Northern Irish State Research Articles

Breaking Silences: Women, Citizenship and Theatre In Northern Ireland

This essay seeks to weave together an analysis of women’s citizenship and its dependency on certain silences, and the exploration of this tension in two recent productions by Belfast- based Kabosh Theatre Company. Kabosh, and company Artistic Director Paula McFetridge, stage work that examines the realities of the region in the post-conflict era. In constructing the theoretical frame for the analysis, the concept of “silence” and “silencing” draws from Kristie Dotson (2015), and from work on violence such as Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “epistemic violence” and a wide range of sources on the performance of violence in theatre. Chantal Mouffe’s concept of agonistic democracy shapes the discussion of the Northern Irish state, and Wendy Brown and Joane Butler are the key scholars for the consideration of citizenship and nation.

The Moral Parameters of Violence: The Case of the Provisional IRA

AbstractOver three decades, the Provisional Irish Republican Army waged a campaign of violence that claimed the lives of some two thousand people. This article explores the moral framework by which the IRA sought to legitimate its campaign—how it was derived and how it functioned. On the one hand, the IRA relied on a legalist set of political principles, grounded in a particular reading of Irish history. An interlinked, yet discrete strand of legitimation stressed the iniquities of the Northern Irish state as experienced by Catholic nationalists, especially in the period 1968–1972. These parallel threads were interwoven to build a powerful argument that justified a resort to what the IRA termed its “armed struggle.” Yet the IRA recognized that the parameters for war were set not simply by reference to ideology but also by a reading of what might be acceptable to those identified as “the people” or “the community.” Violence was subject to an undeclared process of negotiation with multiple audiences, which served to constitute the boundaries of the permissible. Often, these red lines were revealed only at the point of transgression, but they were no less important for being intangible. An examination of the moral parameters for IRA violence provides a new perspective on the group, helping to explain IRA resilience but also its ultimate weakness and decline.

Ballymena, Bangor and Belfast: Hyper-Localism, Regional Decision-Making and Local Film Censorship in Northern Ireland

This article explores local film censorship in Northern Ireland, examining the ways in which individual local authorities and committees imposed their own conceptions of what was acceptable for the cinema-going public. Drawing on material from the Public Records Office Northern Ireland (PRONI) this work begins with the setting up of local censorship systems in the newly created Northern Irish state in the 1920s, and maps the interventions by a range of local councils across the decades including objections to films such as Frankenstein, The Outlaw and Garden of Eden. It offers a comparative focus of a specific geographical region and argues that understandings of film censorship must move beyond a straightforward national verses local model in order to acknowledge a more nuanced picture that encompasses local sensitivities, regional politics and religious feeling.

‘Room to Rhyme’: Heaney, Arts Policy and Cultural Tradition in Northern Ireland 1968–1971

Abstract Drawing on extensive research in Arts Council and government archives in Belfast and the collections of Seamus Heaney’s manuscripts, this essay reconstructs for the first time Northern Irish state cultural policy at the height of the crisis years 1968–1972. It also examines the response of a major poet to this policy, through a genetic mapping of the complex development of Heaney’s poem ‘The Last Mummer’, between 1969 and its publication in 1972. The poem refers to the mumming plays practiced at Christmas when troupes of young men, or ‘Rhymers’ would enter and perform in the houses of both communities in the North. This practice also informed ‘Room to Rhyme’, the Arts Council sponsored 1968 tour of several towns in Northern Ireland by Heaney and Michael Longley and the folk musician Davy Hammond. The make-up of the performers on the tour, the itinerary and accompanying booklet, suggest a deliberate attempt on the part of the Arts Council Northern Ireland to assert a role for itself, and for culture, in the political thaw of the time. In the years immediately after the tour, however, major confrontations between civil rights marches and police, widespread sectarian rioting and ultimately troops on the streets, resulted in even more extreme polarization in the North. As this essay shows, Heaney’s manuscripts from this period provide a valuable resource for the examination of the relationship between poetry, the public sphere and notions of cultural tradition in early 1970s Northern Ireland.

