Irish Studies, Cultural Pluralism and the Peace Process1
Andrew Finlay
Andrew Finlay, PhD
Dept of Sociology,
Trinity College,
Dublin 2
Tel (353 1) 6082353
Fax (333 1) 6771300
Email arfinlay@tcd.ie
Abstract:
Prompted by events, notably the citizenship referendum held in the
Republic of Ireland in 2004, this article explores the influence of
revisionism and postcolonial theory in the development of the ideas about
cultural identity and pluralism that underpin the peace process and the
Good Friday Agreement (GFA). This is not a matter of intellectual claimsmaking: it bears seriously on how we assess the GFA and its potential:
does it articulate an essentialist view of identity or, as some postcolonial
theorists have argued, a more radical view of identity as open-ended and
fluid? The wording of the GFA is ambiguous, but, far from being radical
and postcolonial, the notions of cultural identity and pluralism that
underpin the Agreement owe more to revisionist thought. This argument
appears paradoxical for revisionism is sometimes characterised as a form
of liberalism, and elsewhere in the world cultural pluralism emerges as a
critique of Enlightenment thought and the ideological projects that
emerged from it, including liberalism. In fact liberalism and cultural
pluralism have long been reconciled, and the article seeks to demonstrate
that this reconciliation, in Ireland as elsewhere, is based on an essentialist
conflation of individual and collective identity.
Biographical note:
Andrew Finlay teaches sociology in the School of Social Sciences and
Philosophy, Trinity College Dublin. He is editor of Nationalism and
Multiculturalism: Irish Identity, Citizenship and the Peace Process,
(Münster: LIT Verlag, 2004).
This article is concerned with the contribution of Irish studies to the
development of ideas about cultural pluralism and identity in Ireland. I
should make it clear from the outset what I mean by ‘cultural pluralism’.
Cultural pluralism in Ireland shares much with what elsewhere is called
multiculturalism, but it began in efforts to reconcile Catholics and
Protestants, and it remains resolutely bicultural. For this reason we need to
make a distinction between what might be called the old pluralist agenda,
which culminated in the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), and the new
pluralist agenda which is being opened up with the arrival in Ireland of
immigrants from other European Union (EU) countries and beyond.
Several exponents of Irish studies have claimed to have influenced the
shape of the Agreement. The most persistent claim has come from political
scientists, particularly advocates of consociational democracy2, but here I
wish to focus on the claims made for postcolonial theory. For example,
Declan Kiberd has suggested that ‘the language of the […] Agreement is
richly indebted […] to postcolonial theory and to recent forms of Irish
criticism’. 3
There are two reasons why this claim bears scrutiny. Firstly, because, as I
shall argue, the Agreement owes less to postcolonial theory and more to
the intellectual movement which preceded it and to which it was a
response; namely historical and political revisionism. Secondly, because
the failure to recognize the influence of revisionist thinking may blind
Kiberd and others who share what he calls ‘the radical analysis’, to the
contradictions and limits of the old pluralist agenda and its crowning
achievement, the GFA.
Kiberd is prescient about some of the GFA’s limitations, particularly of a
cultural policy that is ‘hospitable to theories of hybridity’ but ‘doesn’t go
much further’ than offer parity of esteem for the Irish Language and the
Ulster Scots dialect4. He also recognizes that the Agreement is vague, but
he sees this as a virtue:
Much of the Language of the […] Agreement is vague even “poetic”
because it offers, a version of multiple identities, of a kind for which
no legal language yet exists […] where is the lawyer who can offer a
constitutional definition of identity as open rather than fixed, as a
process rather than a conclusion? The […] Agreement effectively
sounds a death-knell for old style constitutions. 5
This was written when the euphoria surrounding the signing of the
Agreement had not yet been dented by events; it is nevertheless ironic that
shortly after it was published the constitutional lawyers and judges of the
Supreme Court were being drafted in to save Ireland from immigrants
who, it was claimed, were taking advantage of a constitutional “loophole”
that had been created as an unintended consequence of the peace process.
