Last week a friend happened to mention to me that she was to attend a lecture by Giorgio Agamben, the Italian philosopher and critic.

Despite a fundamental ignorance of his work, the name was familiar from conversations with friends who edit a philosophical journal in Paris.

So, off to the Casa Italiana I hopped. The subject of the lecture was 'civil war' or 'statis' in the Greek from which the concept is derived. He described how civil war in the pelepneese was followed by amnesty, which shares a common root with amnesia but is quite distinct. For our forebears the amnesty was an instrument to overcome the acrimony generated by civil war. In 403 bc the victorious democrats undertook 'me mnesikakein', which means literally not to recall the wrongs committed nor nurture bad memories. The essence of the concept is clear: in order that the population may leave the rupture of internecine strife behind, there must be no instrumental use of memory to cultivate hate. Civil war was understood not to be the unthinkable and instead had mechanisms to facilitate its surmounting.

30.10.2001

Charles Foliard was shot dead yesterday in Strabane, Co. Tyrone. I know the town, it's desperately poor and has one of the highes unemployment rates in the six counties which constitute 'Northern Ireland'. He had been released from jail some years previously, having served time for attempted murdewr of a catholic colleague in 1991. When he was twenty years of age.

Upon release, he apparently severed his links with the UFF. Whilst he may have been a sectarian at twenty, the fact that he was with his 16 year old catholic girlfriend before her house when shot is sufficient to demonstrate that this was a past he had left behind.

Ballistic tests showed that the gun used in his murder was lost by the RUC a year previously. A republican faction was presumed responsible for his death. In cold military terms, individuals posting to Irish political sites lauded his execution as a legitimate miltiary act.

I was upset.

Many people in Ireland have friends who are former prisoners. The change in the political climate means that many of these people feel very differently now to when they committed the acts for which they were jailed. This is not to say that there is a general disavowal of violence or a distancing from acts performed in the context of the conflict. The prescriptions for confronting the unacceptable social

system have changed for many of those with the experience and literal education of the collective experience of protracted incarceration.

The dynamic of the sectarian conflict has stalled in much of the region.

In such circumstances, do they not all merit a second chance? Particularly those who have pointedly distanced themselves from sectarianism? Or are they to carry the stigma of 'orange fascist' or 'fenian murderer' forever?

Amnesty need not be about forgetting, but it might mean the decommissioning of the poison - though not the lessons- of memory.

I wish the voice of Agamben could be heard in Strabane. Rather than the voice of the surrender, it rings for transformation, overcoming, a step on the path to where there's space for all at the rendez-vous of victory, which, as Aimee Cesaire tells us is the only place worth going for all of us who have no monopoly on beauty, violence and intelligence.