National identity in Northern Ireland: stability or change?

ABSTRACT. This article addresses a set of fundamental, long‐term factors associated with the Northern Ireland conflict: the pattern of underlying values and attitudes, especially those related to identity, that have helped to shape the nature of intercommunal competition. Using all generally available public opinion data, the article explores in particular the nature of national identity and of related forms of belonging for political behaviour. It notes the mutually reinforcing character of political loyalties within the Protestant community (where national identity, communal affiliation, constitutional preference and party support tend to coincide in a ‘Protestant‐unionist’ package) and the failure of this to be matched within the Catholic community (where the components of the ‘Catholic‐nationalist’ package are less closely interrelated). It concludes by speculating about the implications of these value configurations for political development, suggesting that they are unlikely to contribute to any fundamental political change in Northern Ireland in the short or medium term.     

E.A. Markham’s St. Caesare: the other “Ulster”?

This essay examines the invented Caribbean island of St. Caesare and its relation to the representational space of “Ulster” in Montserratian poet E.A. Markham’s collection Letter from Ulster and the Hugo Poems (1993). As the title of the book implies, it unites two of the poet’s home islands, Ireland and Montserrat. Ireland was Markham’s home at the moment when he drafted many of these poems, as he was Writer-in-Residence at the University of Ulster at Coleraine from 1988 to 1991. However, as a Caribbean writer of Afro-Irish heritage, Ireland is also home in that it represents a “hinterland”. Of the Caribbean islands, Montserrat is the most closely identified with Ireland owing to its Irish cultural inheritance, which has earned it the nickname “The Emerald Isle of the Caribbean”. This article surveys Markham’s depictions of St. Caesare and “Ulster” as analytical spaces that enable him to chart the palimpsestic topologies of Montserrat and Northern Ireland. The author argues that Markham limns St. Caesare and “Ulster” as transatlantic mirror images to allow for critical relationality between Montserrat and Northern Ireland.     

Irish language education and the national ideal: the dynamics of nationalism in Northern Ireland

Since the beginning of the Northern Ireland conflict in the late 1960s, Irish nationalism has been identified as a prominent force in the political culture of the state. Recent studies have suggested, however, that the ‘Nationalist’ population has become increasingly content within the new political framework created by the peace process and the aspiration for Irish unity diminished. In placing the Northern Ireland situation within the theoretical framework of nationalism, this paper will analyse how these changing priorities have been possible. Through an analysis of Irish language study in Northern Ireland's schools, the paper will examine how the political ideals espoused by the nationalist Sinn Féin Party reflected the priorities of the ‘nationalist community’. It will be contended that the relationship between the ideology and ‘the people’ is much more complex than is often allowed for and that educational inequalities are a significant contributing factor to this.     

‘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.     

The Irish question and the concept ‘identity’ in the 1980s1

ABSTRACT. This article critically investigates the social construction of ‘identity talk’ in relation to the Irish Question in the 1980s. Our contention is that the utilisation of ‘identity’ imagined people as bounded groups in a particular way – as the two traditions or communities in Northern Ireland – and that this way of imagining people was deployed against ‘will’‐based conceptions of politics. The first part of the article places the emergence of ‘identity’ as a concept in its historical context and suggests four phases in the use of ‘identity’. The second part focuses on ‘identity’ as a concept and locates its emergence within the meta‐conflict regarding Northern Ireland. The article concludes by reflecting on Brubaker and Cooper's (2000) analysis of ‘identity’ as a category of analysis in light of our case study of ‘identity’ as a category of practice regarding the Irish Question.     

“From one April to another”: remembering and acknowledging the Holocaust in the poetry of Michael Longley

Michael Longley has written and spoken of the responsibility to commemorate the Holocaust in a manner which is free from historical or political distortion. This article will consider his poetry about the Holocaust in the light of these statements, arguing that the epigraph in Gorse Fires (1991) from the work of Paul Celan provides an indication of Longley's strategy. The close association of elegy and botanical life in Longley's work manifests in the reconfiguration of remembrance poppies in relation to Celan and the Holocaust. The article discusses Longley's work in relation to Ireland's refugee policies during the Second World War, with recourse to the poems “Buchenwald Museum” and “Poppies”. Finally, the article considers Longley's personal link to the Holocaust through his friend Helen Lewis. The representation of the Holocaust in Longley's poetry is always associated with other traumatic events and this article extracts the threads which entangle Longley's evocations of historical violence.     

