Commemorating dead ‘men’: gendering the past and present in post-conflict Northern Ireland

War is instrumental in shaping and negotiating gender identities. But what role does peace play in dispelling or affirming the gender order in post-conflict contexts? Building on a burgeoning international literature on representative landscapes and based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Northern Ireland between 2003 and 2006, this article explores the peacetime commemoration of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ in order to explore the nuances of gender. Tellingly, the memorial landscapes cultivated since the inception of the paramilitary ceasefires in 1994 privilege male interpretations of the past (and, therefore, present). Gender parity, despite being enshrined within the 1998 Belfast Agreement which sought to draw a line under almost three decades of ethno-nationalist violence, remains an elusive utopia, as memorials continue to propagate specific roles for men and women in the ‘national project’. As the masculine ideologies of Irish Nationalism/Republicanism and British Unionism/Loyalism inscribe their respective disputant pasts into the streetscape, the narratives of women have been blurred and disrupted, begging the question: what role can they play in the future?     

Feminist and gender geographies in Ireland

Abstract

This report discusses feminist and gender geographies in Ireland. We first focus on the ways in which gender constructs Irish geographies, updating numbers of women in academic positions across Ireland. This shows that women are increasingly in secure positions, but remain under-represented in more senior positions. We then turn to research. We discuss how femininities and women, and masculinities and men, have been addressed in Irish geographies. The focus on femininities and women is crucial given recent strides towards gender and reproductive justice. We then briefly summarise sexualities work. The report concludes by arguing that Ireland not only has vibrant gender/feminist geographical scholarship, it also has significant potential for emerging research and developing new theorisations and research agendas.     

2. CONSTRUCTIONS OF “HOME,”“FRONT,” AND WOMEN'S MILITARY EMPLOYMENT IN FIRST‐WORLD‐WAR BRITAIN: A SPATIAL INTERPRETATION

In First‐World‐War Britain, women's ambition to perform noncombatant duties for the military faced considerable public opposition. Nevertheless, by late 1916 up to 10,000 members of the female volunteer corps were working for the army, laying the foundation for some 90,000 auxiliaries of the official Women's Services, who filled support positions in the armed forces in the second half of the war. This essay focuses on the public debate in which the volunteers overcame their critics to understand how they obtained sufficient popular consent for their martial work. I explain the process in terms of shifting hegemonic understandings of space. As critics' arguments in the debate indicate, the gender attribution of war participation was organized and represented spatially, assigning men to the warlike “front” as warriors and women to the peaceful “home” as civilians. To redefine the meaning of these gendered wartime spaces, women volunteers deployed rival spatial discourses and practices in their campaign for martial employment. The essay explores the progress of these competing definitions through feminist and spatial theories, including gender performativity, discursively constructed and constructive spaces, and heterotopias. I argue that the upheaval caused by the war in gender and spatial norms undermined absolute conceptualizations of space with dichotomous binary areas on which critics drew for their arguments and reinforced more recent, relative spatialities, including the cultural construction of militarized heterotopic sites in between and paralleling both “home” and “front” for soldiers in training or recovery. The volunteers' efforts to gain access to military employment both contributed to and were supported by this shift. Heterotopic sites offered ideal discursive locations for constructing the new gender role of auxiliary soldiering through the performance of martial training and work, and competing spatial definitions provided arguments through which they could justify their activities to both critics and supporters.     

A question of national identity or minority rights? The changing status of the Irish language in Ireland since 1922

When the Irish Free State was founded in 1922, the Irish language was a substantial feature of the politics that led up to this event. Subsequently the language was recognised as the national and first official language of the Irish Free State. Since then, the de jure position of Irish appears to have evolved. Most recently, legislation was introduced in the Republic of Ireland, and statutory duties were placed upon certain public bodies with regard to the Irish language in Northern Ireland. This article examines this historical shift in the status of Irish in the two political jurisdictions in Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland [as a part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (UK)], and explains its significance.     

