Culture and Identity Politics in Northern Ireland (review)

Abstract

Mairead Nic Craith, Culture and Identity Politics in Northern Ireland. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2003, 256 pp. Mairead Nic Craith's Culture and Identity Politics in Northern Ireland offers a fine portrayal of a phase in Irish politics and history distinguished by a degree of political collaboration but also infused with symbolic and identity conflict. The largely non-violent but symbolic discord of this period is the root paradox described in Nic Craith's account: a Northern Ireland principally unified in an endeavor for peace but robustly divided the precise nature of officially recognized political identities. Mairead Nic Craith's work is part survey of contemporary developments in Northern Irish identity politics and part social critique of these recent manifestations. The official efforts the part of the British-supported Northern Irish government encourage the development of political identity along the two historically constituted poles of Northern Irish political activity: Nationalist and Unionist. Further, Nic Craith contends that the officially legitimated identity categories differ greatly from identity on the ground in Northern Irish society. Public political identity is not a multifaceted assemblage, but rather a largely stagnant and immutable construction around which individuals organize. These manifestations of Nationalist and Unionist identity are alternately, for Nic Craith, the objects of study and subjects of criticism. For Nic Craith, the dialectic between political factions and the government serves as the construction site of Irish political identity. The locus of this identity negotiation is the where identity crystallizes in political discourse, educational programs, and museums. The cultural and political characteristics, exported into the public sphere, provide the ingredients for the shaping of Irish political institutions and identity. Nic Craith's vision of the public sphere can be likened to a pair of individuals piecing together a jig-saw puzzle. Equate the Nationalist and Unionist traditions to the builders. The aspiration for the actors is not the construction of the picture into a stable and unifying whole. Rather, the goal is the construction of a maximum portion of the puzzle for one's self. Just as the Unionist and Nationalist construct identity through a pool of common resources (political life, notions of nationhood, ethnicity, and language), advancement is only achieved through the stripping of pieces from the other builder. But this dualistic notion of Irish identity is in principle a myth. In between the traditional identities of Nationalist and Unionist lie various adaptations of each. Further, actors with multi-ethnic identities creep into the margins of the public sphere, but Nic Craith first focuses the two principal actors in Northern Irish Politics. The English government, a long-time ally of the Unionist factions in Northern Ireland, has in the last two decades attempted to realign itself as a neutral negotiator. The Irish government has, as well, adopted a more conciliatory stance. The two political divisions are, as Dr. Nic Craith notes, not well-defined and united political fronts. Rather, the political identity of Northern Ireland is perhaps best viewed as a complex web of competing identities and goals in political life. Emphatically, however, all of the actors attempt to construct a picture that reveals two clear and essentialized political identities. British policies attempt the reconciliation of the two while the more vociferous groups endeavor to assemble an officially supported political and/or cultural identity at the expense of the other. Essential to Nic Craith's argument is this public competition for this governmental recognition by the political parties in Northern Ireland. Consider her discussion of the creation of Ulster-British culture in the 1980s. In response to what was viewed as a political and educational saturation of Gaelic history and culture, Protestant groups (such as the Ulster Young Unionist Council) sought to dispel the labeling of Ulster-Scots mythology as nationally Irish. …