Northern Irish Society Research Articles

A Pentecostal and charismatic contribution to peace and reconciliation: Case study of Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT Despite the marking of the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement (1998), there remains a significant fragility of peace in Northern Irish society today. Recent periods of collapse at Stormont government and high rates of segregation between Catholic and Protestant communities, evidence a need for alternative contributions to peace and reconciliation efforts. A specific focus on the role of religious actors in reconciliation pursuits has often been met with scepticism due to historic religious-political institutional ties. However, challenging the increasing trend of secularism in Northern Ireland has been the growth of Pentecostal and charismatic communities across the region. Thus, a major question is: How can the Pentecostal and charismatic movement contribute positively to peace and reconciliation? This article explores the possibility of adopting a Pentecostal and charismatic approach to peace, forgiveness and reconciliation, utilising the case study of Northern Ireland. Such an analysis is integral to discerning the movement's positive potential for peace and reconciliation work in the pursuit of post-conflict societal transformation.

“Taking Comedy Seriously”: Humour in Lisa McGee’s Girls and Dolls

Laughter in the midst of tragedy can be one of life’s most disturbing, cathartic and enlightening experiences, a maxim experienced in Northern Ireland during the Troubles, one of the most painful periods of Irish history. Northern Irish playwrights were acutely aware of this when dealing with violence in their plays and so, however grim the events they depicted, the comic element was very much present. After the Good Friday Agreement, along with the change in the political situation in Northern Ireland, there was a generational change in the theatre. What seems to characterise this new wave is the ironic distance taken towards the sectarian divide and the consequences of the conflict on Northern Irish society, which is revealed above all in their use of humour. Lisa McGee, one of the most important representatives of the new generation thanks to the popularity of her television series Derry Girls, had already shown her maturity in her 2006 play Girls and Dolls, performed by Tinderbox the same year. McGee mixes the tragic and the comic to present the terrible consequences of childhood trauma alongside the violence of the late Troubles, while raising questions about guilt, the meaning of friendship and the subtle ways in which violence affects us. This article aims to analyse the different uses of humour employed by McGee to deal with tragic episodes and their theatrical effect, drawing on the existing research on humour in literature and McGee’s own observations given in an interview with the author on 3 March 2023.

‘Seismic’ or stalemate? The (bio)politics of the 2021 Northern Ireland Census

ABSTRACT This article provides a critical reading of the 2021 Census of Population in Northern Ireland. A close examination of the available data on religion and nationality leads us to suggest that the Census provides a distorted portrait of Northern Irish society in two crucial, and connected, senses. First, the operation of the Census creates incentives for many residents to identify in ethnoreligious terms who might not ordinarily do so. Second, the forms of inter-communal competition generated by the decennial poll serve to obscure the degree of cultural diversity that exists in an increasingly secular society.

Northern Ireland 25 years after the Good Friday Agreement: an introduction to the special issue

ABSTRACT In this introduction, we set up a theme that runs through the special issue. There are, we suggest, two dominant readings of the Northern Irish peace process – one ‘liberal,’ the other ‘nationalist’ – that see the region in the process of becoming a multicultural (neo)liberal democracy, albeit in different constitutional settings. The teleogical nature of these perspectives means, however, that they fail to grasp what is perhaps the most essential characteristic of contemporary Northern Irish society, namely its liminality. If we are to understand the true nature of post-conflict Northern Ireland, it is imperative, we contest, to grasp its quintessential ‘inbetweenness.’

The Power of Voice: Storytelling as Peacebuilding in Post-Troubles Northern Ireland

The Northern Ireland peace process has been long and tumultuous, yet 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement, peace has not become a reality for many Northern Irish citizens. For those who have been excluded from the state and the institution-led peace process, grassroots methods of peacebuilding are needed to create an everyday peace that is owned by and includes all Northern Irish citizens. A narrative approach to peacebuilding is one that addresses many of the challenges to everyday peace following the “Troubles.” By exploring the use and impact of storytelling and narrative on everyday experiences, the narrative approach proves to be a viable tool for elevating and giving ownership of the peace process to marginalized members of Northern Irish society.

‘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.

