ABSTRACT
Oral history, a reconstruction of the past based on personal testimony, is ‘a history built around people’ that ‘thrusts life into history itself and widens its scope’. The historical record bears testimony to the presence of religious women ministering to victims wherever there has been conflict, disease, deprivation, pain, and poverty. The Troubles was an ethno-nationalist conflict in which religion was a cultural reality, a marker of identity that conveyed a sense of belonging. Interestingly, religious women revealed distinctly different attitudes toward sectarianism from some male clergy who cleaved to the widely held view that Northern Ireland was, from top to bottom, infected by a deeply rooted, ubiquitous sectarian disease, ingrained over generations, requiring generations more to erase. Religious women were major contributors to the process of legitimacy erosion within the community and even amongst combatants, playing an important part in creating a climate and depth of communication that made successful negotiations more likely.
