The Troubles in Ballybogoin: Memory and Identity in Northern Ireland (review)

In The Troubles in Ballybogoin, William Kelleher explores how space, history, and memory are contested in Northern Ireland. Kelleher’s work in Ballybogoin began during the Troubles in the mid-1980s and continued through the relatively more peaceful time of 1999. The site of Kelleher’s research is Ballybogoin, a fictitious name for a real town in the western region of Northern Ireland. Located west of the River Bann, which marks the dividing line between the rural west and the relatively industrialized eastern section of Northern Ireland, Ballybogoin lies less than fifteen miles from the contested border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, the state to which the vast majority of local Irish nationalists desire to belong. Ballybogoin is a socially and politically divided place; Catholics slightly outnumber Protestants in the town but form a clear majority in its hinterland. The Irish Catholic nationalists become the main subject matter of the book.

Despite his lengthy residence in the area, Kelleher never became very familiar with the Protestants, a fact that he admits but does not explain in great depth. He does suggest that the people of Ballybogoin identified him as a Roman Catholic. Although Kelleher’s book is about identity in Northern Ireland, and although he delineates and interprets a number of sites where the work of identity formation takes place, he largely skips over the question of his own identity. However, it is but a minor gap in an impressive interpretive account of the riven social and political postcolonial landscape of Ballybogoin.

Questions of identity dating from seventeenth- century colonial times are paramount in Ballybogoin. “Telling,” a practice carried out by both Catholics and Protestants, refers to the attempt to determine whether strangers are Catholic or Protestant. Using cues such as names, place of residence, schools attended, and class appearance, Ballybogoin Catholics said their interpretations of sectarian identity were correct over 90 percent of the time. In Ballybogoin, telling was a continual, everyday social action that affected interactions and social relations. Kelleher states that telling was a struggle over classification, helping to sustain a discourse that had its roots in colonial power and showing that colonial relations continued in the 1980s in Ballybogoin.

Kelleher’s research asserts that “manhood” is a strategy of colonial resistance, as he describes and probes workers’ gendered identities on the shop floor of a Ballybogoin glassworks factory. One of the Catholic nationalist enterprises inspired by the social justice movements in and around Ballybogoin in the 1960s, the glassworks factory became the site of a fiveweek strike in 1985. Kelleher shows how social memory enters the workaday world to hinder communication and stymie progressive change. The workers’ inability to win the strike was not simply a failure of will but rather, according to Kelleher, an indicator of other struggles under way in Northern Ireland. At the glassworks and during the strike, class relations were worked out in terms of ethnicity or race, and no successful class-based strategy developed. Kelleher writes, “The workers’ attitudes toward class issues were profoundly affected by the culture and politics they brought through the door. Political and class identities were negotiated simultaneously and none was determining” (p. 150).

Given the entrenched nature of the sectarian divide, the cautionary words with which Kelleher closes his book seem well chosen. He states that decolonization in places like Ballybogoin in Northern Ireland is a huge task. The legacy of past violence from all three sides—the British state, Ulster unionists and loyalists, and Irish nationalists—lies heavy on the land. Kelleher’s book is a positive contribution toward increasing the understanding of the complexity of the Troubles. Such an understanding is an important component of any peaceful resolution of the entrenched conflict in the north of Ireland. Kelleher’s book is a contribution not only to Irish studies but also to anthropology and postcolonial studies in general.