Beyond Orange and Green? The awkwardness of negotiating difference in Northern Ireland1

Since the Good Friday Agreement (1988) issues of migration, racism and social difference beyond the ‘two traditions’ have become increasingly prominent in Northern Ireland. This paper investigates the difficulty, the ‘awkwardness’, of multiculturalism and anti-racism as models for negotiating these emerging differences in a society historically grounded in sectarian division. It is argued that multicultural practices, which offer opportunities for the recognition of diverse groups and identities, remain structured by on-going sectarian division in the wider society. Texts produced by anti-racist groups in West Belfast show how racialized ‘Others’ are often incorporated within dominant sectarian narratives. Despite this awkwardness, cultural diversity is fundamentally changing Northern Irish society and helping to denaturalise practices grounded in, and reproductive of sectarianism. In conclusion, it is suggested that Northern Ireland needs an inclusive, polyvocal anti-racism which connects all forms of discrimination, including racism and sectarianism.     

The failure of parenting and the success of love in Robert McLiam Wilson's Ripley Bogle and Eureka Street

Robert McLiam Wilson has become one of the most influential literary voices to emerge from Northern Ireland since the Troubles began, and he has challenged the understanding of contemporary Irishness. His novels are gritty, acerbic and he constructs images of Belfast that are as startling as they are affectionate. Both Ripley Bogle (1989) and Eureka Street (1996) involve characters from broken families who, in spite of sectarian violence around them, find emotional support from unlikely individuals. Failure of parenting is a persistent motif in McLiam Wilson, but so too is the triumph of love because the protagonists of Ripley Bogle and Eureka Street both turn to unlikely individuals for guidance. Although traditional parenting fails, pseudo-adoptive parents mollify both Ripley Bogle and Jake Jackson by granting them support and love.     

‘Each fantasy chosen begin’: the music of The Divine Comedy

This article considers the cultural and social context for the music of the Northern Irish band The Divine Comedy. It focuses on three mid-1990s albums – Liberation (1993), Promenade (1994) and Casanova (1996) – and debates the significance of this performance of alternative Ulster masculinity during the peace process. It will detail the lyrical obsession with a very particular type of imagined Anglo-Irishness during the first two of these albums, and then consider the complicated uses of the ‘Britpop’ genre in Casanova. This music is baroque, literary and written by an Anglican bishop's son, Neil Hannon, who grew up in Enniskillen during the Troubles. It will consider how Hannon cobbles together an acceptable identity through the use of literary pretentiousness and a carefully crafted pop persona.     

‘… 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.     

Fallout from the thunder: poetry and politics in Seamus Heaney's District and Circle

This article examines Heaney's preoccupation in District and Circle (2006) with international political events during this ‘new age of anxiety’, and how he initially approaches these circuitously through a return to originary, boyhood experiences. Such momentous acts as the attacks of 9/ll, the ‘War on Terror’ and the London bombings are filtered through, juxtaposed with and illuminated by episodes both from the ancient past and Heaney's family history. In attendance, as always, throughout the latest volume is the poet's diverse literary ancestry, a reminder of how his work exemplifies core claims made in ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), where Eliot argues that ‘what makes the writer most acutely conscious of his own place in time’ is ‘the historical sense’, ‘a feeling for the whole of literature’ from Homer onwards. Thus, alongside its detailed address to politics and such crucial literary matters as structure, form and metaphor, the essay repeatedly returns to the intertextual ‘presences’ which haunt and animate Heaney's continuing creative project.     

The last glaciation in the Western Mourne Mountains,Northern Ireland

During the late‐Midlandian (25–13 ¹⁴C ka BP), the last Irish Ice Sheet was thicker in the Western Mourne Mountains than previously argued. Geomorphological and sedimento‐logical analysis shows that regional ice from the Irish Ice Sheet spilled over the mountains, reaching a major limit 5 km along Pigeon Rock Valley. These findings differ from the previous view that a local valley glacier occupied the valley during this period. The pattern of deglaciation was reconstructed using glacial and periglacial evidence. A complex topographic environment in the upper reaches of the valley suggests that regional ice stagnated as it wasted away. During the Nahanagan Stadial (Younger Dryas, ca. 11–10 ka ¹⁴C BP) an arcuate ridge was formed on the western flank of the valley. Calculations suggest that the Equilibrium Line Altitude, influenced by topographic conditions favourable for snow accumulation, was approximately between 1736 m and 1386 m lower during the Nahanagan Stadial than at present.     