Aristotelian Interpretations by Fran O’Rourke (review)

after the 1921 Treaty and retired from politics to take up a judicial position. While he was a brilliant leader in promoting opposition to the government by all means, including treason, in at attempt to defeat Home Rule, he was a dismal failure as a minister in the war time coalition governments. He was essentially more a rabble-rouser than a statesman. Given his lack of real affection for the Northern Irish state, there is something deeply ironic about the fact that the larger than life-size statue of him, erected in his own lifetime in front of the parliament building at Stormont, symbolises the fact that Northern Ireland is essentially Carson’s creation. By contrast, Redmond remains an almost forgotten man in nationalist Ireland, despite the fact that the parliamentary democracy that emerged in Dublin is far closer to his dream of an independent, tolerant, Ireland than the visions of the 1916 leaders. It is also arguable that Redmond would be far happier with the way history turned out for what is now the Irish Republic, than Carson was with his creation. Redmond’s big regret would be that partition has divided the island for a century and is likely to do so for many years to come. Augustine Birrell, Chief Secretary for Ireland from 1906 to 1916, who worked so closely with Redmond to try and deliver Home Rule, noted in his memoirs published in the 1920s how the young men who formed the government of the Free State did not appreciate ‘how they had entered into their inheritance by the efforts and great personal sacrifice and risks of that Irish Parliamentary Party which they have since flung upon the scrap-heap of history. Politicians seldom desire gratitude and never get it’. In Redmond’s case that is certainly true. Stephen Collins has recently retired as political editor of The Irish Times, to which he continues to contribute on a regular basis. Aristotelian Interpretations, Fran O’Rourke (Kildare: Irish Academic Press, 2016), 366 pages. Who is the greatest philosopher who ever lived? Many might hesitate to answer such a question, Fran O’Rourke does not. For him Aristotle is, without any doubt, the holder of that title. This book substantiates the claim. Summer 2018: Book Reviews Studies • volume 107 • number 426 234 The magnanimity and comprehensiveness of Aristotle’s dictum that ‘every realm of nature is marvellous’ sums up O’Rourke’s conviction and describes also his own connaturality with his hero. The maxim also serves as an underlying and unifying motif for this volume of original essays. Aristotelian Interpretations considers themes of perennial interest, offering new avenues of interpretation, illustrating how Aristotle’s thought may be creatively applied to a variety of timeless and contemporary questions. Each chapter concerns itself with central themes of metaphysics, aesthetics, political anthropology, ethics and epistemology. The result is a panoramic survey of Aristotle’s philosophy showing that, far from being just a figure of historical interest living over two thousand years ago, this remarkable thinker provides us with a vision which is applicable and relevant. While many of Aristotle’s empirical presuppositions are obviously out of date, science having taken such gigantic strides in the meantime, his deeper intuitions and unrivalled wisdom have perennial validity. Aristotle’s philosophy, as well as being comprehensive and profound, is noted for its common sense, its belief in and reverence for nature, and its overall confidence in the human mind’s capacity to discover and to formulate truth. Those who might find it somewhat flat, dull and forbidding might risk a preliminary glance through Aristotle’s Ethics; reminding themselves that such an apparent banality is the result of the total absorption of such thought into our cultural bloodstream. Aristotle’s books have become the warp and woof of life as we were born into it. They formed the shape and fabric of the cultural shelter woven around us. That is why this book by Fran O’Rourke is such a godsend. ‘We are the only animals who can be happy . . . Morality and virtue are personal . . . and virtue depends upon ourselves’, this author tells us in his introduction, echoing the master he has been studying all...

Contrary Regionalisms and Noisy Correspondences: The BBC in Northern Ireland circa 1949

This essay examines the limits and possibilities of the mid-century broadcasting field in Northern Ireland, by attending to the dynamic interplay at the BBC's Belfast station of three competing regional formations: the political regionalism of the Northern Irish state; the cultural regionalism of a coterie of Northern Irish writers and intellectuals; and the broadcasting regionalism instituted as part of the BBC's policy of national programming. These contrary regionalisms each had different and, at times, competing criteria for what constituted particular and typical details of life in the North, and broadcasters had to negotiate the inexact correspondences among them with ears tuned to the political relations triangulated by Belfast, Dublin, and London. Beginning with a consideration of how broadcasters in Northern Ireland produced forms of mediated actuality both in and beyond the studio, the essay concludes with Sam Hanna Bell's This is Northern Ireland (1949), a feature that explores the tension of overspill and containment effected less by the partition of Ireland than by the contradictions inherent to the broadcasting field.

