The Troubles, by contrast, concluded in a stalemate. The Good Friday Agreement envisioned a “power sharing” arrangement. But there was a sense in which neither side had really emerged triumphant. There were some cosmetic changes: the RUC was rebranded the Police Service of Northern Ireland; the structural discrimination that the civil rights protests sought to challenge had mostly gone away. Northern Ireland had always been devoted to the theater of historical commemoration. But there was no formal process for attempting to figure out how to commemorate, or even to understand, the Troubles.
