Claire Mitchell

Behind the ethnic marker: Religion and social identification in Northern Ireland

Reducing religion to a mere ethnic marker has stifled the debate about its social and political significance in Northern Ireland. This article puts forward a constructivist argument, which understands religion as a dynamic of personal and group identification, as the key to illuminating its social significance. Drawing on analysis of in-depth interviews it finds four main ways in which religion informs processes of social identification and community construction in Northern Ireland: where it acts as an identity marker; where religious rituals play a practical role, or religious ideas play a symbolic role, in the construction of community; and, where doctrine can legitimize oppositional social identifications. In fact, specifically religious structures and religious ideas remain socially significant beyond the confines of the most devout. Thus, rather than just marking out ethnic identities, this article argues that religion generally provides some substantive content to processes of categorization and social comparison in Northern Ireland.

The Limits of Legitimacy: Former Loyalist Combatants and Peace‐Building in Northern Ireland

Abstract The British government has a fraught relationship with former combatants in Northern Ireland. It simultaneously benefits from former combatants’ peace‐building efforts, whilst being reluctant to grant them statutory recognition and funding. Drawing on interviews and focus groups with politically motivated former loyalist combatants and statutory representatives in Belfast, this paper explores the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between them. It argues that a lack of legitimacy is the biggest obstacle to good working relationships, and that positive engagement may be crucial in order to promote the implementation of peace in the most difficult to reach and volatile constituencies in Northern Ireland.

From victims to equals? Catholic responses to political change in Northern Ireland

Catholic history in Northern Ireland has often been couched in terms of victimhood. This narrative has been used to identify, locate and evaluate the community vis-à-vis Protestants through recent conflict. However, in the wake of recent political change, many Catholics are presenting themselves not as victims, but as equals, fully expectant that there will be no going back to the unionist hegemony of the past. Based on analysis of in-depth interviews with a variety of Catholics in the year 2000, this article examines the discursive change from victims to equals. It explores how far Protestants are trusted by Catholics not to victimise, and whether there may be some that do not feel they have benefited from political change in Northern Ireland and may still see themselves as victims. It concludes that whilst equality, like victimhood, is a morally laden concept, it is easier to accommodate politically. This is one of the most important developments of the peace process in recent years, because just as political change has stimulated the language and expectation of equality amongst Catholics, so too this discursive transition may facilitate further political change.

The Push and Pull between Religion and Ethnicity: The Case of Loyalists in Northern Ireland

This study uses the case of a largely religiously non-practising group, working class loyalists in Northern Ireland, to explore the relationship between religion and ethnicity in divided societies. It finds that loyalists often turn to religion habitually in times of insecurity to provide justification for conflict. But religion does not just prop up deeper ethnic identities. Religion has meaning and content itself that is sometimes in tension with oppositional ethnic identities and, in some cases, can transform them totally. This produces a complex set of relationships in which religion and ethnicity push and pull against one another in the lives of individuals, neither dominating fully over the other.