Title
The IRA Apology of 2002 and Forgiveness in Northern Ireland's Troubles: A Cross-National Study of Printed Media
Abstract
This study provides a cross-national exploration of the media and public responses to the 2002 Irish Republican Army (IRA) statement of apology for the hundreds of non-combatant deaths caused by them over the past 30 years. The study explored responses to the statement in national, regional, and local news papers across the United States, England, and Northern Ireland. It was hypothesized that relational closeness to victims of the IRA campaign would affect attitudes toward the IRA apology, as would geographical closeness to the political violence in Northern Ireland; also within Northern Ireland there would be differences in attitudes toward the statement due to the ethnopolitical orientation of the newspapers' intended readership. The results broadly supported these hypotheses, with the U.S. print media being generally more positive and the English print media more negative in attitude toward the statement of apology. Also, among responses in England, those areas that had suffered directly from IRA violence tended to have the most negative reactions of all. In Northern Ireland, newspapers with a predominately Catholic readership responded to the IRA apology generally positively, whereas newspapers with a predominately Protestant readership responded generally negatively. The results illustrate difficulties facing peace processes in settings of ethnic violence and the complexity of responses to apology and forgiveness of relevant publics within and outside actual conflict areas.
Disciplines
Psychology
Recommended Citation
Ferguson, N., Binks, E., Roe, M. D., Brown, J., Adams, T., Cruise, S. M., & Lewis, C. A. (2007) 'The IRA Apology of 2002 and Forgiveness in Northern Ireland's Troubles: A Cross-National Study of Printed Media'. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 13(1), 93-113
Digital Commons Citation
Ferguson, N; Binks, E; Roe, M D.; Brown, J; Adams, T; Cruise, S M.; and Lewis, Christopher A., "The IRA Apology of 2002 and Forgiveness in Northern Ireland's Troubles: A Cross-National Study of Printed Media" (2007). Psychology. Paper 4.
http://epubs.glyndwr.ac.uk/psyc/4
Comments
Metadata only available from this repository. Information for the final version of the article as published in the print edition of the journal Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology by Routledge Taylor & Francis (2007) is available online at http://www.informaworld.com Contact the author via email at - ca.lewis@glyndwr.ac.uk for information about this article.