A Possible Case of Hydrocephalus in a Medieval Child from Doonbought Fort,Co. Antrim,Northern Ireland

Hydrocephalus is a condition that is rarely found in the palaeopathological record. It has been demonstrated in a modern study of untreated cases of hydrocephalus that 50 per cent of children suffering from the disease die within the first 18 months of life. It is probable that the situation was the same in archaeological populations and that the delicate nature of neonatal and infant crania accounts for the paucity of palaeopathological evidence. As far as the author is aware there are approximately 30 possible cases of hydrocephalus known in the archaeological record throughout the world and only two of these cases originated in the British Isles. The following report presents evidence of a case of possible hydrocephalus in a 6–7-year-old juvenile from Northern Ireland. The skeleton was recovered from a post-thirteenth century context during excavations at the secular medieval fort of Doonbought, Co. Antrim. The diagnosis of hydrocephalus has been made on the basis of the abnormal and enlarged morphology and increased cranial capacity of the cranium. The only other palaeopathological lesion present in the remains was cribra orbitalia.     

John Hewitt's allegorical imagination

John Hewitt (1907–1987), the Northern Irish poet from Belfast, is most famous for advocating the Regionalist project he helped start in the 1930's. Regionalism demanded something more than kinship: an allegiance to the smaller unit of land within a nation. In his poetry, Hewitt's pursuit of this ideal necessitated a concern with sectarian issues and the religious and cultural impasses that attended them. Consequently, he often examines his own complicity in the unhealthy relations between divided neighbors, and this opens the door to a couple of criticisms that have commonly been directed at Hewitt: that his negotiations with place are outdated and that his craft and imagination were superseded by a self-conscious attention to denominational questions. To a large degree this essay means to explore how Hewitt manages to overcome such difficulties in his best work, especially The Bloody Brae and ‘The Colony’. In these and other poems, he imagines an alternative time and place; such settings allow the poet to dramatize philosophical and meta-ethical questions without being explicitly hortative. The worlds of these poems exist independently, untainted by contemporary fact, yet they often allude to the predicaments of his homeland. This technique of using a double focus inspires reflection on questions current in Hewitt's lifetime, at the same time as it shifts responsibility for answers from poet to reader. It also insists on the recall of visual experience, thereby promoting a regionally characteristic language.     

Deviations from the known route: writing and walking in Ciaran Carson's Belfast

Considered as a whole the work of Ciaran Carson is perhaps distinguished above all by its sheer miscellaneity, but within this catholic remit of interests the city of Belfast continues to occupy a central place, manifesting itself in complex and various forms. Disclosing a dialectic of recollection and revision at its centre, Carson's work balances a desire to record everything about the city, and thereby to know Belfast in its totality, against the necessity of knowing it in terms of its provisional details and contingent multiplicity. This fundamental tension can be explored through his variations upon the theme of walking in the city, a mode of perceiving and navigating urban space that precludes any privileged position of detached objectivity in favour of active engagement in the writing and re-writing of the city-text. Moreover, I argue that whilst Carson's writing contains unusally sophisticated representations of Belfast as both labyrinth and panopticon, walking in the city also implies for him an utopian spatial politics through which resistance to state surveillance and paramilitary terror might be both imagined and effected.     

Partitioned identities? Everyday national distinctions in Northern Ireland and the Irish state

How does political structure affect ethno‐national distinction? Partitioned societies are a good test case where we can see the effects of changed socio‐political circumstances on historically inherited distinction. This article takes nominally identical distinctions of nationality and religion with common historical roots and shows how they are differentially understood in two polities partitioned in 1920: Northern Ireland, a devolved region of the United Kingdom, and the Irish state. Using a data base of interviews with over 220 respondents, of which 75 in Northern Ireland, conducted between 2003 and 2006, it shows how complex, potentially totalising and exclusive ‘ethnic’ and ‘ethno‐national’ divisions are built up from simpler and more permeable distinctions. Respondents interrelate the same elements into a loosely‐knit symbolic structure – different in each jurisdiction – which frames expectations and discourse, and which is associated with different logics of national discourse, one focussing on personal orientation, the other on group belonging. The resultant ‘ethno‐national’ distinctions function differently North and South.     

“Back in the heartland”: Seamus Heaney's “Route 110” sequence in Human Chain

This essay foregrounds the increasingly significant role translation has played in Seamus Heaney's compositional and creative practices since the 1970s, and how it functions as a means of displacement and route into imagined homecomings. It offers a detailed analysis of the sequence which occupies a central position within Human Chain, in which Heaney HeaneySeamusStations. Belfast: Ulsterman Publications, 1975. [Google Scholar] attends to and seeks to reconcile once more the different “voices of my education”, that of originary familial/parish culture of Mossbawn and Bellaghy, and that acquired at St Columb's College and Queen's University that furnished him with rich linguistic and cultural assets, but sentenced him also to a “migrant solitude” (“The Wanderer”, Stations). “Route 110” illustrates the enduring effects of both bequests, as Heaney takes scenes and motifs from Virgil's Aeneid, Book VI, which details Aeneas' experiences on his descent into the seventieth year, Heaney takes readers with him on a road back to pre-Troubles Northern Ireland in the mid-twentieth century, stopping off initially at Smithfield Market, Belfast, in order to pick up a “used copy” of the Virgil that will become his guide. What he subsequently assembles is an album of snapshots of his youth, part of his legacy to his newly-born granddaughter.     