#IBelieveHer: Representations of rape culture in Northern Ireland’s media surrounding the 2018 Ulster Rugby Rape Trial

This article studies how Northern Ireland’s media represented rape culture in relation to the 2018 Ulster Rugby Rape Trial. Thematic analysis was employed to analyse newspaper articles and social media posts to determine common themes surrounding the perpetuation of rape culture. While there were portrayals of perpetrator support and victim-blaming in the media, there was a surprising wealth of criticism surrounding the culture of misogyny, female subordination and sexual violence acceptance in Northern Ireland. This suggests Northern Irish society is becoming increasingly aware and intolerant of the damage rape culture acceptance can cause to all levels of society.

Bridge-builder feminism: the feminist movement and conflict in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT While gender has been widely used as an analytical category to understand the dynamics of conflict transformation in Northern Ireland, surprisingly little has been written on the ways in which the conflict has shaped or constrained feminist organising. Singular focus on groups or initiatives like the Northern Ireland Women's Coalition, Peace People or the Women's Support Network has overshadowed the contested history and intricacies of the wider feminist movement. Adopting a more holistic view, this article takes the concept of ‘bridge-builders' as conceptualised by Ruane and Todd in The Dynamics of Conflict in Northern Ireland (1996) to examine the fractured development of the feminist movement in the North. It charts how ‘bridge-builder feminism' became a distinguishable feature of the feminist movement during the Troubles and was used as a mechanism to transgress what Todd calls the ‘grammars of nationality’ (Todd, 2015). I argue that although this organising approach pioneered some changes in Northern Irish society, it overlooked key feminist struggles and thrived at the expense of an inclusive, intersectional feminism. Though the movement has undergone significant changes in the last two decades, the legacy of bridge-builder feminism continues to impact the capacities of the movement to address key feminist issues.

Dark Knowledge: Deirdre Madden's One by One in the Darkness

Deirdre Madden's novel One by One in the Darkness, first published in 1996, marks its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2021. Madden began writing the book in 1993 in anticipation of another anniversary (a quarter century of political and sectarian violence in Northern Ireland) and completed it in 1995. I argue that she was both responding to contemporary events, including the 1994 paramilitary ceasefires, and attempting to shape the way that people would think about the impact of the Troubles in the post-conflict period. One by One in the Darkness is usually read as the story of a family that has suffered a traumatic loss: the violent death of its patriarch. I contend, in contrast, that the family's experience is more representative than exceptional. This essay explores the formal means by which Madden makes her point about the lingering effects of trauma on individuals and Northern Irish society at large.

Tribunes, racism and deadlock politics in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACT Both Sinn Féin and the DUP have successfully mobilised ethnic tribune strategies in order to secure dominance in the electoral politics of Northern Ireland. Alongside this development, Northern Irish society has become markedly more diverse as a result of increasing inward migration. While immigration has enriched the array of cultural variety in the territory, it has been accompanied by increasing evidence of high profile racism. This raises questions as to how political parties that have profited from ethnic tribune strategies might adapt to the realities of a more diverse society. This paper illustrates the manner in which Sinn Féin and the DUP have approached the issue of racism against ethnic minorities, using an in-depth, qualitative analysis of party language. The data are drawn from a series of interviews with elected representatives, party literature, and from debates in the Northern Ireland Assembly. Two key findings are discussed. Firstly, the paper notes a lack of clarity in the manner in which both parties approach the subjects of racism and sectarianism. Secondly, the paper highlights the process by which varieties of racism experienced by ethnic minorities, have become absorbed by debates traditionally associated with bi-national division in the territory.

Northern Ireland’s 1968 at 50: agonism and protestant perspectives on civil rights

ABSTRACT 2018 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the seminal events of Northern Ireland’s 1968: a milestone offering up an opportunity to reassess a pivotal moment in the province’s recent past. This article will argue that the civil rights period has fitted into a common model of the past being used to perpetuate the divisions at the heart of Northern Irish society. It will go on to demonstrate how an innovative methodological and theoretical approach, based on oral history, education and – most crucially – agonism, has facilitated the unearthing and integration of complex and hitherto marginalised Ulster Protestant perspectives.

Reforming education in post-partition Northern Ireland: state control and churches’ interference

ABSTRACT After the partition of Ireland, the newly established parliament in Belfast was given control over education. The unionist government, mainly representing the majoritarian Protestant population, embarked on a reform of the pre-existing denominational education system and tried to persuade all the churches to transfer their schools to state control in exchange for public funding. Despite the sincere efforts of the first Minister of Education, the Catholic Church rejected interference in education from a government that its followers perceived as hostile, while the Protestant churches became increasingly intransigent in their demands for more control over state schools. In order to ensure their support, the government met their requests, ignoring the instances of teachers and principals who called for independence from clerical managers. The result was a segregated education system that contributed to maintain the deep divisions of the Northern Irish society.

