Communities In Northern Ireland Research Articles

Young people with LGB identity and their sense of belonging: Evidence from Northern Ireland – A society emerging from violent social conflict

In 2023 Northern Ireland celebrated the 25th anniversary of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement (GFA) which is regarded as a milestone of the Northern Ireland peace process. Via the 1998 Northern Ireland Act, the peace process saw equality and anti-discrimination legislation being implemented in Northern Ireland that legislates that public authorities must carry out their duties with due regard to equality of opportunity, including between persons of different sexual orientations and gender identities. Using time series data from 2013 to 2023 taken from the annual Young Life and Times (YLT) survey conducted among a randomized sample of 16-year olds in Northern Ireland (N = 15,162), this article explores the extent to which same-sex attracted young women and men express a sense of belonging to, and influence in, their local neighborhoods and Northern Ireland. We argue that the sense of belonging and influence can be used as suitable policy indicators to assess how same-sex attracted young people fare in Northern Ireland, a society emerging from significant violent conflict. The YLT dataset allows us to track, if any change in attitudes can be detected over the last decade. Our analysis shows that there was an increase in the proportion of young people, especially among young women, expressing same-sex attraction. However, our study also indicates that, regardless of gender, LGB 16-year olds consistently felt a lesser sense of belonging and influence than their non-LGB individuals. We found no LGB-specific differences among respondents with different religious affiliations. LGB respondents disproportionately rejected both Protestant and Catholic faiths and community affiliations, unlike their non-LGB counterparts. Our findings are a strong indicator that religion still plays a major part in the relationship between ethno-national communities in Northern Ireland and that there still is a long way to go until LGB young people feel valued and feel that they belong.

Improving access to free school meals for children in poverty in Northern Ireland

ObjectivesTwo thirds of children in poverty did not receive free school meals (FSM) between 2015 and 2019 in Northern Ireland (Department for Communities in Northern Ireland, 2022). This project aims to explore this discrepancy between eligibility and access to FSM and improve access to FSM for all children in poverty.
 MethodsData from the Family Resources Survey (FRS) between 2017 and 2020 was obtained from the UK Data Service and FSM eligibility was calculated using the current criteria provided by the Department for Education in Northern Ireland. Cross-tabulations were used to explore the number of children in receipt of FSM compared to those eligible but not in receipt of FSM. Multilevel logistic regression models used FSM eligibility as the dependent variable and relative and absolute poverty before and after housing costs and number of siblings in a family as the independent variables, controlling for age and gender of the child.
 ResultsPreliminary analysis suggests that increasing the income threshold for families with more than one child provides greater access to FSM for children in poverty. There is also evidence that using the OECD modified equivalisation to adjust household income for larger families improves the rate of FSM eligibility for children in relative and absolute poverty before and after housing costs. The findings aim to provide evidence on the most appropriate threshold and equivalisation calculation required to ensure all children in poverty are eligible for FSM, giving greater access to FSM and educational opportunities to those children who need it most.
 ConclusionThe project will inform the current Anti-Poverty Strategy which is under review in Northern Ireland highlighting the need to consider family size through equivalisation into the FSM eligibility criteria. It also emphasizes the importance of administrative data to inform policy on FSM and other educational opportunities in Northern Ireland.

Making sense of segregation: Transitional thinking and contested space

In segregated societies space is typically a source of conflict and confusion. Everyday geographies are often navigated through complex patterns of movement that are sensitive to the ‘other’ and their spatial practices. Individuals adjust and tailor their movements, in part, because of the fear of the unknown. This paper, using three embedded cases of interface communities in Northern Ireland, considers how processes of spatial ‘sensemaking’ can reduce anxiety about contested spaces in deeply divided communities. The paper makes three important contributions. First it extends conceptualisations of sensemaking to a focused reading of geographical space in a divided society. This marks an important extension for a theory that until now has been largely confined to the organisational studies literature and provides a theoretical scaffolding with which to better understand individual and group responses to spatial contestation and division. Second, it identifies how processes of sensemaking, married with what we term a ‘connecting methodology’, can instigate individuals to make, break and give sense to themselves and others around issues of past contestation and current disputes. Finally, it argues that these interventions can occasion transitional thinking and new movement through contested space, an important contribution for those working and living in divided societies. The paper draws on data from a wider project on community commemoration in Northern Ireland which explore how individuals and communities collectively move through contested spaces. The process of sensemaking, we argue, can redefine the parameters for participatory methodologies and provide unique opportunities to break deadlocks in deeply divided societies.

Using GIS to analyse early years provision in Northern Ireland – adding another year of segregated education?

