The Prisons Memory Archive: Representing the Troubles
A collection of 175 filmed walk-and-talk interviews back inside Armagh Gaol and the Long Kesh/Maze, seeks to address a conflicted past in a contested present
The Maze prison: From its beginning, the project understood the need to address the political and psychic sensitivities of these memories for both participants and viewers; ethical protocols of inclusivity, co-ownership and life-storytelling were employed in order to address concerns about remembering experiences from a conflict that is within living memory and which continues to produce spasms of violence
With the North of Ireland emerging out of violence, there is a general, but not yet officially recognised, consensus that storytelling, in the sense of giving voice to experiences, can be one of the ways of addressing the legacy of a conflicted past in a contested present. The Northern Ireland Victims Commissioner’s We Will Remember Them (1998) [1], the Report of the Consultative Group on the Past [2], and the Hass O’Sullivan Report (2014) [3]each called for storytelling as part of a range of recommendations requiring government support, yet none have been implemented to date and the Stormont House Agreement’s promise of addressing the legacy of the past has yet to reach resolution.
The Prisons Memory Archive (PMA) is one of many bottom-up initiatives that have attempted to fill the gap of addressing a conflicted past in a contested present [4]. It is a collection of 175 filmed walk-and-talk interviews back inside Armagh Gaol, which held mainly female prisoners, and the Long Kesh/Maze Prison, which held male prisoners during this period. From its beginning, the project understood the need to address the political and psychic sensitivities of these memories for both participants and viewers; ethical protocols of inclusivity, co-ownership and life-storytelling were employed in order to address concerns about remembering experiences from a conflict that is within living memory and which continues to produce spasms of violence [5].