Gendered and generational experiences of place and power in the rural Irish landscape

The out-migration of young people from rural regions is a selective and highly gendered process suggesting considerable differentiation in the way young men and women identify with and experience rural life. Gender imbalance in rural youth out-migration has prompted feminist researchers to consider more carefully linkages between the gendered nature of rural space and place and the social and spatial mobility of rural young men and women. Based on 11 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a rural Irish fishing community, this article explores the gendered dimensions of rural youth experience. Theoretically grounded in the conceptual triad of gender, power and place, this article considers how young men and women experience ‘the rural’ as masculine and feminine subjects. Special attention is given to the ways in which relations of power in ‘the rural’ are articulated, contested and accommodated in the everyday lives of local young men and women. As well as highlighting the ways in which rural space and place is male-dominated, this article foregrounds other power relations at play in the rural. As part of this effort, I problematize male power and point to the ‘effectivity of girls as conduits of power’. I argue that subjectivities of intra-gender relations are a critical dimension of rural youth experience and cannot be overlooked in research on rural youth experience and emigration.     

Partners for stability? Irish Free State perceptions of the incoming British Labour government 1923–24

This article examines the anxiety and frustration of the Irish Free State government faced with the uncertainty of which party was going to become the next British government in 1923–24. The Free State government had only recently emerged victorious in its own fratricidal civil war and its moral and political legitimacy was still challenged in Ireland itself. The most contentious issue an incoming British government had to deal with on Ireland was the final demarcation of the boundary between the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland which, according to Article 12 of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, would be determined by a boundary commission. The Free State government remained unconvinced that any incoming British Labour government had the competence, understanding or commitment to resolve this issue and contribute to long-term stability in Ireland, given Labour's perceived lack of knowledge and interest in Irish politics and its commitment to social and economic issues taking precedence. This apprehension was articulated in contemporary Irish government papers and personal correspondence and proved well founded, given the legalistic and cautious approach of the Labour government to establishing the Irish Boundary Commission.     

Translocational Irish identities in Edna O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl (2012)

A rural-urban exodus subsequently followed by overseas migration has characterised geographical movement in Ireland. While Irish women have outnumbered men in their diaspora, physical and symbolic identification with Ireland has been decisive to the polemic of Irish female migration. This article explores how real and symbolic contradictions in Irish women experiencing displacement are reflected in Edna O’Brien’s memoir Country Girl (2012). Using translocational positionality as an intersectional research framework, the article reveals the importance of spatiality in the ‘life writings’ of a particular situational subject and its major role in identity construction processes. Furthermore, this article relates the individual biography to the collective and complex construction of identity of Irish women abroad in the second half of the twentieth century. The analysis sheds light on many unvoiced experiences shared by female migrants and discloses key aspects of Irish migration that result in a problematic gendered relation with the land still unresolved.     

Not quite as British as Finchley: the failed attempt to bring British Conservatism to Northern Ireland

In a previous issue of Irish Studies Review I examined the unanticipated emergence in the late 1980s of a series of Conservative associations in Northern Ireland. In this follow-up article, I will seek to account for the subsequent swift and ignominious decline in the early 1990s of the Northern Irish Conservatives. While the fortunes of the Ulster Tories were undermined by a number of contingencies – the vagaries of parliamentary arithmetic and their own lack of political judgement foremost among them – their fate was sealed primarily by certain rather more structural concerns. In particular, the rapid decline of the Conservative associations in Northern Ireland owes its origins to the historically “loveless marriage” between Ulster unionists and the British state. The unionist community simply refused to vote in meaningful numbers for a political party at the centre of a Westminster establishment deemed hostile to the cause of the Union. In addition, the Conservative hierarchy would inevitably prove unwilling to nurture their own party associations in Northern Ireland as this “integrationist” project ran precisely counter to their own longstanding political ambitions for the region. This conflict of interests and intentions would in short order ensure the demise in all but name of the Northern Irish Conservatives. There can be few more dramatic illustrations of the mutual distrust that conjoins Ulster unionists and the British state than the string of lost deposits incurred by Conservative candidates running for office in Northern Ireland.     