ABSTRACT Early years education is offered free to all three-year-olds in Northern Ireland, prior to starting primary school, and most parents take advantage of this offer for their children. An experience of early years education has been shown to considerably improve life chances and to be important in starting the process of building a shared society, particularly important in a divided society emerging from conflict such as Northern Ireland. This paper will examine the degree to which that provision is segregated using GIS analysis and explore the factors which influence those divisions within the wider context of a deeply segregated system of education. Pre-school education in Northern Ireland is found to be highly segregated by community background, and there is a tendency for pre-schools to be more segregated than the areas in which they are located. This may exacerbate existing divisions within education and adding a further year of segregated education may provide a further impediment to building a shared future for communities in Northern Ireland.

A terrible beauty is burned: gifts, sacrifice and community in Northern Ireland

PurposeSacrifice, integral to gift giving, remains unexplored and undertheorized in marketing. This paper aims to address this shortfall by analyzing the dynamics of sacrifice and theorizing how it serves as an engine of the gift chimney.Design/methodology/approachThe ethnographic investigation of public ceremonial gift giving in sectarian Northern Ireland describes and interprets the complex nature of the gift.FindingsThe authors show that sacrifice is a plausible mechanism of the gift chimney and that the co-occurrence of monadic, dyadic and systemic giving in the same ritual acts as an accelerant.Social implicationsThe authors analyze how public ceremonial gift giving induces sectarian communities to risk convocation, enabling them to exorcize trauma sustained at one another’s hands and to build a platform for future cross-community cohesion in a context of ineffective institutional efforts.Originality/valueSacrifice propels circulation of the gift, creating a social bond between antagonists whose ethos of mutuality depends upon ritualized reciprocal recognition of entangled loss.

Data report on three datasets: Mortality patterns between agricultural and non-agricultural ward areas.

The health of the farming community in Northern Ireland (NI) requires further research as previous mortality studies have reported contradictory results regarding farmers' health outcomes compared against other occupations and the general population. This study collated the NINIS area-level farm census with the population census information across 582 non-overlapping wards of NI to compile three mortality datasets (2001, 2011, and pooled dataset) (NISRA 2019). These datasets allow future researchers to investigate the influence of demographic, farming, and economic predictors on all-cause mortality at the ward level. The 2001 and 2011 mortality datasets were compiled for cross-sectional analyses and subsequently pooled for longitudinal analyses. Findings from these datasets will provide evidence of the influence of Farming Intensity scores influence on death risk within the wards for future researchers to utilise. This data report will aid in the understanding of socio-ecological variables' additive contribution to the risk of death at the ward level within NI. This data report is of interest to the One Health research community as it standardises the environment-human-animal data to pave the way towards a new One Health research paradigm. For example, future researchers can use this nationally representative data to investigate whether agriculturally saturated wards have a higher mortality risk than non-agriculturally based wards of NI.

The coup de grâce to the Union citizen’s right to equal treatment: CG v. The Department for Communities in Northern Ireland,

The coup de grâce to the Union citizen’s right to equal treatment: CG v. The Department for Communities in Northern Ireland,

‘We now have Catholics and Blacks’: Whiteness in a Northern Irish rugby club

Northern Ireland is often considered in terms of the two majority communities, Catholics and Protestants, and the inter-communal conflict which structured, and continues to structure, much of Northern Irish society. However, situated within often volatile situations, the small ethnic minority communities of Northern Ireland have often been overlooked. This article investigates a Northern Irish rugby club, and examines the way in which whiteness is normalised, racist discourses are dismissed, and the sectarian boundaries, which are normally so strongly maintained, are overlooked in the presence of ‘others.’ As such, this research offers a contemporary perspective of the way whiteness, racism and sectarianism intersect in Northern Irish society, and starts a conversation about the provision of sport for ethnic minority communities in Northern Ireland.

‘I’m just a pebble in the pond’: exploring the lived legacies of art for reconciliation

ABSTRACT Since the 1998 Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, the arts have been promoted as capable of reconciling communities in Northern Ireland. In keeping with cultural policy orthodoxies in Britain and Ireland, practitioners are expected to provide even more information on the contribution of their work to this agenda. However, short-term evaluation processes entrench bureaucratic systems of arts administration that occlude, and even hinder, the complex, long-term legacies of particular applied arts projects. This article instead argues that situating participant experience within the broader material conditions of inequality and scarcity they face offers a better account of the transformative power of such projects.

‘The ‘local-visual turn’: understanding peacebuilding in post-conflict societies using photo-elicitation

ABSTRACT The ‘local turn’ and ‘visual turn’ are increasingly crucial in peacebuilding processes in post-conflict societies. This research combines these concepts, offering a deeper understanding of communities experiencing ongoing peace processes and the environments where these processes take place. It uses the ‘local-visual turn’ with a photo-elicitation methodology to understand the relationship between the material world, social realities, and local peacebuilding processes. Specifically, in Northern Ireland, a post-conflict state experiencing ongoing tensions exacerbated by Brexit. Photo-elicitation interviews were carried out across local communities in Northern Ireland. The findings point to four key themes: local understandings of peace processes in Northern Ireland at the onset of Brexit; youth, peace, and the future of Northern Ireland; religion, churches and the peace processes; and paramilitarism and the peace processes. The results demonstrate that peace processes can be more comprehensively understood by rooting research methodologies in local experiences and physical landscapes.

Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground by Susan McKay

Reviewed by: Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground by Susan McKay Dr Kevin Hargaden (bio) Susan McKay, Northern Protestants: On Shifting Ground (Newtownards: Blackstaff Press, 2021), 346 pages. Susan McKay published one of the definitive modern books on Northern Ireland in 2000: Northern Protestants: An Unsettled People (Belfast: Blackstaff Press, 2000). Now, almost a generation later, she has published a sequel. It follows the same format, of using extensive interviews to weave together an evocative impression of the tensions and hopes that lie below the surface of the still-dominant (at least in some respects) community in Northern Ireland. Consisting of ten chapters, organised around four geographic sections – Far North, Belfast, Down to Mid Ulster, and The [End Page 203] Border – the author’s voice only explicitly comes to the fore in the epilogue. The book begins with a description of the annual burning of the effigy of Robert Lundy, the governor of what was then called Londonderry, who advocated for compromise during the 1689 siege. The book ends having convincingly demonstrated the ways in which this founding ‘No Surrender!’ myth of Ulster Unionism is self-immolating. The refusal to adapt, to even engage in such conversations remains foundationally prevalent. Again and again through the book, people describe how they won’t even engage in the formal process of dialogue we call voting (a non-exhaustive list includes: 26, 31, 45, 153, 182, 192, 292). The backdrop for these conversations – which partially took place through the pandemic – are concrete political disputes. The obvious complications around Brexit are central here, but so too are local issues like the ‘cash for ash’ scandal and the unjust treatment of NHS nurses in Northern Ireland. These are issues that can be addressed, even resolved, through community organising and clear political advocacy – developments that are not just permitted to Ulster Protestants but actively encouraged through EU peace funding. And yet so often the conversation with the interview subjects is mired in the endlessly self-referential debate about identity. One person opines that ‘Protestant working-class people don’t have a problem with limited abortion rights. … Gay sex, marriage, nobody gives a damn.’ A surprising perspective perhaps? But they then continue, ‘But see if they put Irish language road signs in my estate? They’ll be gone the next day’ (23). This is not to say that material politics are absent from the conversations that McKay presents. Her interviews engage voices from across the socioeconomic spectrum and they often speak with striking clarity. So one person admits that their standard of living and the ability to own a house and run a car ‘matter more to me than the flag that’s flying above our country’ (122) and another, a community activist, concisely describes the reigning neoliberal orthodoxy of the DUP’s economic policies based around deregulated land development before concluding that she would ‘rather politicians focused on policies that eradicate poverty than deliver food parcels’ (90). The craven greed of Ulster Protestant’s ruling class is a recurring motif. I could almost hear the voice of the conservative Ulster farmer who issued a damning verdict using only polite words: ‘The DUP seem very, very influenced by material gain’ (225). McKay’s interviews thus manage to combine to make an important point: what looks like an absurd preoccupation with questions [End Page 204] of identity for those outside the region are in fact articulations of the hopelessness with respect to material questions for those who live inside. What I mean by that is that there are vast swathes of Ulster Protestantism that have been without meaningful political representation for a long time. There has been little peace dividend in the working class estates or the deep rural interior of Ulster. And it is a material political decision to continue to divert discourse towards seemingly ephemeral identity questions so as to deter any serious questioning about why so many people are so politically homeless that they don’t even bother to spoil their vote. When ‘bread and butter’s hard to come by every day’ then it is easy to understand how one could conclude ‘a flag is all that people really do have to cling to’ (113...

The people's broadcasters

The people's broadcasters

Nodding by the fire: appreciation of the Derry Temple

ABSTRACT I represent an ethnographic inquiry on sacrifice, precarity and reconciliation in a sectarian context through an amalgam of photographs and poetry, to transubstantiate fieldnotes and journal entries into an aesthetic account embodying the art installations that are this ritual process incarnate. I explore the production, consumption and disposition of an artwork called ‘Temple’ by sectarian communities in Northern Ireland through the orchestration of bricoleur artist David Best, which took place in Derry/Londonderry in the spring of 2015. I present a set of photographs that limns the event to anchor a series of poems that unpack the researcher’s and participants’ apprehension of their engagement with the installation. I emphasise material, spatial, emotional and ideological dimensions of the event. Photopoetic representation greatly enhances the researcher’s sensual attention and emotional resonance in the field, challenges the imagination to craft an evocative account of deep, multi-perspectival fidelity, and opens up lived experience to the possibility of empathic intervention.