‘New dissidents are but old Provisionals writ large’? The Dynamics of Dissident Republicanism in the New Northern Ireland

This article discusses recent developments in dissident Irish republicanism and some of the arguments advanced to explain its emergence as a factor in Northern Irish politics. In particular it considers those explanations which define these new armed groups as either the latest manifestation of a historically determined Irish republican tradition or simply as ‘residual terrorist groups’ left behind by Provisional republicanism's movement into the constitutional mainstream in the 1990s. It rejects these arguments as ahistorical and schematic, and instead suggests that the dynamics and trajectory of dissident republicanism are shaped instead by the inherent tensions and structures of ‘the new Northern Ireland’. It goes on to compare the contemporary political, social and economic forces that produce the dissidents with the conditions that created the Provisionals as in the early 1970s and concludes that whilst these new groups will continue to pose a threat to the ‘normalization’ of the new dispensation they will not be successful as their republican forebears in mobilizing a significant and sustained challenge to the Northern Irish state.

Michael Mays, Nation States: The Cultures of Irish NationalismNation States: The Cultures of Irish Nationalism. Michael Mays. Lanham, MD, and Boulder, CO: Lexington Books, 2007. Pp. vii+225.

<i>Michael Mays,</i> Nation States: The Cultures of Irish Nationalism<i>Nation States: The Cultures of Irish Nationalism</i>. Michael Mays. Lanham, MD, and Boulder, CO: Lexington Books, 2007. Pp. vii+225.

We were conscious of the sort of people we mixed with: The state, social attitudes and the family in mid twentieth century Ireland

In the Republic of Ireland, the family is both a private entity and a construct of the state, and the relationship between family and state is outlined in the Irish constitution. In the Northern Irish state a similar conviction that the family unit is essential to the welfare of society has been implicit in social policy and legislation, as has the classification of women's place. Access to financial resources has played a significant role in situating the family in society and income and social class were inextricably interwoven. This paper explores how social attitudes have shaped family behaviour and identity in mid twentieth century Ireland, particularly in terms of the part played by women. Class consciousness and definitions of “respectability” are considered, using oral history testimony from a number of women remembering when they were young in the 1930s and 40s. The interviewees accepted the domestic role assigned to them by popular consensus and social policy. Their stories contain frequent references to their reluctance to associate with people whose occupations were judged to be inferior because of the lower status accorded to certain kinds of work. The paper will consider the extent to which legislators and policy makers shared such class awareness and how that might have influenced the shaping of the family unit in Ireland in the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Predictors of admission to a high-security hospital of people with intellectual disability with and without schizophrenia.

Admission to secure hospital facilities is a rare outcome for people with intellectual disability with or without concomitant psychosis. The present study compares people with mild intellectual disability with and without schizophrenia resident in the Scottish and Northern Irish State Hospital, Carstairs, to matched mild intellectual disability controls, also with and without schizophrenia, in the community. It is hoped that this study may identify socio-demographic, clinical or historical predictors which may lead to admission to secure hospital facilities for people with mild intellectual disability. One hundred and eight subjects were identified from two previous studies which concerned State Hospital patients and patients with intellectual disability with and without schizophrenia. Four experimental groups were derived: (1) 14 individuals with comorbid intellectual disability and schizophrenia who had been resident in the State Hospital; (2) 34 comorbid community control subjects; (3) 33 individuals with intellectual disability and no psychosis who had been resident in the State Hospital; and (4) 27 community control subjects with mild intellectual disability. The four groups were compared on a range of socio-demographic, historical and clinical variables obtained from case records and subject interviews. Relative to community controls, people with intellectual disability and no psychosis in the State Hospital are likely to be single, to have a later age of first psychiatric hospital admission, and to have a history of previous suicide attempts, alcohol abuse or drug misuse. Subjects with comorbid intellectual disability and schizophrenia in the State Hospital are more likely to be male, to have an early age of first psychiatric admission, and to have no family history of either schizophrenia or intellectual disability. Strategies aimed at addressing suicidal behaviour, alcohol and drug misuse amongst people with intellectual disability may facilitate a reduction in the number of admissions to high-security hospitals in the UK. In people with comorbid intellectual disability and schizophrenia, males with an early age of onset and no known family history are more likely to require care and treatment in a secure psychiatric setting. Such comorbid subjects may be suffering from a particular malignant form of schizophrenia, manifesting in childhood as cognitive impairment prior to the early onset of psychosis in teenage years.