It was the citizenship referendum – a moment when the old pluralist
agenda clashed with the new one – that prompted this reassessment of the
ideas about cultural pluralism and identity that underpin the Agreement
and their intellectual provenance: this was a moment when the
contradictions and limitations of the old agenda were exposed. There have
been other such moments, and some reference will also be made to two of
these. One is the controversy surrounding the requirement that members of
the Assembly set up under the Agreement (MLAs) must register an
identity. The other is debate surrounding the development of a Bill of
Rights for Northern Ireland.
Postcolonial Theory, Revisionism and the Development of Pluralism in
Ireland
For all the fury of the ‘revisionist controversy’ what is most striking with
hindsight is how much the protagonists shared; in particular their mutual
overweening fascination with cultural identity. For sure, the postcolonial
theorists revealed a much keener appreciation of the relationship between
identity and power. Drawing on insights about the role of culture in
government, they demonstrated the centrality of stereotypes of Irishness to
British colonial rule: unable or unwilling to see the possibility that Irish
underdevelopment was the product of an unequal colonial relationship,
English writers and administrators chose instead to see it as a product of
defects in the Irish national character, or cultural identity as we would call
it today. The persistence and influence of these stereotypes is illustrated by
the geography textbook still in use at the secondary school I attended in
the 1970s. It was a state school – complacently Protestant – in a suburb
north of Belfast. The book was first published in 1938, the edition in my
possession is the fifteenth, reprinted in 1968. The book is entitled, The
British Isles. It has fifteen chapters on English regions, three on Scotland,
one on Wales and one, the penultimate chapter, on Ireland. This chapter
has a section on political divisions that attempts to explain partition. It
makes some reference to the troubled history of British/Irish relations and
then says:
The six counties of Northern Ireland differ from the Irish Republic in
having fewer Roman Catholics and more people not of pure Irish
lineage, largely due to the “plantation” of Scottish settlers during the
reign of James I. The people of Northern Ireland have many Scottish
characteristics, and are more thrifty, far-seeing, and methodical than
the more carefree, happy-go-lucky, quick-tempered people of the
South.6
Postcolonial theorists show how in a sequence of cultural revivals, Irish
writers took the negative characteristics ascribed to them by the English
and made of them something positive: where the English were methodical,
coldly rational, materialist, Protestant, industrial philistines, Anglo-Saxon;
the Irish were creative, spiritual, Catholic, rural and Celtic or Gaelic.
As Luke Gibbons points out this was not the only version of Irish identity
that the insurgents in the War of Independence had access to7, but it was
the one that came to dominate in the newly independent Irish state. It was
a singular, mono-cultural view of Irish identity which struggled to
comprehend the Anglo-Irish let alone Northern Protestants.
Setting aside second and third generation revisionist historians such as F. S.
L. Lyons and Roy Foster, I wish to stress the role of Garret FitzGerald in the
development of the old pluralist agenda. In an article he published in Etudes
Irelandaises in 1976, FitzGerald argued that the singular, mono-cultural
vision of Irishness promoted by the Irish state was no longer tenable. He
was one of the first to diagnose that the Irish were suffering an ‘identity
crisis’. For FitzGerald, the identity crisis was not caused by the legacy of
colonialism so much as by the ‘trauma’ of partition and a subsequent
contradiction in the ideology of a State, which ‘claimed to represent … all
the people of Ireland, but whose ideological basis was the narrow one of
Gaelic, Catholic nationalism’8. This contradiction, he says, began to be
explored in the late 1950s, became a focus of political debate during the
1966 Presidential contest between de Valera and Tom O’Higgins, but was
given impetuous by the onset of the Troubles in the late 1960s. Out of this
debate, says FitzGerald, there emerged a different conception of Ireland as
‘a pluralist society, in which the different Irish traditions would be given
equal importance and standing.’9
It is here that we can seen the beginnings of the old pluralist agenda that
culminated in the GFA. FitzGerald pursued this agenda as Taoiseach. In
1981 he sought to re-fashion ‘the Constitution on pluralist lines’ through a
‘crusade’ aimed, amongst other things, at changing the provisions in the
Irish constitution ‘that were interpreted as involving a claim to the territory
of Northern Ireland (Articles 2 and 3)’10. The crusade was scuppered by
what Gibbons describes as ‘the resurgence of a new Catholic
fundamentalism’ in the 1980s11. On his return to office in December 1982,
FitzGerald pursued his pluralist agenda through the New Ireland Forum
and in the negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 198512.
