Events

This public event will be introduced by Professor Laura McAtackney and will focus on two panels that will represent and extend discussions that began during workshops hosted at University of Ulster in the Spring of 2025 on themes of Dealing with Difficult Pasts: (1) Institutional Abuse and (2) Gendered Experiences and Sexual Violence.

Panel 1:  Institutional Abuse 

We know there have been significant failures in official approaches to understanding institutional abuse and communicating those findings to the public. These failings have often been ensured from the start due to an overreliance on the narratives and logics of the official records created by those organizations and individuals who operated the institutions. How can we ensure these processes are completed better in the future? How can we ensure experiences of victims and survivors form the basis of our understandings? How can official investigations be shaped so their findings centre the victims and survivors, and their results can be translated to inform public memory?

Contributors: Wesley Geddis (Public Record Office, NI), Gerry McCann (survivor),  Roisin McGlone (survivor and Member of Truth Recovery Independent Panel), and Fiona Ryan, Commissioner for Survivors of Institutional Child Abuse, NI.

Panel 2: Gendered Experiences and Sexual Violence 

We know that to date, there have been limited attempts to meaningfully incorporate the nuances and realities of women’s experience of our difficult past into our wider understandings of the North of Ireland. How can we ensure we gender our understandings better moving forward? How can women’s experiences impact and change our largely male-centred understandings of the past? How can our research into the past be more meaningfully connected to how we understand the enduringly problematic experiences of women today? 

Contributors: Céire Broderick (Critical Epistemologies Across Borders, UCC), Patricia Carey (Special Advocate for Survivors of Institutional Abuse), Linda Connolly (Social Sciences Institute, Maynooth), and Fionnuala French (NI Executive).

The event will conclude with a keynote address (with book launch) by investigative journalist, author and former BBC reporter Chris Moore, who has recently published his “strong and unnerving” (Irish Times) exposé of abuse at Kincora: Britain’s Shame (2025).

This event is co-ordinated by Professors Laura McAtackney (UCC), Roisín Higgins (Maynooth Uni), and Patricia Lundy (UU), with funding from UCC Futures - Collective Social Futures, Radical Humanities Laboratory (UCC) and the University of Ulster.