Northern Irish Protestant Research Articles

The marriage plot and the plot against the Union: Irish Home Rule and endangered alliances in Henry James's “The Modern Warning”

By the period of the Irish Home Rule crisis – in which Catholics and liberal Anglicans lobbied for limited self-government while northern Presbyterians campaigned to keep Ulster wholly within the Union between Ireland and Great Britain of 1800 – certain of those of pre-Famine northern Irish Protestant origins (the “Scots-” or “Scotch-Irish”) identified with the position of their Presbyterian brethren in Ulster. This identifiably Ulster Protestant engagement with the Home Rule debate is detectable (and generally overlooked) in the Scots-Irish Henry James story “The Modern Warning”. Moreover, equally discounted is the fact that James's story deploys the Irish literary convention of the marriage plot as metaphor for political union in order to grapple with a moment in which that alliance is – in the unionists' view – in danger. This article concludes that the political-union-as-marriage trope still sporadically returns at moments of political crisis in the British Isles, as occurred during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum debate.

Southern Magnolias and Orange Lilies: Gender, Class, and School Integration at Central High and Holy Cross

Scholars have written volumes regarding pro-active American Southern and Northern Irish women in the American civil rights movement and Northern Ireland's troubles. This work generally examines the South’s white, upper-class integrationists and Northern Ireland's Catholic Republicans, while Southern working-class segregationists and Northern Ireland's Protestant Loyalists are ignored. These women and the reasons for invisibility in historical records are similar. Both cultures demanded feminine submission to their place, serving God and man, Dixie and Ulster; conservatism discouraged females from politics. This explores the unusual public stance of Southern workingclass segregationist women and Northern Ireland's working-class Protestant females during Little Rock's Central High School crisis of 1957 and Belfast's Holy Cross Primary School protest of 2001. Segregationists protested integrating black students, while Protestants railed at Catholic families who walked daughters to school via the exclusively Protestant Glenbryn Estate. In analyzing these events, I examine the gender history and traditions of each group. I survey the social environment that motivated these women's protests, and the justifications used to delve into the public arena while defending the status quo. I also examine how these choices altered political roles for both groups in the protests' aftermath. My analysis yields integral conclusions regarding the personal and political ideologies of Southern segregationist and Northern Irish Protestant females. This study explores the fears and anxieties that these females held toward what they regarded as black and Catholic encroachment in societies. My study belongs to a limited body of research that will hopefully begin to provide understanding of the perspectives and consequences of two distantly separated groups of women who have been quieted in the Central High and Holy Cross dramas.

Intergroup Identity Perceptions and their Implications for Intergroup Forgiveness

Three studies revisited the application of the Common Ingroup Identity Model (CIIM) to the Northern Irish conflict and shed light on the factors that potentially limit the scope of the CIIM. Study 1 (N =61) showed that both conflict protagonists unanimously viewed “Northern Ireland” as the most inclusive superordinate category relative to other viable categories. Employing a longitudinal design, Study 2 (N = 67/43) examined the stability of the intergroup identity perceptions that the Northern Irish Protestant and Catholic groups hold in relation to the superordinate category “Northern Ireland”. Moreover, Study 2 also provided evidence that the Protestant group engages in ingroup projection (i.e. perceiving a large overlap between their ingroup identity category and the superordinate category). Study 3 (N = 307) successfully replicated previous research revealing that, while the Catholic group’s willingness to forgive the outgroup benefits from identifying with the superordinate category, the Protestants’ willingness to forgive the outgroup does not. Results are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical implications.

The role of social categorization and identity threat in the perception of migrants

AbstractThis paper investigates how the categorization of migrant workers shapes their reception. In an experiment with Northern Irish Protestants we manipulated the representation of Poland to make the Catholicism of Polish migrants either more, or less, salient. Furthermore, judgements of Polish migrants were obtained under conditions designed to encourage participants to believe that sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland was either resolved, or still a strong feature of the present social landscape. Overall, results showed that when Poland's Catholicism was salient, participants were less welcoming of Polish migrants. Furthermore, this effect was mediated by increases in the level of symbolic threat participants believed the migrants posed to participants' (Protestant) community identity. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

“Heirs of Freedom” or “Slaves to England”? Protestant Society and Unionist Hegemony in Nineteenth-Century Ulster

Based on Ulster Presbyterian immigrant correspondence and recent research in Irish religious demography, this essay argues that Unionist cultural and political hegemony over northern Irish Protestants was constructed largely because of the massive emigrations (mostly to the United States) of Ulster Presbyterians, between the 1790s and the 1850s, who would or could not accommodate themselves to the political and socioeconomic regime fastened on the north of Ireland after the United Irishmen's failed rebellion of 1798 and the Act of Union in 1800. Hence this essay directly challenges revisionist scholars who argue that Ulster Presbyterians' post-1798 embrace of the Union and the Orange Order was rapid, inevitable, and natural.

