Dominic Bryan

The Politics of Community

Abstract The idea of ‘community’ dominates politics in Northern Ireland in both popular and political discourse and in academic writing, policy and legislation. Depending upon particular understandings of the notion of community different arguments are made about the policies that need to be implemented to develop the peace process. This has had a fundamental impact on areas such as legislation over parades and the development of a Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland. This essay critically looks at understandings of ‘community’; how it becomes used in political discourse and in policy development and the character of its relationship with ideas about safety and security.

Parades and power

Whenever political change in the north threatens their centuries-old hegemony, the protestant marching season takes on a special significance. This years Orange parades marched to confrontation to the fading tune of a dying order

Green Parades in an Orange State: Nationalist and Republican Commemorations and Demonstrations from Partition to the Troubles, 1920–70

Parading is seen as a practice that is central to the Northern Irish Protestant culture and one that defines that community in distinction to the nationalist community. While it is acknowledged that nationalist organisations do hold commemorative and other parades, these are regarded as either little more than a pale reflection of their Orange counterparts or as part of a political strategy which could be easily abandoned. Parades are not seen as part of nationalist culture in the way that they are a part of unionist culture.1 They are not imbued with the weight of tradition. Yet parades have been a part of Irish social, cultural and political life since at least the fifteenth century, and during the late nineteenth century were as much a vehicle for mobilising and defining an Irish nationalist identity as they were for defining a Protestant British identity.2 For instance, from the 1890s to the First World War, the Fifteenth (Lady’s Day, 15 August) was treated by the Irish News as comparable to the Twelfth, the Ancient Order of Hibernians (AOH) rivalled the Orange Order, and Derry nationalists paraded the city walls each St Patrick’s Day.3

The failed paradigm of ‘terrorism’

This paper argues that the paradigm of ‘terrorism’ needs to be abandoned by those academics engaged in exploring political violence. The authors, through the prism of their various disciplinary backgrounds and their research experience in Northern Ireland, argue that those engaged within Terrorism Studies must go further in their critique of the concept of ‘terrorism’. Taking fives steps into the field of Terrorism Studies, this article argues that the term is indefinable; and that some of the common elements of a definition are unconvincing; explores the significant implications of using such a label; engages with the arguments of Richard Jackson and other critical terrorism studies’ scholars; and, finally, draws upon lessons learnt from the Northern Ireland case study.

The Regulation of Public Space in Northern Ireland

Abstract The Parades Commission of Northern Ireland was established to regulate the use of public space in the region. Its formal design includes both a role in mediating between groups over how spaces are used and an adjudicative role when agreement between competing groups cannot be reached. We argue that the Parades Commission has only been effective to the degree that its character as a bureaucracy has quelled violence surrounding parades. The Commissions goal of conciliation cannot be attained without a more consistent, transparent and inclusive approach to applying law.

Rituals of Irish Protestantism and Orangeism: The Transnational Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland

This article explores the influence the Irish border has had on the cultural expression of Orangeism north and south of the border. Utilising anthropological understandings of culture the article looks at the Orange Institution as a transnational organisation. It focuses on the contrasting problems created for a pro-British, pro-Empire Protestant organisation once the Grand Lodge of Ireland found itself with jurisdiction over Orange lodges and parades in two politically antagonistic countries. The symbols used in the parades on both sides of the border reveal the divergent relations of power within which the Orange Order has developed. The Orange Order in the Republic of Ireland has adapted the ideological content of their parades to allow them to hold regular events in County Donegal. However, the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland effectively acts as if it is the Grand Lodge of Northern Ireland. Equally, the Irish state has struggled to know how to deal with Orange parades within the Republic. In its conclusions, this article suggests that studying culture allows us to map aspects of transnationalism by exploring both the effects that common cultural traits have on border regions and the effects that the border and changed power relations have on culture.