One of the weaknesses of FitzGerald’s pluralism is that it seems to imply that
openness towards the other requires a disavowal of one’s own identity13.
For example, FitzGerald opposed an Irish language requirement for public
service in the South because it was ‘incompatible with any serious attempt
to achieve Irish unity by consent … [it] was an obstacle to Northern
unionists, to almost all of whom the language was alien’14.
Thus, while postcolonial theorists shared in revisionist criticism of the monocultural view of Irish identity projected by what Kiberd calls ‘narrow gauge’
nationalism, they were less concerned with promoting pluralism than with an
Irish identity that may have been narrow, but more importantly, had been
rendered precarious first by colonialism and now it seemed by a revisionist
inspired disavowal. Re-imagining or reinventing Irish identity, not pluralism
was the priority.
To the extent that the old pluralist agenda owes more to revisionism than to
postcolonial theory, Ireland is anomalous. Pluralism in Ireland may be
bicultural, but it shares much with multiculturalism, and elsewhere in the
world multiculturalism developed as a radical critique of the assumptions
about humanity, knowledge, reason, power and progress that underpinned
the political ideologies – socialism as much as liberal democracy – that
emerged from the European Enlightenment and the French Revolution.
The exponents of this critique were from among the peoples colonized by
European powers and others who had experienced the rough edge of the
Enlightenment dream of Progress. The decline of ideology and the rise of
identity as the idiom for politics has a lot to do, therefore, with
decolonization and the rise of new social movements that are based on
identities other than class; i.e. gender, ethnicity, sexuality. After the Cold
War, identity has tended to supplant ideology as the idiom for politics. The
issues raised by ideological critiques - inequality, marginalization,
dispossession, powerlessness - have not disappeared, but they are
increasingly mediated through discourses of identity15.
Seen in this international context, Kiberd’s claim that the language of identity
used in the GFA owes much to postcolonial theory seems to make more
sense than mine. While there might be some truth in the suggestion that
revisionism articulated the interests of the Protestant minority in the Republic
of Ireland, this is a minority that not made a strong and coherent claim to
having been oppressed16. Moreover, revisionists are often caricatured as
liberal rationalists in the Enlightenment mould17. This caricature has some
basis; for example a typical revisionist move is to oppose objective historical
fact to myth. However, if we look again at the broad history of
multiculturalism we can see that multiculturalism and liberalism were
reconciled long before writers like Kymlicka appeared to clinch it.18
The Reconciliation of Liberalism and Cultural Pluralism or
Multiculturalism
Anthropology in the period immediately after World War Two was crucial to
the reconciliation of liberalism and what we today call multiculturalism. It
would take up too much space to examine the role of Claude Levi-Strauss,
particularly his intervention at the founding conference of UNESCO19, or of
Melville Herskovits, particularly his work with the American
Anthropological Association. So I will to focus on the role of Erik Erikson a
Freudian psychologist who worked with members of the culture and
personality school of anthropology before and after the War20.
The concept of cultural identity that Erikson developed is crucial to the
reconciliation of liberalism and multiculturalism. For Erikson, personal
identity was something internal that persists even as the individual changes
in response to the developmental tasks associated with biological
maturation and the role-requirements associated with his or her cultural
milieu. The notion of an identity crisis - so beloved by FitzGerald and
subsequent observers of the Irish situation - was first coined by Erikson to
describe the ‘climactic turning point in this process … [which] usually
occurs in adolescence, but can also be precipitated by unusual difficulties
further along in the life-cycle’21. Change and crisis notwithstanding, an
individual’s identity is at bottom an accrued confidence in the inner
sameness and continuity of his/her own being. As such, this inner
sameness and continuity is something to be valued and nurtured. Despite
his emphasis on identity as something interior to the individual, Erikson
regarded identity as inextricably bound up with the communal culture. In
an abidingly influential formulation he reduces individual identity to
communal identity: identity was ‘a process located in the core of the
individual and yet also in the core of his communal culture, a process
which establishes … the identity of those identities.’22 As the American
cultural historian Phillip Gleason points out, the linkage that Erikson
implies between personal identity and an inherited communal culture
makes plausible
the argument that cultures – especially minority ethnic cultures –
require some sort of official recognition if the self-esteem of
individuals is not to suffer damage. The respect for the dignity of the
individual demanded by democratic ideology is thereby extended to
cover ethnic cultures that sustain the sense of personal self worth.23
Thus is liberalism reconciled to cultural pluralism or multiculturalism.
