Calming Conflict: Northern Ireland, Metaphor, and Migration by Brian Lambkin was launched in the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) at the end of February 2020 – just before ‘lock-down’. As part of the events marking the Twenty-Fifth anniversary of ‘The Agreement’, which Calming Conflict refers to as the ‘Belfast~Good Friday Agreement’, there will be a ‘launch’ of the new e-Book edition on 31 March 2023, at PRONI, organised by the publishers: the Ulster Historical Foundation (UHF) in partnership with the Mellon Centre for Migration Studies (MCMS).
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About the event
The event will start (in person and on-line) at 11:30 a.m.
Its focus will be on how the new e-Book edition of Calming Conflict deals with the ‘Belfast~Good Friday Agreement’.
As Professor Sir George Bain observed in his original Foreword to Calming Conflict, ‘we’re not even agreed on whether we call it the Belfast Agreement of the Good Friday Agreement, or both!’ In the Revised Foreword which he has kindly provided for the new e-Book edition, he picks up on this issue:
Recently I read that this is still the case: ‘those from a nationalist background describe the settlement as the Good Friday Agreement [GFA] while those from a unionist tradition invariably prefer and favour the Belfast Agreement [BA]’ (Paul Walsh, ‘Three Cheers for the Belfast Good Friday Agreement’, Irish Times, 21/01/2023). To complicate things, however, I also saw this front-page headline in the traditionally unionist-leaning Belfast Telegraph: ‘Exclusive Poll: Most Unionists would vote against GFA [sic] now’ (29/01/2023). Paying closer attention to such apparently ‘small differences’ (as in the ways we ‘modulate’ in referring to ‘The Agreement’) is a principal concern of Calming Conflict.
There will be three presentations, each followed by Q.&A., with the opportunity for contributions from the floor and those participating by Zoom on-line.
The opening presentation will be by the author, Brian Lambkin, explaining the new features of this e-Book edition and how it links to Calming Conflict’s ‘GIS Companion Website’ (https://go.qub.ac.uk/gisCALM). It will highlight in particular how Calming Conflict deals with the ‘Belfast~Good Friday Agreement’ and its ‘precursors’ – particularly the little-known document ‘Sharing Responsibility’ (1977), which some claim is its most important ‘precursor’ (Novosel 2013, 214).
The main speaker will be the veteran Irish News cartoonist Ian Knox, whose cartoon ‘Disagreement’ (his take on ‘The Agreement’) appears on the front cover of Calming Conflict.
The closing presentation, 'A Response to Calming Conflict as an e-Book;, will be by Professor Donald Akenson
The Q & A session will be introduced by Anne and Colm Murray-Cavanagh
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