Austerity and consociational government in Northern Ireland

Abstract

This article examines the institutional crisis of the Northern Ireland Assembly in 2015 as a case study on the impact of austerity on multiculturalism in Ireland. I make a case for viewing the Assembly as a multicultural institution through pointing to the historical role of community relations policy, which was directed at reconciling “sectarian” Irish nationalists and Ulster unionists. It did so through shifting from an understanding of the conflict as one based on the struggle for Irish national self-determination to one based on conflicting identities. I argue that Sinn Féin’s embracing of multiculturalism is a product of its accommodation to British rule in Ireland. Sinn Féin has made a virtue out of its political volte-face by becoming the strongest advocate of ethnic Irish nationalism in Northern Ireland. The ethnic power politics of Sinn Féin has found its unionist equivalent in the political manoeuvrings of the Democratic Unionist Party. Austerity measures imposed by the Westminster government have created problems for the parties in the power-sharing Assembly, problems that threaten the collapse of the Assembly. It is because of, rather than in spite of, the multicultural mechanisms embedded in the Assembly that the institution has got to crisis point. This is an institutional crisis, not a crisis of multiculturalism.     

The military, psychiatry, and "unfit" soldiers, 1939-1942

This article examines the psychiatric screening of U.S. soldiers during the Second World War, established by psychiatrist Harry Stack Sullivan (1892-1949), as a key moment in the public application of clinical psychiatry, as well as a turning point in Sullivan's intellectual and professional career. After a brief look at the ideas and expectations Sullivan brought to the screening system, I discuss a major problem of the screening: the mismatch between the medical concept of disease prevention and the realities of the mass screening as a public policy. As a way to highlight this mismatch, I focus on Sullivan's failure to protect homosexual men from medical and social stigmatization by screening them out of the armed forces. Despite his liberal approach to the issue of homosexuality before the war, which he had created in his clinical practice, Sullivan was unable to persuade the military and the public of gay men's right to serve the nation. The examination of how his sympathetic view of homosexuality became circumscribed reveals not only the gap between clinical insights and public policy, but also how tentative views of homosexuality in public debate among liberal psychiatrists during the decade preceding the war contributed to the failure to make non-homophobic policy in the 1940s. This article shows that the relative conservatism in the politics of sexuality among liberal psychiatrists, as well as the intransigent conservatism as seen in homophobic tradition of the Army, contributed to the discriminatory screening criteria.     

Patrick O’Farrell and the Irish History Wars, 1971–1993

While Patrick O’Farrell's achievements as an historian of the Irish and of Catholicism in Australia are well recognised, little attention has been paid to his significance as an historian of Ireland. This article takes his two major Irish monographs, published in 1971 and 1975, and considers how they influenced leading Irish political historians of the 1970s and 1980s. In doing so, the article examines the crisis created for historians by the Northern Ireland Troubles. It demonstrates that the work of O’Farrell, which called into question the primacy of politics and of the nation state, helped open up new avenues for the analysis of Irish culture and identity. Yet, at the same time, such an approach challenged the republican reading of Irish history as a struggle against colonialism, and thus O’Farrell's work attracted severe criticism.     

Ireland and the Paris Olympic Games (1924): a difficult journey successfully negotiated

ABSTRACT

Ireland first competed as an independent nation in the Olympic Games at Paris in 1924. The Irish presence in Paris was largely due to the work of J.J. Keane, who became the first Irish member of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1922. This made it possible for Ireland to compete independently in the Olympics. As Keane lobbied for IOC membership, he also persuaded the two rival athletic controlling bodies of Irish athletics to abandon their claims and merge into a single controlling body for the sport. An Irish Olympic Council was established by Keane to manage the Irish entry for the Paris Games. Olympic recognition was achieved against a background of tumultuous political events in Ireland that included a war of independence, a civil war and partition of the island. The British Olympic Association consistently opposed demands for independent Irish Olympic representation and in 1924 attempted to limit Irish Olympic jurisdiction to the territory of the Irish Free State, an attempt that was firmly rejected and resisted by Keane on behalf of the Irish Olympic Council. This was complicated by Irish participation in the Olympic football competition.     

