Catholic,Irish and Nationalist: evaluating the importance of ethno‐national and ethno‐religious variables in determining nationalist political allegiance in Northern Ireland

Irish national identity, political nationalism and Catholicism are the defining characteristics of the minority community in Northern Ireland. These identifiable ethno‐national and ethno‐religious characteristics have been the basis of communal solidarity that has transcended increasing socio‐economic heterogeneity within that community. Both of the Nationalist political parties in Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), draw their support almost exclusively from their community of origin. What is not known, however, is the relative importance of Irishness, Catholicism and Nationalism in shaping support for either party. Which of these ethnic identifiers is of greatest salience in identifying support for Sinn Féin or the SDLP? Drawing upon recent election survey evidence, this article attempts to rectify this information deficit, highlighting the weighting of components of ethnicity in determining intra‐bloc political allegiances.     

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.     

The right to Belfast City Centre: From ethnocracy to liberal multiculturalism?

This paper outlines a longitudinal study of struggles to control the public space of Belfast City Centre, the capital of Northern Ireland and a city divided by the competing political aspirations of British unionists and Irish nationalists. While the City Centre was once proscribed to nationalist groups, since 1993 nationalist groups have claimed equal use of this ‘sacred space’, once the spatial preserve of unionism. I examine this opening access of the City Centre in terms a shift from an ‘ethnocratic’ form of citizenship to one inflected by liberal multiculturalism, from one of ethnic exclusion to one informed by forms of power-sharing between nationalists and unionists. While many commentators have critiqued this form of conflict management for institutionalizing sectarianism and facilitating zero-sum conceptions of space, I argue that current strategies of creating a ‘shared space’ can be critically viewed as a successful form of liberal multiculturalism.     

Going Against the Flow: Sinn Féin’s Unusual Hungarian ‘Roots’

Can states as well as non-state political ‘actors’ learn from the history of cognate entities elsewhere in time and space, and if so how and when does this policy knowledge get ‘transferred’ across international borders? This article deals with this question, addressing a short-lived Hungarian ‘tutorial’ that, during the early twentieth century, certain policy elites in Ireland imagined might have great applicability to the political transformation of the Emerald Isle, in effect ushering in an era of political autonomy from the United Kingdom, and doing so via a ‘third way’ that skirted both the Scylla of parliamentary formulations aimed at securing ‘home rule’ for Ireland and the Charybdis of revolutionary violence. In the political agenda of Sinn Féin during its first decade of existence, Hungary loomed as a desirable political model for Ireland, with the party’s leading intellectual, Arthur Griffith, insisting that the means by which Hungary had achieved autonomy within the Hapsburg Empire in 1867 could also serve as the means for securing Ireland’s own autonomy in the first decades of the twentieth century. This article explores what policy initiatives Arthur Griffith thought he saw in the Hungarian experience that were worthy of being ‘transferred’ to the Irish situation.     

Immigration,the Celtic Tiger and the economic crisis

Abstract

This article addresses the puzzle of why Ireland has proved so open to immigration. It compares responses to immigrants in the Republic of Ireland during the Celtic Tiger era and during the post-2008 economic crisis and finds no evidence of a political backlash during the latter period even though opinion polls suggest that opposition to immigration had increased and other evidence suggested that there had been an increase in racist incidents within Irish society. Nor did the resumption of large-scale emigration trigger political hostility to immigrants. The outcome of the 2004 Referendum on Citizenship, which removed a constitutional right to Irish citizenship to the Irish-born children of immigrants, suggested that that nationalism still matters hugely and a latent tendency towards ethnic chauvinism amongst the host population. Yet, a decade after the 2004 Referendum it looked as if the old mono-ethnic sense conception of the Irish nation had been disrupted, at least a little bit.     

The Difference Context Makes: Planning and Ethnic Minorities in Northern Ireland

The ways the British planning system fosters racial disadvantage and the initiatives taken by local authorities to address such bias have been subject to a number of studies over the last 17 years. This body of research has revealed isolated examples of progressive professional practice within a general pattern of inaction and ignorance. This paper looks at how the needs of ethnic minorities have been accommodated by the planning system in Northern Ireland that has a very different institutional and political context than other parts of the UK. The nature of 'race' relations in Northern Ireland is examined and the concept of 'policy processes' is used to explain why ethnic minorities in the region face similar difficulties to those in Britain. The influence of the political and cultural context is shown to play a key role in framing the policy processes that shape patterns of discrimination. The paper suggests that a full understanding of this context is required if multiculturalism is to be fully accommodated by planning in Europe.     

