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PROJECT TIMELINE
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Rationale For Chronology of Events |
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August 1968 – August 1998
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Echoing the focus of the epilogues Workshop Education Programme this chronology of events spans the 30 years from 1968 to 1998.
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It adopts the emergence of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) and in particular the seminal event of the NICRA march on Saturday October 5th 1968 in Derry as its starting point. It concludes its exploration with that of the signing of the ‘Good Friday / Belfast Agreement’ in April 1998 and the subsequent bombing at Omagh in August of the same year by the Real IRA (RIRA) which is its end point.
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Clearly, just as there are differing views on what the conflict was, there are correspondingly different views as to when it started and when it ended or in fact, if it’s actually ended at all. Some people take the view and date the starting point of the conflict - set against a backdrop of rising unionist and Protestant unease about the reforming measures of Captain Terence O’Neill, who had become prime minister of Northern Ireland in 1963 - with the killing of two Catholic civilians and a Protestant civilian by members of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in June 1966. Others view the arrival of British troops on to the streets of Derry in August 1969 as a more appropriate starting point. And there are others yet again who insist on dating the beginning of the conflict with the partition of Ireland and the formation of the Northern Ireland state in 1921.
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It is important to state that while the project acknowledges the validity of all these differing positions, the ‘epilogues’ Workshop Education Programme does not see its primary objective as one of providing an exhaustive and authoritative factual chronology of contemporary Irish/British history. Its primary aim rather is to provide a democratic educational space where participants can explore, examine and process what produced the conflict in and about ‘Northern Ireland’ and what sustained it over a thirty year period.
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The project does however recognise the need to provide participants of the programme with factual information that will better enable them to negotiate the complex political landscape of the conflict - which is generally acknowledged to have taken place over the course of thirty years, between the years 1968 to 1998 - consequently we offer this ‘chronology of events’ purely as a guide in this regard.
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The chronology is therefore designed to function primarily as a contextualising timeline and political backdrop to the twenty seven individual testimonies featured on the ‘epilogues’ DVD and project web site. The DVD and web site are the primary core resources for the ‘epilogues’ Workshop Education Programme.
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