A story of Punk & Peace in Northern Ireland

How Youth in Northern Ireland combated the sectarian civil war known as the Troubles with Punk Music

By Linnea Bergman, DIS Cross Cultural Communication student, spring 2015

One of the main things I took away from our week-long field trip to Northern Ireland, to study cross-cultural communication, is the importance of narratives. Out of our many site visits, to gain a deeper understanding of their longstanding territorial and cultural conflict between Catholics and Protestants, I found myself most interested by our visit to the Workman’s Club in Dublin.

There, we immersed ourselves into punk music and learned about its relevance to the conflict – and I want to share my thoughts about Northern Irish punk music and its functioning for cross-cultural communication.

To provide a brief context, the Northern Irish conflict, also commonly referred to as “The Troubles,” is a violent thirty-year conflict started off by a civil rights march in Londonderry in 1968. Basically, although it’s a whole lot more complicated, the violent disputes are grounded in clashing of interests between nationalistic Catholics, wanting separation from the United Kingdom and loyalist protestants (settling down in the area after England colonized it in the 16th century) wanting to stay a part of the United Kingdom union. In recent times the first group started protesting against discrimination by the last previously dominant part which resulted in the Troubles. So this, simply put, is the entrenched history that allowed for a fertile ground for youth to create punk music.

From the start of The Troubles until 1977, the music scene in Belfast (the capital of Northern Ireland) was as good as dead because of the army’s constant presence in the streets during the day and bombings dominating at night (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7797071.stm). Punk in Belfast came about as a wave in the late ‘70s and aimed to have an impact on the music scene as well as politically. The youth were tired of the dull and sad life the violence and fighting brought about to the country, and they needed to express it in a way that also provided them with an outlet for emotions. Punk music allowed them to do that back then.

When a crisis arises in society, understanding the framing of narratives and stories becomes even more important in trying to grasp the root of the conflict. As a class, we approached many ways in which narratives can come about as a result of an incident, as well as form for the purpose of keeping an already occurring conflict going. Whether it’s due to the former or the latter, the use of symbols plays a very important role in forming stories and cultural unity as well as separation. With regard to Punk music, this was also true.

Punk against The Troubles
As an example, both “The Undertones,” formed in 1975, and “Stiff Little Fingers,” (both notable Northern Irish Punk bands) started in 1977, made good use of logos. Stiff Little Fingers were very political in their music. This is also represented in their logo, that is: the backside a traditional finger peace-sign, meaning something in the lines of “fuck off.” Their lyrics reflect their political agenda with regard to the conflict and their desire for it to stop.

Here is an excerpt from their song “Suspect Device”: “Just take a look around you, at the bitterness and spite, why can’t we take over and try to put it right.” Although this is criticizing the conflict in a lyrically pretty sweet and heart-warming way, they are of course – as Punks do – screaming out the words. In this way, the Stiff Little Fingers or the genre of Punk in Northern Ireland at the time of The Troubles, provided youth with a way of cross-culturally communicating a political message. While, at the same time, expressing frustration through the aggressive delivery of the lyrics/singing.

The Undertones, on the other hand, were not political. They too were sick of the conflict, but expressed it through lyrics about everyday relatively “insignificant things,” such as teenage dreams. In their song “Teenage Kicks,” for example, they reflect their need for being able to be normal teenagers and not have to focus their entire lives around the conflict: “I’m gonna call her on the telephone, have her over cos I’m all alone, I need excitement, oh I need it bad, and it’s the best I’ve ever had.”

What both Stiff Little Fingers and the Undertones have in common nonetheless, is that they gave youth in Northern Ireland a way out of the conflict through the expression and cultural language of Punk. In this way, Punk music also provided an outlet for processing complex emotions and channeling aggression in a way that united people in dislike of the conflict in and of itself, rather than perpetuating and directing aggression towards a third “culpable” party. Punk offered another form of narrative and identity to young individuals.

I can’t say that I think Punk music plays a role as an identity marker in Northern Ireland (and around) today. However, it is clear to me that it had a significant history for why it came about and had an impact on the lives of (mainly) youth during the years of the Troubles. There is no doubt about that. And, the main lesson I took with me from this experience is that the past can be used as a powerful tool to tell something about who people are in the present.

The role of memory and forgetting of the past is what distinguishes what Catholics, Protestants, and Punks promoted with regard to the conflict. Catholics and Protestants have used the past to remember injustices and in that way kept the conflict going, focusing on what was instead of what can be – i.e., peace.

Punk music, on the other hand, used the past to form a narrative that directed hatred towards the conflict in and of itself, promoting the forgetting and the avoidance of fighting. The same way Catholics and protestants have created a narrative around their past, reframed the present for their own socio-political purposes, and consolidated these strong sentiments and identities through symbols to perpetuate the conflict, so did Punk music to work against it.

Simply put, the youth were tired of the violence, and the sad and dull lifestyle it came with – and they used music to combat it.