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?     

‘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.     

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.     

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.     

‘Signs of the still recent war’: Medbh McGuckian and conflict

In a review of Medbh McGuckian's poetry, Christopher Benfey maintained that ‘[t]o scan her poems for allusions to sectarian violence would be as fruitless and naïve as to sift Emily Dickinson's poems for references to the Civil War’. McGuckian's work is not often read for its commentary on or critique of violence in Northern Ireland. Indeed, in an interview with John Brown, the poet revealed that ‘I never thought of myself as a “Troubles” poet; it was not part of my oeuvre and I couldn't do it simply as an exercise, so I didn't take it on’. This article tests the validity of her self-assessment by examining poems which borrow from sources focused on conflict, particularly the two world wars. The intertexts allow the poet to explore moments of crisis (due to violence, imprisonment and enforced deprivation) without having to deal explicitly with the more immediate conflict in Northern Ireland.     

Migration in childhood and its impact on national identity construction among migrants from Northern Ireland

While there is currently only a tiny literature available on Northern Ireland migration, nothing at all has as yet been published relating to the subject of the province's child migrants. This paper focuses on the migration experiences of individuals who migrated as children to and from Northern Ireland, based on interview narratives collected during the course of two studies on contemporary migration from Ireland, North and South, conducted from 2004 to 2008. In all cases, these experiences triggered identity issues for the individuals which have played out subsequently in their lives in different ways. In particular, the author seeks to understand how the memory of these events continues to construct present realities for these individuals. What awareness did these children have of sectarianism, of the Northern Ireland conflict? What was their reception in the host country and upon return to Northern Ireland? How have these experiences contributed to their identities in the present and their sense of belonging to Ireland, North and South?     

Ideological content and institutional frameworks: Unionist identities in Northern Ireland and Scotland

This article examines the complex interactions between British national identity and the territorial identities of Northern Ireland and Scotland. We argue that the current literature on national identities in Britain misunderstands the nature of British identities in Northern Ireland and Scotland. Indeed, much of this literature wrongly defines Unionists in both of these areas. By examining the content of British national identity, a comparison of Scotland and Northern Ireland reveals that Unionism finds political significance through an ideological project committed to the Union. However, we also have to account for the differences in the Unionist ideology of Scotland and Northern Ireland. We argue that the institutional framework in which these identities and ideologies are exercised explains this variation. Overall, we argue that the debate on nationalism in the United Kingdom has not adequately shown how the integrative functions of British national identity can co-exist with the separatist nature of territorial national identity.     

Localism,signification, imagination: de-stabilizing sectarian identities in two fictionalized accounts of ‘Troubles’ Belfast

This paper is a critical discussion and interpretation of literary representations of the city of Belfast with a particular concern with and focus on sectarian forms of nationalism and place-based identity. It identifies various constructs of place particular to the city as articulated by Eoin McNamee's Resurrection Man and Mary Costello's Titanic Town, two ‘fictionalized’ accounts of 1970s Belfast written and published in the 1990s. A ‘dialogical’ methodology is deployed in order to engage with these texts and to challenge and reinterpret various enduring and problematic narratives of sectarian spatiality. The social and geographical identity formations articulated, reflected and constructed therein are, I suggest, variously uncritical and disconnected. Sectarianism in particular can be seen as an empty discourse of signs. Its social and geographical consequences, however, are ‘real’ and measurable; the discursive and the material operating seamlessly as one socially effective and self-reproducing process. The paper argues then, that such forms of entrenched partisan localism are sterile, subjective and contingent, and that the resulting social division is simultaneously ‘real’ and ‘imagined’.