MODERATE NATIONALISM AND THE IRISH REVOLUTION, 1916–1923

This article reconstructs the constitutionalist nationalist critique of the Irish revolution. It employs the writings of Stephen Gwynn, John Dillon, Jasper Tully, and others to illustrate the views of those Irish parliamentarians who were marginalized by the emergence of Sinn Fein as the dominant force in Irish political life after 1918. Stephen Gwynn, in particular, claimed that republican violence could not militate against – indeed exacerbated – the damage done by the failure of the constitutionalist nationalists to grasp the need for compromise over Ulster. Indeed, Gwynn argued that the violence of the Collins era – which has been justified on counter intelligence and broader political grounds – played a major role in shaping the sectarian institutions of the Northern Irish state. Gwynn's reflections on the self-defeating aspects of the Collins strategy are linked to a wider consideration of the role of the British government. This article attempts to qualify a scholarly orthodoxy – that British policy in 1920–2, undoubtedly subject to fluctuations, was incoherent and essentially reactive; instead, it argues that from the spring of 1920, Britain evolved a strategy, dependent on a considerable degree of intelligence success, involving the application of a carrot and stick policy designed to lead precisely to the Treaty compromise of 1921, but available much earlier to any Sinn Fein leadership willing to take it.

A state under siege: the establishment of Northern Ireland, 1920–1925. BY Bryan A. Follis. Pp xii, 219. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1995. £30. - The Catholic church and the foundation of the Northern Irish State. By Mary Harris. Pp xiii, 304. Cork: Cork University Press. 1993. IR£32.

A state under siege: the establishment of Northern Ireland, 1920–1925. BY Bryan A. Follis. Pp xii, 219. Oxford: Clarendon Press. 1995. £30. - The Catholic church and the foundation of the Northern Irish State. By Mary Harris. Pp xiii, 304. Cork: Cork University Press. 1993. IR£32.

A state under siege: the establishment of Northern Ireland, 1920-1925

The origins of the Northern Irish state are of great importance for the study of Irish history and Anglo-Irish relations, but this subject has never been tackled in great detail. In this diligent ad detailed account, Follis makes up for this oversight. He examines the turbulent early years of Northern Ireland, looking at how its administration was established and how it survived in the face of widespread communal violence, near bankruptcy, and political uncertainty, exacerbated by problematical relations with the governments in Westminster and Dublin. The highly controversial subject matter is subject to careful analysis, and if a particular standpoint emerges at its conclusion, an expression of it is long overdue. This is an honest and extremely lucid piece of research on a subject of vital importance.

Review: The Catholic Church and the Foundation of the Northern Irish State

Review: The Catholic Church and the Foundation of the Northern Irish State

Book Review: The Catholic Church and the Foundation of the Northern Irish State, 1912–1930

Book Review: The Catholic Church and the Foundation of the Northern Irish State, 1912–1930

Accumulation and the Irish Crisis

From within Ireland and from without, traditional "Republicanism" (pro-United Ireland) is under fire, not only from the right but also from sections of the left. The "Marxist" Official IRA (now Sinn Fein, the Workers Party) began moving away from Republicanism in the early 1970s, causing a split and the formation of the Irish Republican Socialist Party (IRSP). At the same time, most Official IRA volunteers left it to form the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). The new analysis of the Officials and others de-emphasized British imperialism and the repressive role of the Northern Irish state. They called upon anti-state forces in Ireland—the Irish Republican Army and the INLA—to lay down their guns, forget Republicanism, and "build class unity."This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.