1Does being Protestant matter? Protestant minorities, minority Protestants, and the re-making of Protestant identity in contemporary Ireland.1 (original) (raw)
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Learning from minority: Exploring Irish Protestant experience
2015
This paper, based on a narrative research inquiry, presents and explores a number of stories relating to the experience and identity of members of the small Irish Protestant minority. Drawing on these stories it uses Foucault‟s conceptualisation of power and discourse to consider community, social withdrawal, and two different but linked expressions of silence as acts of resistance. These were simultaneously utilised to preserve a culture and ethos diametrically opposed to the religious and political hegemony of the Irish Catholic state and to combat the threat of extinction. The article concludes that an exploration of Ireland‟s traditional religious minority not only raises awareness concerning a specific group‟s experience but extends an understanding of the issues with which minorities (in more general terms) may have to cope in order to survive.
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The study of minorities is central to research in ethnicity and nationalism. But there are cases where the precise nature of the minority is not easy to determine. One view of Southern Irish Protestants is that in the decades after independence they transformed themselves (or were transformed) from British nationals to Irish nationals or, alternatively, from a British ethnic to an Irish religious minority. This paper argues that treating the (past) British dimension of Irish Protestant identity as ethnic or national misconceives it and overlooks the historically deep Irish context of Protestant identity. One consequence of this is the neglect of the specifically Irish roots of residual tensions in Catholic-Protestant relationships. The themes of the paper are exemplified with case material drawn from research on Protestants and Catholics in rural West Cork.
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Nations and Nationalism, 2007
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.
The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 gave an opportunity to remake not just political institutions, but ethno-religious distinction in Northern Ireland. This article looks at how individuals reconstruct their way of being Protestant in Ireland and Northern Ireland in the context of social and political change. It shows individuals renegotiating their ways of being Protestant, attempting sometimes successfully to change its socio-cultural salience, blurring ethnic boundaries, distinguishing religious and ethno-national narratives, drawing universalistic political norms from their particular religious tradition. It argues that these renegotiations are highly sensitive to the macro-political context. Changes in this context affect individuals through their changing cognitive understandings and strategic interests that, at least in this case, are as important to identification as social solidarities.
Keeping Their Heads Down: Shame and Pride in the Stories of Protestants in the Irish Republic
This study draws on a number of in-depth interviews to explore the ethnic aspects of Protestantism in the Republic of Ireland. We explore themes of shame and pride around issues of identity, together with a sense of loss of a minority rapidly losing cultural distinctiveness. Following Ireland‘s division, the ordinary Protestants of the south, comprising a range of religious denominations bound by history, intermarriage and culture, found themselves in a society in which their story was rarely told. The dominant narrative was one of a Catholic people, long oppressed by a wealthy Protestant minority. The story of ordinary Protestants, including those in rural and urban poverty, went largely unheard. Today, ordinary Protestants – small farmers, shop keepers, housewives – tell the story of Ireland as seen through their family‘s narratives. Themes of pride and shame, often intertwined, form a thread that binds their testimony, drawing on family, personal and local history, folklore and statements of identity.
Dublin Review of Books, 2019
Dublin review of Books asked three historians, Prof John Horgan, Dr Niall Meehan, Dr Robbie Roulston, to respond to the recent publication of Ian D'Alton and Ida Milne's edited collection, Protestant and Irish. Each was asked to write a short initial response to the book and then, each having read the first tranche, to write a second longer one [page four here] in which they were free to react to points brought up by the other contributors.
Rethinking Religion in Northern Ireland
On Religion, 2015
Religious diversity is an often forgotten reality in Northern Ireland, whose history has been dominated by conflict between Protestant and Catholic communities. In this feature article, I discuss the history of religion in Northern Ireland since the 1920s beyond Protestantism and Catholicism in order to make way for a new way of thinking about religion there.