Eriksonian theory provides the rationale for the notions of tolerance or
mutual respect or, to use the central term in the peace process - parity of
esteem - that lie at the heart of liberal multiculturalism more generally. To
be secure, individual identity needs to be grounded in a strong collective
cultural identity, and if the collective cultural identity is not recognized in
the broader society, the individual’s sense of self-worth or self-esteem will
be damaged24.
The problem with Erikson’s theory of identity is that it rests on an
outmoded concept of culture that was once purveyed in social
anthropology but is ultimately derived from the work of Johanne Herder. It
is an essentialist concept of culture as an unchanging way of life or
primordial inheritance of a people or group25. Irish intellectuals, like
others, do not like to admit to essentialism perhaps because it has
unpalatable associations with racial thinking26. Revisionists and
postcolonial critics alike thought they had consigned essentialism to a less
sophisticated, older generation of nationalist, Irish or British, who believed
that identity was a primordial inheritance. And yet essentialism lingers.
Indeed, it is central to the liberal form of pluralism elaborated as part of
the old agenda in Ireland, and to its crowning achievement, the GFA.
It is ironic that while cultural pluralism was elaborated in Ireland as a
critique of Irish cultural nationalism, it rests on a theory of culture that
ultimately derives from Herder who was the father of cultural
nationalism27. Seamus Deane alluded to this some time ago when he
suggested that revisionism
collaborates – unconsciously – with the very mentality it wants to
defeat […] Revisionists are nationalist despite themselves; by refusing
to be Irish nationalists, they simply become defenders of Ulster or
British nationalism, thereby switching sides in a dispute while
believing themselves to be switching the terms of it28.
Deane is correct, the notions of cultural identity and community that
revisionists use to critique of Irish nationalism are themselves based in
cultural nationalist theory, but the effect was not so much to privilege one
identity category over another as to proliferate the number cultural
identities extant in Ireland. Lyons suggested that there were at least four –
English, native Irish, Anglo-Irish and Northern Presbyterian. Admittedly,
though, in subsequent revisionist writing this diversity reduced to two
communities29.
Liberal Pluralism, Essentialism and the GFA
To argue that such reductive and essentialist tendencies are also evident in
the GFA is to fly in the face of conventional opinion, which would assert,
with Kiberd, that the GFA articulates a view of identity as ‘open rather
than fixed … a process rather than a conclusion’. The GFA is as Kiberd
also points out a vague and ambiguous document, so we would do well to
return to the text at this point.
Items 1(v) and 1 (vi) of the ‘Constitutional Issues’ are the crucial ones.
Here the ‘participants endorse the commitment made by the British and
Irish governments that, in a new British-Irish Agreement replacing the
Anglo-Irish Agreement, they will’:
(v) affirm that whatever choice is freely exercised by a majority of the
people of Northern Ireland, the power of the sovereign government
with jurisdiction there shall be exercised with rigorous impartiality on
behalf of all the people in the diversity of their identities and traditions
and shall be founded on the principles of full respect for, and equality
of, civil, political, social and cultural rights, of freedom from
discrimination for all citizens, and of parity of esteem and just and
equal treatment for the identity, ethos and aspirations of both
communities;
(vi) recognise the birthright of all the people of Northern Ireland to
identify themselves and be accepted as Irish or British, or both, as they
may so choose, and accordingly confirm that their right to hold both
British and Irish citizenship is accepted by both Governments and
would not be affected by any future change in the status of Northern
Ireland (my italics) 30.
Item 1(vi) offers the greatest support for Kiberd’s reading of the
Agreement. By allowing for the possibility that people born in Northern
Ireland could choose to be Irish or British or both, and affirming that, in
any case, they were entitled to Irish citizenship, the Agreement and the
subsequent amendment to Article 2 of the Irish constitution suggests a
loosening of the relationship between citizenship and national identity.
