are the opposite of the careful, self-censoring speech that defined the Troubles and post-troubled era. The contrast is not accidental. Their loudness is intentional. It is a refusal to “say nothing,” a reclaiming of public voice after decades in which speaking openly about identity or politics was laced with danger.
Where earlier generations were taught to navigate conversations cautiously – poke for markers of identity and religion, avoiding explicit political statements, policing what could and could not be spoken etc. – Kneecap’s artistic output thrives on the explicit. They stage the very conversations that were once whispered or completely avoided. In doing so, they give voices to experiences that were previously buried in silence.
They are unapologetically proud of being Irish, of being Catholic, of being from Belfast and Derry, of being from the working-class. Their lyrics reclaim slurs (through calling themselves “fenian cunts”) and situate their identity within the urban working-class spaces they describe as “the hood.” Their performances and imagery frequently reference the Troubles, drawing on symbols such as burning RUC cars in commissioned murals and on their merchandise. DJ Provai’s signature tricolour balaclava and the group’s occasional use of IRA-style uniforms on stage deliberately court controversy, using visual provocation as part of their artistic vocabulary. Through this blend of irony, sarcasm, and deliberate excess, they make their message impossible to ignore: they are speaking loudly – some critics would say obnoxiously loudly – about the North of Ireland, refusing the silence that defined earlier generations.
In this way, the band exemplifies a broader cultural shift in Northern Ireland: a movement from silence to speech. They represent only one facet of a larger trend in which artists, writers, filmmakers, and activists are deliberately pushing back against the inherited habits of secrecy. These new voices do not merely reflect the Troubles. They refuse to allow them to remain unspoken. Across literature, journalism, film, and community projects, similar efforts are visible: already mentioned novels, such as Milkman, Close to Home, or Reading in the Dark, bring to light the unspoken paranoia and tensions of Northern Irish communities; the TV series Say Nothing (2024), based on Patrick Radden Keefe’s book of the same name, dramatizes the stories of the so-called “disappeared” and gives voice to previously silenced victims and families; Lyra McKee’s reporting on trauma and post-conflict suicide amplifies the voices of those long silenced; the Prisons Memory Archive documents personal testimonies from former prisoners and their families; popular cultural productions such as Derry Girls (2018-2022) use humour to articulate everyday life during the Troubles; and community-driven initiatives like Féile an Phobail stage plays and spoken-word performances that confront paramilitarism, policing as well as general social memory. These, and many more, diverse expressions signal a collective insistence on speech over silence, and on memory over suppression.
Where Heaney once offered the bleak refrain “whatever you say, say nothing,” contemporary culture increasingly replies: say something. And keep saying it.
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Bild: „British troops investigate a couple on the street in Belfast“ von BeenAroundAWhile, Quelle: Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0, Bild zugeschnitten und in der Größe angepasst. Lizenz: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/deed.de