Deducing rationales and political tactics in the partitioning of Ireland, 1912–1925

Partition is an intrinsically abstract and simplistic blunt instrument applied on a complex mosaic of peculiarities that constitute reality. There are very few modern states that are ethnically or culturally homogenous. In this context, partition is a subjective territorial tactic that can treat or exacerbate symptoms of historical, political, and geographical difficulties. While exhibiting comparative scope, especially to the role of the British State and the dynamics of national majorities and minorities, the circumstances concerning the partitioning of Ireland deviate from patterns gleaned from other examples as the evolving bases of its partition between 1912 and 1925 mutated at various stages with regard to geography, political status, and function. However, Ireland served as an important historical precedent in illustrating the disparity between the original intent and eventual result of its partition. Indeed, one can extrapolate from the Irish example that partition is better understood as a catalytic tactical process that radically reconfigures the political and geographical dimensions of conflict rather than as a decisive political instrument solving it.     

The role of the Irish boundary commission in the entrenchment of the Irish border: from tactical panacea to political liability

The abortive saga of the Irish Boundary Commission has largely been dismissed as a minor footnote that warrants little elaboration in the discussion of Ireland's partition. This is unsurprising considering that its final report was hastily suppressed so as to prevent the destabilisation of the nascent regimes in Northern Ireland and the then Irish Free State. However, the concept of the Commission derives from the intensifying controversies of Irish Home Rule and partition, and the consequent difficulties in establishing how and where a boundary was eventually drawn as well as to the status of the entities it would be dividing. The Commission was legally conceived in Article 12 of the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty but confusion over its wording protracted a sequence of events that ensured that it was almost three years before it actually met. Article 12 was eventually interpreted in a restrictive manner, which exposed inherent flaws that were either ignored or naively underestimated when it was originally adapted from part of the post-World War I Treaty of Versailles. Furthermore, the complexities of evidence were inadequately scrutinised by a small and under-resourced panel that operated under considerable political pressure to delimit a precise line that satisfied subjective terms of reference. Nevertheless, the revoked Commission served as a crucial catalyst in defining the Irish Free State's relationship with the British State and in entrenching the territorial framework of Northern Ireland's six counties that exists to this day.     

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?     

Selling Conflict Heritage through Tourism in Peacetime Northern Ireland: Transforming Conflict or Exacerbating Difference?

The paramilitary ceasefires in 1994 and the ensuing peace negotiations brought to a close some three decades of ethno‐nationalist violence in Northern Ireland. The conflict, colloquially termed the Troubles, cost almost 3,700 lives, and bequeathed both a tangible and intangible heritage of division and hurt. This paper considers the commodification of physical conflict ‘heritage’ such as military installations, memorials and street murals through an examination of various tourism initiatives. Such initiatives have been employed by a number of agents ranging from local councils and tourist boards to small community groups and ex‐prisoner organisations. While ‘official’ agencies recognise the economic potential of this form of heritage, community‐based groups often view the sites and symbols of the conflict as vehicles through which to propagate political perspectives. Those sold by the latter, in particular, are often supported by government bodies that fund such forms of tourism under the auspices of ‘conflict transformation’, a strategy that is aimed at transforming the nature of the conflict through fostering self‐understanding within disputant communities. I participated in a number of these tours over the course of six months in 2005/2006.     

‘The gentle art of re-perceiving’: post-ceasefire identity in the poetry of Alan Gillis

This article discusses post-ceasefire identity in Northern Ireland, as examined in the poetry of Alan Gillis. Emphasising the novelty of Gillis's work (and connecting this with his status as one of the first generation ‘peace poets’), the article argues for awareness of complexity and uncertainty within the poems, suggesting formation of the ‘new’ as, in poetry as in society, a difficult, ambiguous task productive of an aesthetics of transition. Focusing particularly on the ten year gap between the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 and the implementation of devolved government in 2007 (and with reference to political writings from this period), it examines the relationship between poetic and political agency, aligning Gillis's approach to form, language and syntax with a dualistic sense of opportunity and disempowerment. Also examined are themes of consumerism and the globalising of identity attendant on economic/political ‘normalisation’, with reference to theoretical approaches by Walter Benjamin and Cairns Craig.     

Unresolved implicative dilemmas: a cognitive-constructivist reading of Emma Donoghue’s The Sealed Letter

The protagonist of Emma Donoghue’s historical novel The Sealed Letter (2008), Emily “Fido” Faithfull, is a New Woman, a campaigner for women’s rights, whose involvement in a scandalous divorce that shocked the London society of 1864 was overtly silenced. In an attempt to unearth her role as one of the leaders of first-wave feminism, Donoghue explores the nature of female friendship through her unfortunate attachment to a troublesome woman with a duplicitous nature and her resentful husband. Considering the game of perspectives displayed in the narrative as propositions for the coexistence of a plurality of truths, this article will venture towards the understanding of the implicative dilemmas characters have to unravel in face of each other and of Victorian mores, as these have been defined by constructivist epistemology and, more specifically, within the framework of constructive psychology.