Item 1(v) is more ambiguous. The reference to ‘all the people in the
diversity of their identities and traditions’ is promising, but this promise is
undermined by a crucial contraction at the end of the sentence such that
parity of esteem is accorded to the identities of only two communities.
And, as was pointed out above, parity of esteem only makes sense if those
two communities are conceived in essentialist terms.
The Agreement is ambiguous and contradictory, but there have been
moments since it was signed when its essentialist and reductive tendencies
have come to the fore. Here I will look briefly at three such moments.
Firstly controversy surrounding the requirement that members of the
assembly set up under the Agreement (MLAs) must register an identity.
Secondly, the citizenship referendum in the Republic of Ireland. Thirdly,
debate surrounding the development of a Bill of Rights for Northern
Ireland.
Under the terms of the Agreement MLAs are required to ‘register a
designation of identity – nationalist, unionist or other – for the purposes of
measuring cross community support’ in ‘key’ assembly decisions31. This
requirement posed particular difficulties for the Alliance Party and the
Women’s Coalition. The latter case is particularly instructive. Reflecting
the fact that it included British-identified unionists and Irish-identified
nationalists, as well as people who would not be described by either label,
the two Women’s Coalition MLAs initially registered as
‘Nationalist/Unionist/Other Other’ and ‘Unionist/Nationalist/Other Other’
respectively. Having been informed that these identities were ambiguous
and unacceptable, the two MLAs amended their designations to ‘inclusive
other’. They were required to re-designate again in November 2001 in
order to secure the reinstatement a David Trimble as First and Mark
Durkhan as Deputy First Minister. One designated as ‘Nationalist’, the
other as ‘Unionist’. As Robin Whitaker comments: whatever the
Agreement might say about the ‘birthright of all the people of Northern
Ireland to identify themselves as Irish or British or both’, the designation
rules ‘assume that political representatives have a substantive identity: unionist or nationalist. Others are defined purely in negative terms; all that
matters is what they are not’32.
Designation rules aside, the citizenship referendum is most revealing. At
the start of this article I described the citizenship referendum as a moment
when the old and the new pluralist agendas clashed. The main opposition
to the referendum came from those who were already perturbed by
government policy on immigration and saw the referendum was another
device in the government’s efforts to make it more difficult for non-EU
immigrants to settle in Ireland. Their principle argument was that the
referendum was racist in intent, but they also made the point that by
seeking to qualify the right to Irish citizenship of anyone born on the
island of Ireland – a right that had been elaborated in Article 2 of the
constitution after the GFA - the Government were breaching both the letter
of the Agreement and, echoing Kiberd’s view, its generous open-ended
spirit33. The argument that the referendum breached the letter of the
Agreement was made most forcibly by the Social Democratic and Labour
Party who complained that as cosignatories to the Agreement they should
have been consulted on proposed changes that affected its provision’s.
The Government responded to these criticisms as follows. Firstly they
argued that the granting of citizenship rights to anyone born on the island
was an unintended consequence of the GFA: a ‘loophole’ that had been
created in the process of securing an historic peace settlement, which was
now being exploited by ‘citizenship tourists’ from outside the EU who
were coming to Ireland with the intention of giving birth on Irish soil34.
Secondly, the Irish government, together with the British, published a
declaration that the changes proposed in the referendum did not breach the
British-Irish Agreement that was completed at the same time as the GFA.
The former Agreement dealt with the commitments of the two
governments arising from the GFA, while the GFA only covered the
commitments of the North’s political parties35.
The failure of the Irish government to consult with any party to the GFA
other than the British reveals the extent to which the Agreement was
driven by the interests of two nation-states. Mary Hickman has suggested
that further evidence of this is the emergence of the term ‘British-Irish’ to
describe what used to be called ‘Anglo-Irish’ relations. Alluding to Irish
immigrants in Britain, few of whom would ever choose to describe
themselves as British-Irish, Hickman suggests that so concerned were the
two governments to ensure that the two nation-states were recognised as
equal that they failed to deal with the messiness of identity36.