Intersectional solidarity? The Armagh women,the British left and women’s liberation

In 1980, three Republican women prisoners held in Armagh prison in Northern Ireland joined the hunger strike being conducted by male Republican prisoners in Maze Prison. Overshadowed by the fatal 1981 strike, the 1980 strike involved these women in Armagh, who challenged the traditional nationalist notion of the strong male warrior, while generating sympathy and solidarity across the globe, including with the far left and the women’s liberation movement in Britain. This article will look at how the left and the women’s liberation movement in both Britain and Ireland looked to portray these women within their competing narratives.     

The British Parliamentary Labour Party and the Government of Ireland Act 1920

Immediately after the First World War the British Labour Party was forced to reconsider its relationship with an increasingly militant Irish nationalism. This reassessment occurred at the same time as it was becoming a major political and electoral force in post‐war Britain. The political imperative from the party's perspective was to portray itself as a responsible, moderate and patriotic alternative governing party. Thus it was fearful of the potential negative impact of too close an association with, and perceived sympathy for, extreme Irish nationalism. This explains the party's often bewildering changes in policy on Ireland at various party conferences in 1919 and 1920, ranging from support for home rule to federalism throughout the United Kingdom to ‘dominion home rule’ as part of a wider evolving British Commonwealth to adopting outright ‘ self‐determination’ for a completely independent Ireland outside both United Kingdom and empire. On one aspect of its Irish policy, however, the party was adamant and united – its opposition to the partition of Ireland, which was the fundamental principle of Lloyd George's Government of Ireland Bill of 1920 which established Northern Ireland. Curiously, that aspect of Labour's Irish policy was never discussed in the party at large. All the running was made by the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) in the house of commons in 1920. The PLP's outright opposition to the bill acted as balm throughout the wider party, binding together the confusing, and often contradictory, positions promulgated on the long‐term constitutional future of Ireland and its relationship with Britain.     

Adjusting to partition: from irredentism to “consent” in twentieth-century Ireland

When the Irish constitution was amended after the 1998 Good Friday agreement to replace an apparent claim to jurisdiction over Northern Ireland by an aspirational statement, it seemed that many of the issues of conflict in the North–South relationship had been resolved. This article traces the process by which ideological change and policy shift in southern Ireland during the course of the twentieth century facilitated this agreement and the associated constitutional reformulation, looking at three areas within which change is obvious. First, demands for Irish unity, vigorously expressed but confined substantially to the domain of rhetoric, were softened in the early 1970s when the fuller implications of Irish unity became clearer, and in the context of a possible British withdrawal from Northern Ireland. Second, distaste for North–South institutions such as a Council of Ireland, on the ground that they implied recognition of partition, was replaced by acceptance of a modest level of institutionalised cross-border cooperation. Third, reluctance to recognise the legitimacy of Northern Ireland was reversed, with Irish governments moving progressively towards recognition of the principle of “consent” in the late twentieth century. Together, these changes amounted to a reversal of traditional irredentist policies and a formal acceptance of partition.     

Stand(ing) up for the immigrants: the work of comedian Des Bishop

This article examines the work of white Irish American stand-up comedian Des Bishop in the context of Ireland's changing demographics. In particular, it situates Bishop within current and controversial debates on ‘undocumented Irish’ in the USA versus ‘illegal immigrants’ to Ireland, debates in which Bishop himself has explicitly intervened. A New York native who has been living in Ireland since the age of fourteen, Bishop's comedy draws upon the convention of the US stand-up as ‘ethnic’ outsider who exposes the foibles of the dominant mainstream, while he also self-consciously asserts his comic persona within the ‘returned Yank’ tradition in Irish American culture. In an increasingly multicultural Ireland, I contend that Bishop has established himself as a mediating figure between white (read: desirable) and non-white (read: undesirable) immigrants to Ireland, a strategy which, I argue, must be approached with caution.     