“One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”: Reading Trauma in Ciaran Carson’s Poetry

“One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”: Reading Trauma in Ciaran Carson’s Poetry Carla Anderson (bio) The Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson was born and raised in 1950s Belfast in an Irish Catholic family living on the Falls Road, which is the heart of West Belfast and an Irish Catholic community within the city. While talking about his childhood in an interview, Carson refers to himself as “a guy from the Falls Road” before even mentioning Catholicism, indicating the importance of the Falls as a geographical locator that is coded with deeper meanings of identity.1 In his poetry, too, place frequently acts as a stand-in for identity. Although both Carson’s poetry and his prose often reflects his personal experiences and history, it is also fictionalized. Even The Star Factory, a book-length essay exploration of the deep history of Belfast that includes details from his own life, is not meant to be a memoir, as he explains in the same interview: “You never really know how things were exactly. We reinvent it all the time.”2 In his poetry, Carson deconstructs and recombines bits of history, news stories, and personal experiences to create a space in which the traumatic experiences of the Troubles can be processed and expressed through his writing. Similarly, places in his poems constantly shift and change, complicating the easy security that comes out of knowing where one is from. His poetic forms often feature nonlinear narratives and stylistic structures that echo the complexities of how trauma is experienced, and thematically, his poems emphasize the generative potential of constant change, even as it can be disorienting. Rather than remaining trapped in a cycle of traumatic thoughts, the speakers in Carson’s poems make use of this generative change to regain some creative autonomy. The Troubles, thirty years of intense sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s until the late 1990s, caused over 3,900 deaths and has had a deep and lasting impact on Northern Irish society. One psychology study from 2013 found that the highest type of traumatic experience reported by adults in Northern Ireland was what the researchers called “network events,” a term that encompasses witnessing traumatic events that affect a “loved one” or witnessing [End Page 125] serious injury, death, or a dead body.3 This study, along with others, emphasizes the severity of post-traumatic response to secondhand traumas as well as firsthand experiences—for example, witnessing a serious injury could be traumatic just as much as personally experiencing that same injury. In this way, even citizens who did not directly experience a personal trauma were still traumatized by the Troubles. Nor did the official end of the conflict bring peace or closure: journalist Lyra McKee further points out just how deeply the trauma has influenced the society even long after the conflict had passed by noting that since the cease-fire in 1999, the suicide rate in Northern Ireland has nearly doubled and, as of 2016, exceeds the number of deaths attributed to the Troubles.4 Given the extent of the impact of the Troubles, trauma often dominates the conversation about contemporary Northern Irish history. As scholar Jim Smyth notes in his introduction to a collection of essays about the Troubles, the rhetoric surrounding this period fixates on Ireland’s long history of colonial oppression, rebellion, and violence to amplify a prevailing notion that the Irish are stuck in a permanent divide and unable to escape from a cycle of sectarian violence.5 In this cultural context, it is even more vital to discuss poetry that pushes back against a narrative of being “stuck.” In Ciaran Carson’s work, memory is unreliable, which allows the speakers in his poems to evade a relationship to history that is fixed and inescapable. References to the Troubles appear throughout the body of Carson’s work, particularly his poetry, prose, and memoir writings. This prevalence suggests that events from this time are deeply influential to Carson, who returns to similar themes from his earliest works up through his final collection of poetry. Significantly, despite reconsidering familiar themes, his work emphasizes change and evolution—both in his writing styles and in how...

“It’d Just Be Banter”: Sectarianism in a Northern Irish Rugby Club

Nearly two decades after the Good Friday Agreement, sectarianism still functions to structure much of the Northern Irish society. While this is often considered in terms of high-profile cases of sectarian violence, most sectarian behavior occurs in everyday practices. This article explores how sectarianism is expressed and understood within the context of a Northern Irish rugby club. I conducted a season-long ethnography using participant observation, focus group discussions, and semistructured interviews to gain an understanding of the particular context which framed the sectarian discourses at the club. Rather than a purely oppressive model, Ballycross RFC showcased how the sectarian climate of the Northern Irish society can be used and experienced in a multitude of ways.

