“All wars are fought twice”

“All wars are fought twice” frames the book’s central concern with the afterlife of conflict: the fighting may subside, but the struggle over memory continues. Attributed in the epigraph to Viet Thanh Nguyen, the expression links the battlefield to the later, contested work of telling, concealing, and commemorating what happened.

The epigraph and its two battlefields

The epigraph expands the expression into a contrast between the battlefield and memory. The first is where violence occurs; the second is where its meaning and legacy remain at stake. The phrase therefore does more than announce a subject about war. It gives the book a structure for examining how personal testimony, political denial, public commemoration, and silence shape the history that follows violence.

In the book’s account of The Troubles, this second struggle is not presented as a settled reckoning. The Good Friday Agreement established power sharing, but the conflict ended in stalemate rather than in an unmistakable victory for either side. Although the Royal Ulster Constabulary was rebranded as the Police Service of Northern Ireland and much of the discrimination challenged by the civil-rights movement had receded, there was no formal process for deciding how the conflict should be understood or commemorated. The absence of such a process left the past open to competing accounts.

Denial, silence, and control of the past

The book connects that unresolved condition to Gerry Adams’s refusal to acknowledge that he had been in the IRA. His continued denials mattered beyond his individual history: they suggested that speaking openly about one’s role might still be unsafe. Martin McGuinness’s 2001 acknowledgment that he had been a member of the Provos, and second-in-command in Derry in the early 1970s, came in the specific context of an inquiry into Bloody Sunday, where he would receive immunity from prosecution. The contrast underlines how the conditions surrounding a disclosure could shape what became speakable.

The same contest over memory appears in the account of Sinn Féin’s treatment of internal critics. The party’s leadership portrayed dissenters such as Brendan Hughes, Dolours Price, Marian Price, and Anthony McIntyre as dissidents or opponents of the peace process. The narrative describes this discipline as helping preserve a particular account of the conflict and the peace process, a monopoly over the memory of republican armed struggle. Against that backdrop, the expression’s second battlefield is also an institutional one: the struggle over who may speak credibly and which account can stand as the public version.

A peace that does not settle memory

The later landscape of Belfast gives the expression a visible counterpart. The city centre could appear cosmopolitan, with familiar chain stores, film production at Titanic Studios, and tourist tours led by former combatants to sites associated with the conflict. Yet the appearance of distance coexisted with persistent division: more than 90 per cent of children in Northern Ireland still attended segregated primary schools, and peace walls continued to separate neighbourhoods. In some districts, people even walked farther to reach a bus stop where they would not fear harassment. The conflict’s past was at once packaged as history for visitors and present in the boundaries of everyday life.

Commemoration and political symbols remained contentious as well. In 2012, Belfast City Council’s decision to limit the days on which the Union Jack flew above City Hall prompted an attempted storming of the building and riots. Such episodes make the book’s central distinction consequential: an end to large-scale violence does not itself resolve the meanings attached to the conflict or the symbols through which communities remember it.

The paradox of continued organization

The account also complicates any simple opposition between peace and the persistence of paramilitary structures. A report discussed in the book argued that the cohesion and authority of republican and loyalist organizations after their ceasefires helped manage members and support political progress. Their hierarchies could restrain dissent and limit the risk of renewed violence. For critics such as Hughes, Price, and McIntyre, the same discipline seemed self-interested and cruel; the book nevertheless presents the report’s counterintuitive suggestion that it could also help keep the conflict from reigniting.

The expression thus holds together two consequences of an unresolved past. Memory can preserve silence, political control, and division; the structures that carry that past can also help contain renewed violence. Rather than implying that the second struggle will produce a single final account, the epigraph prepares the reader for a history in which the conflict’s ending and its meaning remain distinct questions.