Implementing political agreement in Northern Ireland: Planning issues for Irish language policy

This paper examines the place of the Irish language in the context of the political agreement recently reached in Northern Ireland. Language planning issues are seen to turn on critical relationships between the emergent legislative framework and local Irish-speaking communities in the region. A model for community-based language planning initiatives is proposed as a means of ensuring the effective engagement of language policy with Irish-speakers. It is suggested that the issue of language rights is likely to become much more pressing as the new institutions of state seek to reflect the socio-political diversity of the region.     

Annie Moore and the archives of displacement: towards an immigrant history of the present

Annie Moore, the first immigrant to enter the USA through the Ellis Island immigrant processing station, stands as an originary figure of the so‐called golden age of European immigration to the USA in the late nineteenth century. The contemporary archivization of the Irish immigrant Annie Moore in the Ellis Island Museum, New York and the Cobh Harbour Heritage Centre in County Cork, Ireland repeats the democratic rhetoric of immigration which underpins the foundation of the USA, as well as the national imaginary of Ireland. Yet in so doing, this archivization effaces the hierarchies of race and class that have historically underpinned the democratic rhetoric of immigration. With reference to Jacques Derrida's work on the archive and hospitality, this article expands on a performance‐based critical art intervention into the archivization of Annie Moore entitled ‘Calling Up Annie Moore’. Focusing on the blindspots, ellipses and discontinuities which the archive represses, the article traces the different histories and experiences of immigration which the art intervention disclosed.     

To name or not to name: reflections on the use of anonymity in an oral archive of migrant life narratives

This paper draws on an oral archive project on narratives of return migration in contemporary Ireland, as the basis for a discussion on the potential of life narrative research to destabilize meta-narratives and to contribute to the mapping of transformative geographies. It is argued that this kind of research requires the creation of safe spaces within which participants can tell their stories and articulate counter-narratives. At the same time, it is important to make their voices available to a wide audience and to recognize their authorial roles. There are contrasting perspectives in oral history and life narrative research on the use of anonymity to protect participants' identities, which reflect different disciplinary traditions and practices. The paper reflects on these different perspectives and on the process of designing a research project that draws on multiple methodological influences. It concludes that it is possible to facilitate access to these voices, while at the same time providing safe conditions for the articulation of counter-narratives, by providing anonymity where possible and desirable in agreement with the participant.     

Cultural geographies of the contact zone: Gaels,Gallsand overlapping territories in late medieval Ireland

In writing about the social and cultural geographies of the past, we frequently reinforce notions of difference by using neatly delineated ethnic terms of reference that often superscribe the complexities of reality on the ground. Referring to ‘Gaels’ and ‘Galls’, demarcating ‘native’ and ‘foreign’ worlds in late medieval Ireland, is but one example. We often exaggerate, too, the boundedness of geographical space by speaking more of frontiers and less of overlapping territories. Using the context of late medieval Ireland, I propose in this paper the application and broadening of the concept of the contact zone—prevalent in postcolonial studies for a number of years—to address this specific issue of overstating social and cultural geographical cohesion and separation in the past. The use of the concept of the contact zone in geography has been largely confined to the modern period, which in the extant literature has received priority for various reasons, not least of which is the wider availability of source material. However, in this paper, I suggest that its relevance to the study of the medieval period is equally as strong, and perhaps its application can serve to deflect our imaginings of earlier geographical worlds as somehow more static and less complicated, and instead open the possibility of reading the fluidity and interconnections of the more distant past.     

Fiddling for outcomes: traditional music,social capital,and arts policy in Northern Ireland

Arts development policies increasingly tie funding to the potential of arts organisations to effectively deliver an array of extra‐artistic social outcomes. This paper reports on the difficulties of this work in Northern Ireland, where the arts sector, and in particular the so‐called ‘traditional arts’, have been drawn into a politically ambiguous discourse centred on the concepts of ‘mutual understanding’ and, more recently, ‘social capital’. The paper traces the recent history of these policies and the difficulties in evaluating the social outcomes of arts programs. The use of the term ‘social capital’ in the work of Putnam and Bourdieu is considered. The paper argues, through a rereading of Bourdieu’s articulation of the ‘forms’ of capital and Eagleton’s ‘ideology of the aesthetic’, the concept of social capital can be released from its current neoliberal trappings by imagining a reconnection of the concepts of ‘capital’ and ‘the aesthetic’.     

“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.     

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.     

‘It was a bit like the passover’: recollections of family mealtimes during twentieth century Irish childhoods

The article presents an in-depth qualitative analysis of experiences of childhood mealtimes amongst three cohorts of Irish people in different historical periods during the twentieth century. By analysing family mealtimes during respondents' childhoods, the article sheds light on change and continuity to family practices throughout twentieth century Ireland. The analysis shows that patterns of family eating respond to changes in the economy and employment patterns, technological innovation, as well as to shifting family arrangements and structures. But the popular idea that the family meal is in terminal decline is disputed: tendencies towards fragmentation of family mealtimes often meet counter-tendencies. These accounts are important as they problematize normative assumptions about the pivotal role shared family meals play in supporting family life.     

Chiefdoms and the emergence of private property in land

A prevailing characteristic of complex, stratified societies is unequal access to critical resources, and in most cases land is the most fundamental of those resources. Gaining an understanding how relations to land are transformed is viewed as integral to revealing the origins of social inequality. Recent scholarship has proposed an evolution of property rights in land from open access to private property, the latter condition having been attributed to nation states. However, some scholars have concluded from their examinations of Early Medieval Irish texts that land within Irish chiefdoms was regarded as a commodity. The analysis carried out in this paper reveals that in Early Medieval Ireland some land could be considered to be private property, but the holding and transfer of land was restricted to chieftains and their dependents, the lands of commoners being held communally. The closest counterpart to this mode of land ownership is the form of feudalism proposed for the Classic and Post-Classic Maya.     

Vegetation history at the multi-period prehistoric complex at Ballynahatty,Co. Down,Northern Ireland

Palaeoecological methods can provide an environmental context for archaeological sites, enabling the nature of past human activity to be explored from an indirect but alternative perspective. Through a palynological study of a small fen peatland located within the catchment of a multi-period prehistoric complex at Ballynahatty, Co. Down, Northern Ireland, we reconstruct the vegetation history of the area during the early prehistoric period. The pollen record reveals tentative evidence for Mesolithic activity in the area at 6410–6220 cal BC, with woodland disturbance identified during the Mesolithic–Neolithic transitional period ca. 4430–3890 cal BC. A more significant impact on the landscape is observed in the Early Neolithic from 3950 to 3700 cal BC, with an opening up of the forest and the establishment of a mixed agricultural economy. This activity precedes and continues to be evident through the Mid-Neolithic during which megalithic tombs and related burial sites were constructed at Ballynahatty. Due to chronological uncertainties and a possible hiatus in peat accumulation in the fen, the contemporary environment of the Ballynahatty timber circle complex (constructed and used ca. 3080–2490 cal BC) and henge (dating to the third millennium cal BC) cannot certainly be established. Nevertheless, the pollen record suggests that the landscape remained open through to the Bronze Age, implying a long continuity of human activity in the area. These findings support the idea that the Ballynahatty prehistoric complex was the product of a gradual and repeated restructuring of the ritual and ceremonial landscape whose significance continued to be recognised throughout the early prehistoric period.