An examination of facilitated acquisition and transformation of function in derived relational responding.

Stimulus events often organize behavior in the absence of a direct learning history with that particular event. Many studies have examined indirect learning such as derived relational responding in matching-to-sample procedures and determined that the process of relating develops at approximately the same time as language (Devany, Hayes, & Nelson, 1986; Lipkins, Hayes, & Hayes, 1993). Because of this relationship with language in combination with the success of stimulus equivalence in the teaching of reading and language, it has been posited as one of the basic elements of human language and cognition (Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001). Thus, researchers have begun to examine the effects of including words and stimuli with pre-established functions, based on assumed contact with the social verbal community, into equivalence procedures. It was quickly determined that these stimuli impact the formation of equivalence classes. This seems to happen in three ways: (a) inhibition of formation, (b) rigid inflexibility of classes, and (c) facilitated acquisition. Inhibition of Class Formation. Stimuli that evoke certain emotional responses are associated with inhibition of class formation, when training that should produce classes of all meaningful stimuli is given. For example, Plaud (1995) found that the formation of snake classes was inhibited in individuals with a snake phobia, but the formation of flower classes was not. More specifically, conditional discriminations were trained that produced equivalence classes among all snake words (Cobra-Rattlers-Python) or all flower words (Yucca-Daffodil-Crocus). Fear relevant stimuli produced inhibition of equivalence responding in anxious individuals; however, non-anxious individuals were not inhibited in equivalence responding for either snake or flower class. Inhibition was also noted when equivalence training procedures were intended to create classes between sexually explicit stimuli (Plaud, Gaither, Franklin, Weller, & Barth, 1998). Both these studies examined the ability of individuals to form equivalence classes in which all stimuli had similar functions. Inhibition was noted when all the stimuli in the class had stimulus functions that evoked emotional responses (sexually explicit stimuli and snakes for snake phobics). Rigid Inflexibility of Classes. Experimental procedures designed to produce equivalence classes containing one member from two different pre-experimental equivalence classes show an inability of these classes to merge, demonstrating the inflexibility of classes of stimuli that evoke pre-experimental emotional responses. This is the counterpart of the insensitivity seen in rule-governed behavior (Matthews, Shimoff, Catania, & Sagvolden, 1977). For example, Watt, Keenan, Barnes, and Cairns (1991) trained equivalence relations between Northern Irish Catholic names, nonsense syllables, and Northern Irish Protestant symbols to individuals with either a Protestant or Catholic upbringing from either Ireland or England. Participants from Northern Ireland, where conflict between the Catholics and Protestants is ongoing, were unable to form equivalence classes including both a Protestant symbol and a Catholic name, but the English participants readily formed these classes. The authors suggest that the prior social learning of the participants interfered with the ability of individuals to form these equivalence relations. Leslie, Tierney, Robinson, Keenan, Watt, and Barnes (1993) tested the effects of pairing threatening situations, nonsense syllables, and pleasant state adjectives in a MTS procedure in anxious and non-anxious adults. All non-anxious participants formed equivalence classes that included one stimulus from each set; however, the anxious individuals did not form equivalence classes given the same amount of training. The authors attributed this difference to previously established behavioral relations interfering with the emergence of equivalence relations in the laboratory. …

Exorcising the Ghosts of Conflict in Northern Ireland: Stewart Parker's The Iceberg and Pentecost