Identity, Social Action and Public Space: Defining Civic Space in Belfast

Belfast has been the location of the most long lasting, and most violently destructive, communal conflict within the modern United Kingdom. In this conflict public displays of identity — parades, demonstrations, the use of flags and emblems — have consistently played a prominent part. Belfast’s first recorded sectarian riot, in 1813, arose from a Protestant commemoration of 12 July. Today negotiations over emblems and marches remain central to attempts to consolidate a precarious political settlement (Baker, 1973; Bryan, 2000; Farrell, 2000; Hirst, 2002). Commentators and policy makers have for the most part taken the claims of competing practices at face value, as reflecting ‘identities’, Nationalist and Unionist, legitimised by their roots in a distant past. In Ireland as elsewhere, however, the work of Hobsbawm and Ranger (1983) has encouraged historians to look more sceptically at the claims of ‘tradition’. ‘Irishness’, ‘nationalism’ and ‘unionism’ now appear, not as fixed entities, but as fluid categories repeatedly redefined in response to changing circumstances (Connolly, 1997; Comerford, 2003). Against this background, a reassessment of the identity practices lying at the heart of Belfast’s long-standing troubles is overdue.

Negotiating the Ground: ‘Mobilizing’ a Divided Field Site in the ‘Post-Conflict’ City

ABSTRACT While an exploration of mobility patterns in ‘post-conflict’ societies has much to tell us about how division is produced through ordinary activities, less work has considered the practical application of a mobilities ‘lens’ during fieldwork in such contexts. Negotiating the ground in highly polarized contexts presents a unique array of challenges, but also offers opportunities to make use of mobile methodologies. This paper discusses the advantages of GPS-based technologies and walking interviews to a recent activity-space segregation study in Belfast, Northern Ireland, and reflects on methodological issues posed by the ‘post-conflict’ field site.

Beyond group engagement : multiple pathways from encounters with the police to cooperation and compliance in Northern Ireland

In a sample of young people in Northern Ireland (N = 819), we examine the relationships between the quality of experience with police officers and police legitimacy. We examine potential pathways through which experiences may either support or undermine the legitimacy of the police, and thus cooperation and compliance with them. We find evidence that perceptions of the police as having goals that align with those of wider society, and as being fair in general, mediate relations between the quality of encounters and legitimacy, which in turn mediates the relation with cooperation and compliance. Identification with wider society was not a reliable mediator, contrary to our predictions based on the Group Engagement Model. Moreover, our analysis of the structure of police fairness perceptions finds no support for the distinction between procedural and distributive police fairness as usually conceived. Implications for the social psychological understanding of legitimate authority are discussed.

Introduction: Beyond the Divided City: Policies and Practices of Shared Space

T he papers in this special feature address the question of ‘shared space’—a concept that was introduced in urban policy discourse and practice of conflict transformation in Northern Ireland nearly a decade ago (e.g. OFMDFM 2005). Debates around the definition and use of this concept in the context of a ‘post-conflict’ society, though evolving over the years, have generally built upon an interest in the role of public space as a social resource that pervaded think tank, government and public agency reports in the UK during the first decade of this century (Lownsbrough and Beunderman 2007; JRF 2007). Those documents emphasised the importance of public spaces in successful regeneration policies, in the creation of sustainable and cohesive communities, and in fostering interaction and cohesion across lines of ethnic and cultural diversity. They discussed the conditions for the workability of public spaces (e.g. how well they can be made to resonate with everyday life routines and to accommodate wider definitions of community) and in doing so engaged with issues pertinent to, albeit not specifically focused upon, the practices of peace building in Northern Ireland. As the papers in this special feature suggest, however, understandings and policies for sharing space in Northern Ireland have remained rather vague, practised reductively and understood as broadly referring to the ability of people from different ethnonational communities to access and use the same physical spaces. The A Shared Future document (OFMDFM 2005) defined ‘shared space’ in a somewhat vague and circular fashion as necessary for ‘developing and protecting town and city centres as safe and welcoming places’, ‘creating safe and shared space for meeting, sharing, playing, working and living’ and ‘freeing the public realm from threat, aggression and intimidation while allowing for legitimate expression of cultural celebration’ (21). The more concrete aspect of the above definition, for instance, that symbolic expressions of identity need to be managed and restricted to their ‘legitimate’ manifestations, is critiqued by MaryKathryn Rallings in her contribution to this issue. She points out that central government and Belfast City Council’s focus on the symbolic expressions and performative manifestations of identity through public events in the city centre attempt to ‘neutralise’ the political overtones of such expressions, yet miss the complexity contained in the relationship between people and place. They misconceive the nature of sharing as they fail to seriously address the impact of factors shaping access