Moreover, the Irish government’s assertion that the definition of
citizenship contained in the draft of Article 2 ratified as part of the GFA
was an unintended consequence of the search for peace seems to settle any
doubt as to the nature of the Agreement. The GFA was less a recognition
‘of the limits of nationality as a framework for citizenship and political
community’ and ‘more an accommodation of nationalities’37. If the GFA
initially seemed to suggest a loosening of the connection between
citizenship, political community and national identity, the referendum can
be seen as part of an attempt to reassert the connection. According to The
Sunday Business Post, Michael McDowell, who as Minister for Justice
headed the government’s referendum campaign, ‘takes the view that
citizenship is inextricably bound up with nationality. Article 9 of the
constitution – which [presently] states that “loyalty to the nation and
fidelity to the State are fundamental political duties of all citizens”38 –
encapsulated “the essence of the intertwined concepts of citizenship and
nationality”’.39
In line with this, the legislation introduced after the referendum provides
that the children of non-nationals ‘can become citizens if one parent has
resided legally in the state for three years’40. However, if the citizenship
referendum was purely about reasserting a connection between citizenship,
national identity and political community, the government would have
done something about the ‘Irish Granny rule’41 , which grants the right of
citizenship not just to the children but the grandchildren of Irish citizens
living abroad, including hundreds of thousands of people who have no
other connection to the island nor any desire to live there. Leaving ‘the
Irish Granny rule’ intact gives substance to the allegation of racism42.
Far from being a breach of the spirit of the GFA, the referendum would
seem to offer further confirmation of its reductive, essentialist tendencies.
Far from being radical, the vocabulary of identity developed as part of the
old pluralist agenda is liberal-pluralist. And it increasingly seems that
liberal pluralism in Ireland is inadequate to the task for which it was
originally developed let alone to the new agenda opened up by
immigration.
The problems with liberal pluralism in Ireland are similar to the problems
of liberal multiculturalism elsewhere. Firstly, both are top-down and
managerial. Secondly they are based on a relativism that ‘glibly’ celebrates
cultural diversity while leaving ‘groups constituted as givens’ and
entrenching ‘the boundaries fixing group demarcations as unalterable’43.
The extent to which the GFA draws on the language of liberal pluralism is
indicative of the extent to which it reflects the concerns of two nationstates seeking to manage, administer and regulate, relations between what
they conceive as two recalcitrant communities with distinct cultural
identities conceived in essentialist terms.
Further problems were revealed when the Northern Ireland Bill of Rights
was being drafted. Alongside its injunctions about parity of esteem for two
communities, the Agreement also makes provision for a single Equality
Commission to replace pre-existing separate equality agencies and for a
Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) to develop a Bill of
Rights for Northern Ireland and to work towards a joint charter of rights
for the island as a whole with the Human Rights Commission in the South.
Unfortunately the work of the NIHRC has been disrupted by tensions
among the Commissioners. This is the third ‘moment’ I alluded to above.
According to Robin Wilson some commissioners thought that the Bill of
Rights should stick with ‘the international norm in attaching rights to
individuals’, which implies a ‘recognition of those who choose “not to be
treated as a member of what might be perceived to be their national,
ethnic, religious or linguistic community”’ and commissioners who
thought the Bill of Rights should more strongly reflect the principle of
parity of esteem, which ‘would involve deleting the right-of-exit clause’44.
Under the terms of the GFA, the Bill of Rights was supposed to ‘reflect the
particular circumstances of Northern Ireland and the principles of mutual
respect for the identity and ethos of both communities and parity of
esteem’45, and the government of the Irish Republic weighed into the
debate, ‘putting very heavy pressure on the NIHRC […] to endorse what
might be described as Dublin’s “two tribes” view of the North’46.
Here we get a glimpse of the fundamental contradiction that liberal
multiculturalism seeks to reconcile: diametrically opposed theories of
human existence and activity. Liberalism and notions of human rights both
emerge from Enlightenment thought and are based on precisely the kind of
individualism and universalism that Herder was seeking to refute when he
came up with the Volksgeist - a notion that was to be so influential in the
development of anthropological ideas about culture and identity. Given
this contradiction, it is perhaps not surprising that liberal multiculturalism
is characterised by a fragility such that only five years after Kymlcka had
announced that ‘multiculturalists have won the day’ Christian Joppke was
claiming that multiculturalism has failed to secure popular support and that
the liberal state has already retreating from it47.
