Hockey and Habitus: Sport and National Identity in Northern Ireland

Abstract

In the official program of the 2005 European Hockey Nations' Championship held in Dublin, Lynsey McVicker, the captain of the Irish women's hockey team noted that, When you are from Northern Ireland, sometimes you experience a confusion of identity—we're not quite the same as those from the Republic of Ireland. British or Irish? In a sense we [are] outsiders looking in. 1 Her comment highlights one dimension of a more complex social phenomenon: the question of national habitus, or what the pioneering sociologist Norbert Elias called those traits of national group identity—what we call the 'national character'—[that] are a layer of social habitus built very deeply and firmly into the personality structure of the individual.