Contemporary Irish theatre,the new Playboy controversy,and the economic crisis

Abstract

This article examines the impact of the economic crisis on contemporary Irish theatre. More specifically, I contend that the legal controversy surrounding Bisi Adigun and Roddy Doyle’s second production of Playboy of the Western World: A New Version in 2008 provides a case study of how professional theatre productions that dramatised stories of immigrant empowerment during the Irish economic boom were profoundly inhibited by the bust that followed. Their collaborative version of the new Playboy was widely regarded as Ireland’s most successful intercultural play and a commercial success when it was first staged at the Abbey Theatre in 2007. The subsequent breakdown in their relationship and ensuing legal dispute is more symptomatic of Celtic Tiger Ireland in economic collapse, I suggest, than the content of the play itself, or most other productions mounted in the period. I argue that this dispute did not simply reflect but also reinforced the social effects of the economic crisis, through its prolonged litigation, enormous expense, and especially the missed opportunity that it represented to position the multicultural and migrant themed Playboy within the Irish theatrical mainstream. More broadly, I suggest that the economic crisis has been marked by the disappearance of immigrants from the professional Irish stage, a void which was only partially filled by community theatre productions. A case in point is Adigun and Arambe’s most recent adaptation of Jimmy Murphy’s The Kings of the Kilburn High Road in The Paddies of Parnell Street (2013), a play which I positively appraise as an example of successful “intercultural re-appropriation”.     

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.     

Forms of secularism and multiculturalism: Charles Taylor and Ireland

This article seeks to frame the work of the Canadian political philosopher Charles Taylor in terms of its significance for Irish culture. Taylor came to wide prominence for his work on multiculturalism, but the varying ways he understands this term are especially important for Ireland. “Multiculturalism 1” speaks to the kinds of difficulties between nationalist and Unionist communities in Northern Ireland. “Multiculturalism 2” speaks to the more widely understood meaning of the term, which is connected to a cultural diversity that is often born of immigration. Taylor has had a strong role in the emergence of the term “interculturalism” to describe a form of cultural diversity that explicitly seeks to balance the needs of minority and majority cultures, and in Canada and Quebec that term has taken on a different understanding than the one that is common in Ireland. That work on interculturalism also strongly underwrites Taylor’s work on secularism, and he traces that social phenomenon in ways with clear relevance for Ireland. Although Taylor’s explicit engagement with Ireland is rare, it is clearly time to bring his work into the mainstream of studies of Irish culture.     

The Turnbull government’s ‘Post-multiculturalism’ multicultural policy

ABSTRACT

The Turnbull government presented Australia’s fifth national multicultural policy statement in March 2017. This article analyses the policy statement and argues that it represents the most significant change to Australian multicultural policy in four decades. Among other things, it abandons the language of government responsiveness to cultural diversity that previously defined Australian multiculturalism. The 2017 policy amounts to a new form of post-multiculturalism—different from earlier conservative, neoliberal and centre-left versions—in that it seeks to ‘mainstream’ multicultural policy on the grounds that Australian multiculturalism has succeeded in its intended task. While a mainstreaming strategy of this sort is, I argue, theoretically consistent with Australia’s liberal nationalist approach to cultural diversity, the institutional and attitudinal conditions that it presupposes are yet to be fully realised in Australia. More multicultural work needs to be done before this kind of post-multiculturalist approach is practicable.     

Equity, Diversity and Interdependence: Cultural Policy in Northern Ireland

This paper examines the new presence of "culture" within politics in Northern Ireland and attempts by cultural policymakers and community activists to constructively shift the meanings of "identity", "tradition" and "heritage". It focuses on the work of the Community Relations Council and the strategic development of its three principles of equity, diversity and interdependence, in relation to specific controversies about culture in Northern Ireland and wider debates about pluralism and multiculturalism. The distinctive configuration of questions of pluralism and culture in Northern Ireland highlights the ways in which multicultural theory is shaped by its geographies of development and circulation and how ideas of culture and multiculture work in different places and travel with sometimes ambiguous effects. At the same time, the pragmatic combination of optimism, realism, encouragement and critique in cultural policy in a context of continued division and political instability complicates familiar accounts of the geographies and politics of multiculture.     

‘The Party Hack,and Tool of the British Government’: T.P. O'Connor,America and Irish Party Resilience at the February 1918 South Armagh By‐Election

The common view of Irish electoral politics for the 1916 to 1918 period is one of major decline for the traditional nationalist representatives, the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), and the meteoric rise of the newly reconstituted Sinn Féin party; culminating in the latter's overwhelming victory at the December 1918 general election. By examining the February 1918 South Armagh by‐election campaign, this article argues that the Irish Parliamentary Party, which won the contest, was much more resilient than is often acknowledged. Through detailed analysis of election pamphlets, newspaper articles, private correspondence and committee minutes, it considers the significance of the grass‐roots strength of both in the form of their local organisations, the role of the Roman catholic church, and the election strategies of the two parties; in particular Sinn Féin's vilification of the IPP member, T.P. O'Connor, who was in America at the time of the contest.     

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.     