In this context, the desire on the part of some Human Rights
Commissioners in Northern Ireland for a return to something like the
classical liberal notion of the abstract individual is understandable, but
wrong-headed: individuals are never free-floating, but are formed and
develop in and through culture. As Maurna Crozier points out, it is also
true that ‘in times of despair or celebration … people … repair to the
places of their fundamental allegiance’.48 There are times and circumstances, usually of crisis, when the distance between individual and
collective identities collapses and ‘crystallize’ such as to exhibit the
emotionally-laden sense of belonging to a bounded group with a distinct
culture that an essentialist concept of identity would suggest. This was the
case for many in Northern Ireland during the worst days of the Troubles,
but, even then, not all, and it is the exception rather than the rule in the late
modern world49. Culture can no longer be understood simply as the
inherited way of life of a group or a people; rather it is better understood as
symbolic practice, a contested process through which we attach meaning
to our lives and our world
Conclusion
The great achievement of the GFA is that it has lessened the sense of crisis
that precipitated two communal identities which sometimes exhibited the
features that essentialist theory would predict. Its great weakness is that by
making identity the name of the political game, it not only ensures the
perpetuation of these two communal identities but tends to promote their
further reification.
Ireland, like the rest of the late-modern world is no longer divided up into
discrete, hermetically sealed, internally coherent cultures, one to each
community. Nor is it proven that the individual needs a single, coherent
communal culture to give shape and meaning to his or her life. As Stuart
Hall says, this is not to deny the role that culture plays in enabling
individuals to exercise autonomy and to make meaningful choices, rather it
is to insist that in doing so we all, deliberately and inadvertently, ‘draw on
the fragmented traces and broken repertoires of several cultural and ethical
languages’50.
Recognizing that identities crystallize in forms that approximate to the
essentialist concept of cultural identity only in particular circumstances
means that we should be very wary of attempts to enfranchise the claims
of communal cultures over individuals without at the same time allowing
individuals to dissent or exit from their communities of origin. Normative
essentialism is misguided and dangerous. It is misguided because
valorising the distinctive values of particular communities at one moment
in time denies the reality that they are always in a moving relationship to
all the other competing values around them. It is dangerous because it
licenses those who would wish to freeze or fix communal boundaries such
that their ‘traditional’ authority is enhanced and that they can more
effectively police internal differences. But none of this is to suggest a
return to classical liberal notions of the abstract individual, rather it is to
argue that we are each of us grounded in, to use the voguish idiom,
multiple identities, and with this in mind, to resist the privileging of any
one or, thinking of the GFA, any two.
Postcolonial theorists elaborate a view of identity as fluid, something
about which we have an element of choice. While it is receptive to
hybridity and cultural fusion, the permutations tend to be limited. Invoking
multiple identity here means recognising that the options extend beyond
the familiar oppositions: Irish versus British, Nationalist versus Unionist,
Catholic versus Protestant. It also means resisting the reduction of
individual identity to group identity and arguing that difference exists not
primarily between groups but within groups and within individual subjects.
The last point is well-made by Whitaker who was a participant observer
with the Women’s Coalition. She was struck by the people she
encountered, both in the Women’s Coalition and elsewhere in Northern
Ireland, who did not fit comfortably in the normative categories
institutionalised in the GFA. Reflecting on this experience, Whitaker
argues that while the ‘Agreement recognises the differences between
citizens’ the dilemmas facing the people she encountered ‘might be better
understood to stem from differences within subjects’. She further argues
that
Such difference is a necessary condition for the creation of new
solidarities, forged not through already-settled identities but through
political effort. To deny the promise of such multiple subjects might
well mean replacing democratic politics – ongoing struggle about
which differences matter, in what ways – with the institutionalised
administration of certain differences51.
As the consequences, intended and unintended, of what was agreed on
Good Friday 1998 ramify throughout Ireland, the task for intellectuals is
less to construct, invent, reinvent, re-imagine - reify - an identity or
identities for people in Ireland, but to work towards the conditions in
which people living on the island – whether or not they were born here –
can work it out for themselves.