Multiculturalism and the immigrant “Irish woman” after the Celtic Tiger: marginalisation,gender-based violence and family dysfunction in Ebun Akpoveta’s Trapped: Prison Without Walls

This article breaks new ground in examining how “new Irish” immigrant women have responded to the collapse of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy and the different forms of gender discrimination and marginalisation they face both within their minority ethnic communities and the Irish host society. It approaches Ebun Akpoveta’s Trapped: Prison Without Walls (2013) as an exemplary work of fiction which exposes unresolved injustices and inequalities suffered by immigrant women. Akpoveta creates a narrative that complicates previous representations of cultural encounters between newcomers and long-established members of Ireland’s host society, not least because her Nigerian female protagonist arrives as a postgraduate student rather than an asylum seeker or refugee. She fictionalises female experiences of marginalisation, gender-based violence and family dysfunction within an all-Nigerian family that outwardly appears to be a model of integration and social inclusion in an open and welcoming Irish multicultural society.     

Sexual citizenship in Belfast,Northern Ireland

In this article we examine the contours and construction of sexual citizenship in Belfast, Northern Ireland through in‐depth interviews with 30 members of the GLBT community and a discursive analysis of discourses of religion and nationalism. In the first half of the article we outline how sexual citizenship was constructed in the Irish context from the mid‐nineteenth century onwards, arguing that a moral conservatism developed as a result of religious reform and the interplay between Catholic and Protestant churches, and the redefining of masculinity and femininity with the rise of nationalism. In the second half of the article, we detail how the Peace Process has offered new opportunities to challenge and destabilise hegemonic discourses of sexual citizenship by transforming legislation and policing, and encouraging inward investment and gentrification.     

British and Irish Conflict Regulation from Sunningdale to Belfast Part I: Tracing the Status of Contesting Sovereigns, 1968–1974

Abstract. This article, which is presented in two parts, analyses the changing conceptions of the status of the two sovereigns (the United Kingdom and the Irish Republic) whose competing claims to sovereignty over Northern Ireland has been the ultimate cause of conflict. In Part I (presented here) I adapt Ian Lustick's theory of state contraction and expansion to the British-Irish relationship as it affected the negotiation of the Sunningdale Power-sharing Agreement of 1973–1974. I argue that the failure to address the competing claims to sovereignty limited the possibilities of achieving and maintaining the consent of sufficient proportions of each ethno-national community. Part I of the article (forthcoming) will extend the analysis to explain the relative equalisation of sovereignty status between Britain and Ireland and presents a modification of a ‘liberal intergovernmentalist’ explanation of the evolution of the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985) and Belfast Agreement (1998).     

‘… that great swollen belly’: the abject maternal in some recent Northern Irish fiction

This essay will consider the representation of the maternal in some contemporary Northern Irish fiction written by men. It will examine, using feminist theories of embodiment and subjectivity, the power of the maternal image in Irish literary and critical discourse. The work of Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz and Mikhail Bakhtin will be employed in this argument. The pregnant body has the power to radically unsettle order, and this essay will explore the way in which men write their fears of this all-consuming imago. Northern Irish men write out their fears of all-consuming national ideology through infanticide and grotesque mother figures and this essay will trace how this figure is complicated through political ideology in Northern Ireland. The texts under consideration will be Ripley Bogle and Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson and Resurrection Man and The Last of Deeds by Eoin McNamee, as well as a glance towards the work of Glenn Patterson as a possible alternative to the hegemonic view of the grotesque or abjected maternal.