ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the narratives surrounding Troubles-related violence in Northern Ireland. It argues an analytical lens on the state of exception and the legitimating crisis dialectic helps to explain how and why belligerents, their sympathisers, and their 'host' populations justified the suspension of rights characteristic of the idealised political and social systems. They purported to produce or protect through war and violence. For Patrick Magee and other members of the irish republican army, the Troubles were a state of exception because of the political crisis engendered by the ongoing British presence on the island of Ireland. During the height of terrible violence of the early 1990s, the republican proclamation of the state of exception was not absolute. Paramilitary groups might wish to prioritise their own dead 'volunteers', and through that prioritisation, perform the relevance of the state of exception. But there are competing usages of both those bodies and the bodies of non-combatants that perform other narrations of Troubles violence.
