Reckoning Without Transition: Truth, Trust, and Survivor Voices in Non-Recent Institutional Abuse Inquiries

This paper explores the concept and practice of truth and truth recovery within Non-Recent Institutional Abuse (NRIA) inquiries in Ireland, both north and south, and in England, situating these processes within the broader international literature on transitional justice. Transitional justice scholarship has long positioned truth recovery as a foundational response to mass human rights violations, emphasising its role in acknowledging harm, restoring dignity to victims, rebuilding institutional trust, and facilitating forms of societal reconciliation. Yet despite its normative importance, “truth” remains a conceptually fragile and under-theorised idea, lacking a settled definition and often assumed rather than critically examined. While existing transitional justice literature has focused predominantly on post-conflict or regime-transition contexts, this paper shifts attention to how truth is pursued, negotiated, and constructed within long-established democratic societies responding to non-recent institutional abuse. Drawing on original empirical fieldwork conducted as part of my doctoral research, the paper examines three major NRIA mechanisms: the Historical Institutional Abuse Inquiry (Northern Ireland, 2017), the Commission of Investigation into Mother and Baby Institutions (Republic of Ireland, 2021), and the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse (England, 2022). Through in-depth interviews with survivors, practitioners, and officials, alongside detailed documentary analysis, the study interrogates how different actors conceptualise “truth” and how these understandings shape inquiry processes, findings, and outcomes. Building on and extending the limited empirical scholarship in this area (see McAlinden et al. 2025), the paper seeks to develop a new typology of “survivor truth”, which foregrounds survivors’ lived experiences as central epistemic sources rather than supplementary or testimonial evidence. It demonstrates how survivor truth operates across emotional, relational, and narrative dimensions, frequently sitting in tension with legalistic, institutional, or archival forms of truth. The analysis further explores the interconnections between truth, trust, and memory, arguing that failures to meaningfully engage survivor truth risk reproducing harm and undermining the legitimacy of truth-recovery mechanisms. By conceptualising survivor truth as an alternative form of truth, one that extends beyond formal accountability or fact-finding, this paper contributes to a more inclusive and globally relevant theory of truth recovery. In doing so, it repositions NRIA inquiries within international debates on reckoning with the past and challenges transitional justice scholars to rethink truth-making practices in democratic, non-transitional settings.