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.     

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.     

Learning from experience: Cultural policies and cultural democracy in the 20th century 1

Abstract

The discussion of the multicultural society has long been current in Danish social and educational policy, but it is only at the turn of the millennium that the issue has been placed on the agenda in a serious way in relation to the Danish national cultural policy. The transformation from a homogenous identity concept to the acceptance of a diversity of voices and interpretations is occurring only slowly in both the production and dissemination of art and culture. In the cultural policy discourse up through the 1980s there is an acute lack of discussion about the ethnic or multicultural. Far up into the 1990s, the cultural political contributions within the multicultural field are left to the social or humanitarian organs, with integration as the general goal. At the advent of the millennium we can identify greater openness and interest for the multicultural field. In the evaluation of The Ministry of Culture's Development Fund I have analysed the subsidized activities according to the strategies of ethnic revival , interculturalism and hybridisation , and in the article I discuss the problems of formulating criteria for artistic quality in an area new to members of the board. On this background I discuss the relation between multiculturalism and cultural diversity , where I find the concept of cultural diversity to be a better reflection of the new hybrid cultures, which not only transcend boundaries and traditional cultures but dissolve them and create new expressions across genres and cultural forms.     

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.     

Trellising the girders: poetry and the imagining of place in Northern Ireland1

Imaginings and uses of place in Northern Ireland are characterised frequently by sectarianism, leading to the strict territorialisation of space along cultural, political and religious dividing lines. It is argued that such geographies underpin the six counties' ongoing intercommunal conflict. Extrapolating from the work of feminist economic geographers J. K. Gibson-Graham, this paper suggests that in order to fracture the monolith of spatial sectarianism, attention must be paid to imaginings and uses of place which sidestep or move beyond the tendency to exclude. Here I examine poetry by Michael Longley and Sinéad Morrissey for its alternative envisaging of place, and argue that these particular instances of opening out a spatial imaginary are of import both in a Northern Irish context, and further afield.     

Asylum seekers,Ireland, and the return of the repressed

Abstract

In 2014 residents in Direct Provision Centres for asylum seekers staged a series of protests. The protests, which coincided with the appointment of a new Minister for Justice who announced the Irish government’s plans to reform the asylum system, voiced three clear demands. Firstly, the protestors demanded that all asylum centres be closed; secondly, they demanded that all residents be given the right to remain and work in Ireland; and thirdly, they demanded an end to all deportations. The government’s response to these protests was to appoint a working group in October 2014, made up of representatives of migrant-support NGOs (but without any significant representation of asylum seekers themselves) while also announcing that it intends to reform rather than abolish the system.

Against this background, this paper makes three interlinked theoretical propositions. Firstly, I propose that just as the Irish state and society managed to ignore workhouses, mental health asylums, “mother and baby homes”, Magdalene laundries and industrial schools, they also “manage not to know” of the plight of asylum seekers, precisely because the Direct Provision system isolates asylum applicants, makes them dependent on bed and board and a small “residual income maintenance payment to cover personal requisites”, and makes it difficult for them to organise on a national level. “Managing not to know”, or disavowing, entails the erasure of the Direct Provision system from Ireland’s collective consciousness at a time when increasing emigration is returning to haunt Irish society after years of refusing to confront the pain of emigration. I argue that asylum seekers represent the return of Ireland’s repressed that confronts Irish people, themselves e/migrants par excellence. Secondly, I propose that by taking action and representing themselves, the residents of Direct Provision Centres can no longer be theorised as Agamben’s “bare life”, at the mercy of sovereign power, to whom everything is done and who are therefore not considered active agents in their own right. The third proposition responds to the theme of this special issue, that multiculturalism is “in crisis”, arguing in the conclusion that this “crisis” hardly applies to Ireland, where the brief flirtations with “interculturalism” by state, society but also Irish studies disavow race and racism in favour of a returning obsession with emigration, which enables the continued disavowal of the experiences of asylum seekers in Direct Provision.     

Republican Political Theory and Irish Nationalism

Republicanism has enjoyed something of a revival in recent times among political theorists. This article examines the way in which republican strains of democratic political philosophy impacted political thinkers and leaders in the case of modern Ireland. Although the Republic of Ireland was officially established in 1949, the question of its origins was a source of contention throughout the first part of the twentieth century. I argue that the intellectual origins of Irish republicanism lay in the impact of French revolutionary thought on Irish nationalist leaders in the 1790s, and then trace these republican ideas through the public debates and tracts that marked the major stages in the development of the Irish Republic. In particular, I focus on the principles informing the 1916 Declaration of the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic, as well as the central arguments employed in the debates surrounding the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and the Republic of Ireland Act of 1948. My aim is to demonstrate that republican ideas affected nationalism to such an extent that in Ireland republicanism and nationalism became, and in some respects still are, practically synonymous.