Exorcising the Ghosts of Conflict in Northern Ireland: Stewart Parker's The Iceberg and Pentecost Richard Rankin Russell Plays and ghosts have a lot in common. The energy which flows from some intense moment of conflict in a particular time and place seems to activate them both. Plays intend to achieve resolution, however, whilst ghosts appear to be stuck fast in the quest for vengeance. Stewart Parker.1 Stewart Parker's The Iceberg (1974) and Pentecost (1987), works that function as bookends of his all-too-short dramatic career, are haunted by ghosts from Northern Ireland's history.2 Both plays accord with Bernard McKenna's description of Northern Irish drama as "'perform[ing]' moments of rupture that consciously emphasize the destruction of individuals' and communities' identities" (8). The Iceberg stages the loss of pride in the Irish Protestant community surrounding the sinking of the Titanic in 1913, whereas Pentecost explores a seeming triumph of Northern Irish Protestantism, the 1974 Ulster Workers' Council strike—an event, however, that led to a more inflexible political discourse and additional destructive violence in the province. Both works feature revenants, [End Page 42] persistent ghosts whose claims must be recognized and resolved through a process of reconciliation. Parker's revenants share their marginalized status with other ghosts from literature set in Northern Ireland: for example, Brian Friel's three Catholic characters trapped in the Derry Guildhall in The Freedom of the City (1973) and Seamus Heaney's fisherman friend Louis O'Neill in "Casualty" (1979). Friel's and Heaney's ghosts haunt the places where they were murdered and function as emblems of conscience for their respective authors who reject, finally, the official rhetoric of both Irish nationalism and British authority. Parker's ghosts also haunt their localities, watching and waiting for their presence to be realized and their lives given retrospective value and worth; unlike Heaney's shade of his friend O'Neill, however, they are steadfastly sectarian, bound to their respective Protestant communities by religious and cultural ties. Whereas Heaney's vision of his dead friend leads to a realization that he must leave his Catholic "tribe" to write poetry, Parker's imagined ghosts suggest a commitment to work within his own Protestant community to develop a drama that might soften a hardened political divide. Parker belonged to a cohort at Queen's University in Belfast in the early to mid-1960s that included Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Bernard MacLaverty.3 All joined Philip Hobsbaum's Belfast Group, a writing group modeling a "twin emphasis on ethics and aesthetics" that proved crucial in developing the ecumenical, highly crafted work of participants (Russell, "Inscribing Cultural Corridors" 223). Parker would quickly merge an ethical compulsion to ameliorate sectarian tensions with his developing dramatic craft: his dual concern to experiment with a variety of styles and to fashion plays "composed of parts which work together in harmony" equipped him to critique the random violence and fragmentation in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s in formally diverse plays invoking a vision of cultural wholeness ("The Modern Poet as [End Page 43] Dramatist" 2).4 Parker's early concern with aesthetic harmony coincided with his developing ethical urge to promote social accord in the province through depicting its particularized local situation and engaging members of disparate factions in dialogue. Apparitions in The Iceberg and Pentecost emerge from the sense of deprivation engendered by the conflicts in the North—such as those from the 1910s and 1920s, and the contemporary Troubles that began in 1969, the latter of which includes Protestant opposition that toppled the provisional power-sharing government in 1974. The flitting, circling ghosts in these two dramas invoke that pervasive sense of dislocation among Northern Irish Protestants, who feel neither fully British nor Irish and fear abandonment by Britain. Moreover, these apparitions suggest a generalized Northern Irish working-class dispossession stemming from a shared poverty, a deprivation both fueling sectarianism and existing as a potential bond...

Frank McGuinness and the Sons of Ulster

This article offers a critical interpretation of Frank McGuinness's crucial 1986 play 'Observe the Sons of Ulster Marching to the Somme' and considers the play from a number of perspectives. Mindful of the cultural politics of 1980s Ireland, Kiberd places the play in the context of First World War writing: he compares themes of sacrifice in the play with those which prevailed in the 1916 Rising in Dublin and finds striking similarities; he analyses the treatment of Northern Irish Protestant identity and how it has been powerfully moulded by the slaughter on the Somme. He also considers the play's central themes of masculinity and homosexuality.

Symbols, Myth-Making, and Identity: The Red Hand of Ulster in Late Nineteenth-Century Paterson, New Jersey

Symbols are manipulated to express social identity and to reaffirm or create a sense of place. Smoking pipes recovered from late nineteenth-century privies in the Dublin Section of Paterson, New Jersey, bear the symbol of the Red Hand of Ulster. Today, the Red Hand of Ulster is ubiquitous on Unionist murals throughout Northern Ireland symbolizing Northern Irish Protestant identity. Originally, the Red Hand symbolized the dawn of the Irish High King of Ulster. In late-nineteenth-century Paterson, it is argued here, the symbol was embedded in ethnic politics involving the Irish Diaspora and Irish–American identity developed through the Gaelic revival and Irish–American organizations and labor unions.

Poet John Hewitt, 1907-1987, and criticism of Northern Irish Protestant writing

This study questions the validity of John Hewitt's prominence in Northern Irish Protestant writing and asserts the need for a more accurate history of this genre. Confronting the perceived wisdoms of a highly politicized discourse, it undermines Hewitt's status within it as a matchless, acceptable Protestant for a critically re-visioned Ireland. Challenging the substance of Hewitt's self-representations as icon of cultural liberalism, radical secular dissenter, and verse-apologist for the Planter condition, this book shows that his elevation over the majority of northern Protestants is tenable only within an incomprehensive history of Northern Irish Protestant writing that diminishes other important figures. The study provides a framework for a more equitable study of Protestant voices.