The Potential of Interactive Negotiated Narratives in Rebuilding and Reimagining Northern Irish Society

This research explores the role of the writer in interactive transmedia production through a research project that has been primarily designed to take place within contemporary Northern Ireland. Red Branch Heroes was created, in association with Bellyfeel Productions1, as a prototype for a more extensive fictional interactive web series that will be known as The Eleven. The author developed a game-like scenario where, through their play, the audience influenced and developed character and story elements. The research asks if interactive forms such as transmedia offer any new storytelling potentials to the people of Northern Ireland and how such projects can contribute to debates about e-politics and e-democracy in post-conflict societies. Evidence is presented in this article to suggest that the ‘negotiated narratives' formulated in this prototype offer further creative community-building possibilities, in neutral spaces that can facilitate discourses about the future.

Gendering the ‘post-conflict’ narrative in Northern Ireland’s peace process

The Good Friday Agreement negotiations gave a unique opportunity for the insertion of women’s rights and equal formal representation in the new post-conflict Northern Ireland. Notwithstanding the robust and unambiguous commitments in the text of the agreement, the primary architects of the peace process, however, situated gender and women’s position as peripheral to the main priorities of ‘guns and government’. While conventional forms of peacebuilding claim to be beneficial for all, evidence from the so-called ‘post-conflict’ period around the world demonstrates a continuity of violence for many women, as well as new forms of violence. This article explores the position of women in Northern Ireland today across a number of issues, including formal politics, community activism, domestic violence and reproductive rights. By doing so, it continues feminist endeavours seeking to problematise the ‘post-conflict’ narrative by gendering peace and security. While the Good Friday Agreement did undoubtedly provide the potential for a new era of gender relations, 20 years on Northern Irish society exhibits all the trademarks and insidious characteristics of a patriarchal society that has yet to undergo a genuine transformation in gender relations. The article argues that the consistent privileging of masculinity and the dominance of male power is a commonality that remains uninterrupted by the peace process.

Northern Ireland’s elusive peace dividend: Neoliberalism, austerity and the politics of class

The signing of the Good Friday Agreement was meant to signal an era of economic prosperity for those working-class communities that suffered most during the Troubles. Two decades on, this much vaunted ‘peace dividend’ has yet to materialise. A combination of persistent economic stagnation and the onset of austerity has ensured that the poverty and inequality that marked the era of political conflict continue to blight Northern Irish society. The introduction of the 2012 Welfare Reform Act momentarily created the conditions of the possibility of a more progressive politics premised on issues of social class. The decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union would, however, close down this nascent political space and ensure the resurgence in Northern Irish public debate of those ethno-national preoccupations that animate the ‘constitutional question’.

The Role of Museums in Dealing with the Legacy of Conflict in Northern Ireland

This article deals with the roles given to and taken by museums in addressing the legacy of conflict and contributing to reconciliation in Northern Irish society. It analyses the reasons for, relevance and feasibility of the role given to museums in good relations policies as well as the direction defined and changes entailed by the 2011 Museums Policy for Northern Ireland. Using several examples throughout Northern Ireland, it assesses to what extent the official recommendations have been integrated in museums’ mission statements, outreach services, exhibitions programmes and educational provisions, thereby outlining good practices and limitations found in the sector.

The Role of Museums in Dealing with the Legacy of Conflict in Northern Ireland

This article deals with the roles given to and taken by museums in addressing the legacy of conflict and contributing to reconciliation in Northern Irish society. It analyses the reasons for, relevance and feasibility of the role given to museums in good relations policies as well as the direction defined and changes entailed by the 2011 Museums Policy for Northern Ireland. Using several examples throughout Northern Ireland, it assesses to what extent the official recommendations have been integrated in museums’ mission statements, outreach services, exhibitions programmes and educational provisions, thereby outlining good practices and limitations found in the sector.

Exploring the Needs of Socially Excluded Young Men

In recent years, social exclusion has gained the attention of governments around the world. This paper reports on a qualitative study involving 27 young men aged 14–19 years experiencing particular forms of exclusion in the context of Northern Irish society. The study used a focus group methodology to elicit their views with the aim of exploring both emotional and psychological needs and the structural factors that may contribute to their experiences of social exclusion. The findings reveal a range of unmet social and psychological needs, the impact of sectarianism and segregation, and a paucity of support systems in place. The paper concludes by making recommendations about how policy‐makers and practitioners could find more imaginative ways of engaging such vulnerable young men to reduce social exclusion.