Dante’s Influence on Seamus Heaney’s Poetry on the Troubles in Northern Ireland: “The Strand at Lough Beg,” “An Afterwards” and “Ugolino”

Dante’s Divine Comedy had an enormous influence on Seamus Heaney’s oeuvre, especially from Field Work (1979) onwards. Heaney exploits the great Dantean epic poem to create a framework that allows him to contextualise some of the most painful political and social episodes in Irish history, namely the Great Hunger and the secular clashes between Protestants and Catholics. Heaney pays special attention to the problems originating from the outburst of the atavistic and sectarian violence—euphemistically known as “the Troubles”—between the unionist and nationalist communities in Northern Ireland as from 1969, causing great suffering and wreaking havoc on the Northern Irish population for decades.

ECJ 15 July 2021, case C-709/20 (The Department for Communities in Northern Ireland), Social Insurance, Other Fundamental Rights

ECJ 15 July 2021, case C-709/20 (The Department for Communities in Northern Ireland), Social Insurance, Other Fundamental Rights

Religion, Memory, and Materiality: Exploring the Origins and Legacies of Sectarianism in the North of Ireland

The early 17th-century Plantation of Ulster, in which the English Crown sought to plant loyal British colonists in the north of Ireland, is commonly understood as overtly religious in intent and action, and is viewed as the foundation for today’s divide between Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland. Archaeological and documentary evidence complicates this straightforward narrative by demonstrating considerable cultural exchange and the emergence of hybrid practices—suggesting that, during the plantation period itself, religion may have been less influential than economic and political pragmatism. By the end of the 17th century, however, religion took on a more prominent political and cultural role, overtly materialized in objects, settlement patterns, and landscapes. The nature and timing for this transition is examined through archaeological case studies and considered in light of contemporary historical memories regarding the plantation and the origins of sectarianism in Ireland.

“You just went out and talked to them.” An Interview with Maurice Hayes (1927-2017) on the Work of the Northern Ireland Community Relations Commission (1969-1975)

This article reflects on the practice of reusing past interviews in order to improve our knowledge of historical events. It focuses on the period of the early years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and draws on Martin J. McCleery’s recent work on internment (2015) to stress the importance of personal testimonies in reassessing the historical impact of micro-events and / or local events on people’s lives. By revisiting an interview with Maurice Hayes conducted in 2004, the author investigates how the interviewee gives meaning to his personal experience of violence by using the scientific framework provided by specialists in oral history. The interview also serves to uncover some aspects of the ground-breaking work that had been implemented by the Northern Ireland Community Relations Commission (1969-1975).

Qualitative research within the Deaf community in Northern Ireland: A multilingual approach

In this methodology article, the authors illustrate how they conducted multilingual qualitative research in an exploration of the barriers that Deaf people in Northern Ireland face when attempting to access the system of justice. The authors’ research practices are informed, to the extent possible, by the principles of community-based participatory research (CBPR). They explore the challenges of conducting research in American Sign Language (ASL), British Sign Language (BSL), and Irish Sign Language (ISL), and spoken English, facilitated by sign language interpreters fluent in BSL and ISL. Centering the research on the lived experiences of Deaf people who navigate the system of justice, the authors implemented CBPR-informed research methods, which ultimately led to sustained discussion and joint action by the authors and members of the Northern Ireland Deaf community aimed at the removal of barriers that Deaf people face when interacting with the justice system. By writing about their methodological approach in Northern Ireland, the authors wish to be transparent about their work in the hope that other researchers can replicate their successes and avoid the limitations of conducting this work in partnership with members of the Deaf community in other countries.

Association between community-based self-reported COVID-19 symptoms and social deprivation explored using symptom tracker apps: a repeated cross-sectional study in Northern Ireland

ObjectivesThe aim of the study was to investigate the spatial and temporal relationships between the prevalence of COVID-19 symptoms in the community-level and area-level social deprivation.DesignSpatial mapping, generalised linear models,...

Developing Sociality in a Post-Conflict Northern Ireland: An Application of the Perceiver Element Grid

Personal Construct Psychology (PCP) offers a powerful framework for understanding the conflict and dispute between two parties. The bulk of the literature on PCP conflict resolution addresses issues in the context of families and small groups. In this paper, we present the analysis of sociality in the context of a long-standing conflict in Northern Ireland 1 . We used the Perceiver Element Grid (PEG) to map the construing of representatives from the two main communities in Northern Ireland 2 . Following 30 years of violent conflict and a subsequent 20-year peace process, these communities remain diametrically opposed to each other. In this paper, we explore the potential of the PEG as a means by which to assess sociality among parties to the Northern Ireland conflict. In addition, we discuss how the PEG could serve as a useful tool in conflict resolution, particularly when interviewees are asked to construe from the position of an imagined future. We draw conclusions relating to how developing sociality could be used to help improve inter-community relationships.