Perceptions of 'Siege Mentality': Northern Irish Protestants and White South Africans in the New Political Dispensation

Perceptions of 'Siege Mentality': Northern Irish Protestants and White South Africans in the New Political Dispensation

Perceptions of 'Siege Mentality': Northern Irish Protestants and White South Africans in the New Political Dispensation

Perceptions of 'Siege Mentality': Northern Irish Protestants and White South Africans in the New Political Dispensation

Northern Irish Protestants and the Chesterton Conference

Northern Irish Protestants and the Chesterton Conference

The impact of sectarian injustice and the paramilitary ceasefires on adolescent just world beliefs in Northern Ireland

This study compares the level of just world beliefs held by Northern Irish Protestant and Catholic 16 to 18 year olds (n=181), before and after the 1994 paramilitary ceasefires. Analysis of the data indicated that the Protestant sample held stronger just world beliefs than the Catholic sample, while the introduction of peace to the streets of Northern Ireland strengthened the level of beliefs in ajust world held by both ethno-political groups. Religious discrimination was suggested as the cause of the weaker just world beliefs among the Catholic sample. while the increase in just world beliefs after the ceasefire was due to an increased hope for peace in Northern Ireland.

The provisional IRA: A case study

The Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) is a militant, nationalist organisation which aims at ending British rule in Northern Ireland by violent means and at establishing a united Irish republic. It has the support of a substantial proportion of Northern Irish Catholics, and sufficient armaments to continue its campaign for the forseeable future. The quality of the ordinary PIRA recruits is quite high, and its leadership has shown itself capable of adapting political and military strategy to changing circumstances. However, despite achieving a great deal, it is unlikely that the PIRA can overcome the hostility of Northern Irish Protestants to Irish unity, and by its campaign it has exacerbated that hostility.

Social Categorization and Stimulus Equivalence

Northern Irish Protestant subjects, Northern Irish Catholic subjects, and English Protestant subjects were taught a series of conditional discriminations using a matching-to-sample procedure. In the presence of Northern Irish Catholic names, subjects were trained to select three-letter nonsense syllables, and in the presence of the nonsense syllables subjects were trained to select Northern Irish Protestant symbols. Subjects were then tested to determine whether the Protestant symbols and Catholic names had become related through symmetry and transitivity. A generalization test was employed to allow for a preliminary investigation of the transfer of experimentally generated equivalence responding to untrained, socially loaded names. Preliminary findings suggest that prior social learning might interfere with equivalence responding. The relevance of these results to the theoretical interpretation of the equivalence phenomenon and to social attitude measurement in general is discussed.

Perceptions of Group Identity and Recent Political Behavior in Northern Ireland

Societal cleavages based on cultural, ethnic, or tribal divisions are, it can be argued, qualitatively different from those based on other factors (e.g., economic ideology). In this context, can be conceptualized as a set of ascribed and acquired characteristics which derive principally from an individual's birth and upbringing. While physical appearance may be relevant, ethnicity is composed primarily of psychological elements which can not be shed or significantly changed, even if an individual wishes to do so, as easily as can purely acquired characteristics such as economic ideology (e.g., capitalism, socialism, communism). In other words, an individual is forever stigmatized by his group of origin and, in those societies with politically relevant ethnic divisions, the switching of political identities is a very rare occurrence. In this article, the principal psychological elements related to the political cleavage between Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics are briefly reviewed. Second, the main political manifestations of this cleavage since the 1960s are summarized, especially the behavior of politicians and voters in the October 1982 Northern Ireland Assembly election.

Irish Students' Stereotypes About Some National and Subnational Groups Within Ireland and Great Britain

A sample of Irish undergraduates was asked to characterize the English, Irish, Welsh, Scots, Northern Irish Catholics, Northern Irish Protestants, Southern Irish Catholics, and Southern Irish Protestants using both a check list and a free response format. Analyses of the social and personal stereotypes indicated that the English were described in different and significantly less favorable terms than the Irish. The enmities and strife in Northern Ireland were reflected in the stereotypes about the subnational Irish groups. While Catholics and Protestants, on both sides of the political border, were seen to be different from each other, these differences were overshadowed by the distinctions between the Northern and Southern groups. Both of the Northern irish targets were characterized in much less favorable and much less differentiated terms than their Southern counterparts. The implications of these findings were discussed.