Le localisme, la signification, l'imagination: déstabiliser les identités sectaires dans deux récits fictifs des «Troubles» de Belfast

Irlande du Nord, représentation littéraire, sectarisme, lieu, identité

Cet article est une discussion critique et une interprétation de représentations littéraires de la ville de Belfast qui porte et met d'avantage l'accent sur les formes sectaires relatives au nationalisme et à l'identité propre au lieu. Un nombre de concepts relatifs au lieu urbain qui trouvent leur expression dans Resurrection Man de Eoin McNamee et Titanic Town de Mary Costello sont identifiées. Il s'agit de récits «fictifs» sur le Belfast des années 1970, rédigés et publiés dans les années 1990. La méthode «dialogique» est utilisée afin d'attirer l'attention sur ses textes et de mettre en cause et réinterpréter les divers récits immuables et problématiques entourant la spatialité sectaire. Je propose que les formations identitaires sociales et géographiques qui s'y manifestent, trouvent leur expression et qui sont élaborées manquent de discernement et sont coupées de la réalité. Le sectarisme peut en soi être perçu comme un discours creux sous forme de signes. Les effets d'ordre social et géographique sont toutefois «réels» et mesurables; les éléments discursifs et les matériaux interviennent uniformément dans un processus socialement efficace et se reproduisant par lui-même. Le présent article soutient par ailleurs que de telles formes de localisme à outrance et teinté de partisanerie sont stériles, subjectives et contingentes et que la division sociale qui en découle et à la fois «vraie» et «imaginée».

Localismo, significación, imaginación: la desestabilización de identidades sectarias en dos relatos ficcionalizados de los ‘Problemas’ en Belfast

Irlanda del Norte, representación literaria, sectarismo, lugar, identidad

Este papel es un discurso crítico e interpretación crítica de representaciones literarias de la ciudad de Belfast que se centra, en particular, en las formas sectarias de nacionalismo e identidad con base en un lugar. Identifica varios constructos de lugar que son particulares de la ciudad, articulados por Eoin McNamee en ‘Resurrection Man’ y Mary Costello en ‘Titanic Town’; dos relatos ‘ficcionalizados’ de la ciudad de Belfast en los años 70, escritos y publicados en los años 90. Usamos una metodología ‘dialógica’ para estudiar estos textos y para desafiar y reinterpretar varias narrativas duraderas y problemáticas de la espacialidad sectaria. Sugiero que las formaciones de identidad sociales y geográficas que se ve articuladas, reflejadas y construidas en ellas no son críticas y son desconectadas. El sectarismo, en particular, puede ser interpretado como un discurso de signos vacío. Sin embargo, sus consecuencias son ‘verdaderas’ y medibles; lo discursivo y la material funcionan perfectamente como un sólo proceso que resulta socialmente efectivo y que se reproduce a sí mismo. El papel entonces sugiere que estas formas de localismo partidista son estériles, subjetivas y contingentes, y que las divisiones sociales que resultan de ellas son simultaneamente ‘verdaderas’ e ‘imaginadas’.     

A place apart? The interventions of John P. Mackintosh and Bernard Crick on Northern Ireland

This article considers the significance of the scholarly and practical engagement with the Northern Ireland problem on the part of the Scottish politician and academic John P. Mackintosh, and the academic and controversialist Bernard Crick. It is argued that they were among the few scholars and public figures outside of Northern Ireland for whom the crisis represented an opportunity to explore more searchingly issues with broader significance for the UK as a whole, particularly devolution, and for relations within and between the islands of Britain and Ireland. For both men, Northern Ireland brought into sharp focus questions of sovereignty and identity, and of constitutional reform in the UK.     

Between the devil and the deep blue sea: nationality,power and symbolic trade‐offs among evangelical Protestants in contemporary Northern Ireland1

ABSTRACT. National identity is a symbolically complex configuration, with shifts of emphasis and reprioritisations of content negotiated in contexts of power. This paper shows how they occur in one post‐conflict situation – Northern Ireland – among some of the most extreme of national actors – evangelical Protestants. In‐depth interviews reveal quite radical shifts in the content of their British identity and in their understanding of and relation to the Irish state, with implications for their future politics. The implications for understanding ethno‐religious nationalism, nationality shifts and the future of Northern Ireland are drawn out.