NOTES
1
An earlier version of this article was read as the keynote address at Variations on an
Irish Theme: Reflections, Reactions and Realities, the Inaugural Conference of
Humanities Postgraduates at The Queen’s University of Belfast, Belfast, 4-5 August
2004.
2
Brendan O’Leary, ‘The Nature of the Agreement’ in The Northern Ireland Conflict
Consociational Engagements, eds John McGarry and Brendan O’Leary (Oxford
University Press 2004) pp261.
3
Declan Kiberd, Irish Classics (Granta 2000) pp628.
4
Kiberd, Irish Classics, pp. 630.
5
Kiberd, Irish Classics, pp. 630.
6
D. M. Preece and H. R. B. Wood, Book II of the Modern Geography Series: The
British Isles (University Tutorial Press Ltd, 1968) pp. 222.
7
Luke Gibbons, ‘Challenging the Canon: Revisionism and Cultural Criticism’, in The
Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing Volume III, ed. Seamus Deane, (Derry: Field
Day Publications 1991) pp 563.
8
FitzGerald Garret, ‘Ireland’s Identity Problems’, Études Irelandaises, 1 (1976), pp141.
9
FitzGerald ‘Ireland’s Identity Problems’, pp141.
10
Garret FitzGerald, All in a Life. (Papermak 1991), pp. 380 and 376.
11
Gibbons, “Challenging the Canon: Revisionism and Cultural Criticism”, pp 563.
12
See O’Leary and McGarry, The Northern Ireland Conflict, pp 81
13
C.f. Luke Gibbons ‘Dialogue Without the Other? A Reply to Francis Mulhern’, in
Radical Philosophy, 67 (1994), pp 29. It is also worth noting the view that the Editors of
the Crane Bag attributed to Conor Cruise O’Brien; ie that nationalism was a commodity
that the Irish could dispose of if the price – an aspiration to Irish unity that sanctioned the
Provisional IRA – was too high. Mark Patrick Hederman and Richard Kearney ‘Editorial:
A Sense of Nation’, in The Crane Bag Book of Irish Studies (1977-1981) (Blackwater
Press, 1982) pp 92-4. (Originally published in The Crane Bag 1977, 1, 2).
14
FitzGerald, All in a Life, pp 64.
15
See Michael Cronin, ‘The Unbidden Ireland: Materialism, Knowledge
and Inter-Culturality’ in Andrew Finlay, ed., Nationalism and Multiculturalism: Irish
Identity, Citizenship and the Peace Process (London and Berlin: LIT, 2004).
16
See Andrew Finlay, “Me Too: Victimhood and the Proliferation of
Cultural Claims in Ireland,” in Nationalism and Multiculturalism: Irish Identity,
Citizenship and the Peace Process, ed. Andrew Finlay (LIT, 2004).
17
Gibbons, ‘Challenging the Canon: Revisionism and Cultural Criticism’
18
Will Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship: A Liberal Theory of Minority Rights
(Oxford University Press 1995).
19
See Alain Finkielkraut, The Undoing of Thought, (Claridge Press, 1988).
20
Gopal Balakrishnan, ‘The Age of Identity’, Review of Lutz Niethammer, Kollektive
Identitat. Hiemliche Quellen einer unheimlichen Konjunktur, Hamburg: Reinback bei,
New Left Review 16 (2002), pp 130-142.
21
Phillip Gleason, ‘Identifying Identity: A Semantic History’, The Journal of American
History, 69, 4, (1983), pp 914.
22
Erik Erikson, Identity: Youth and Crisis (Norton, 1968), pp 22.
23
Gleason, ‘Identifying Identity’, pp 921.
24 cf. Kymlicka’s notion of “societal culture”. Kymlicka, Multicultural Citizenship.
25
This notion of culture is implicit in FitzGerald, but explicit in that other key revisionist
text: F. S. L. Lyons Culture and Anarchy in Ireland 1890-1939 (Oxford University
Press, 1979). Interestingly it is a concept which Gibbons shares. See Luke Gibbons
Transformations in Irish Culture (Field Day and Cork University Press, 1996).
26
See Terry Eagleton, The Truth About the Irish (New Island Books, 1999).
27
See Calhoun for what essentialism owes to cultural nationalism. Craig Calhoun,
Nationalism (Open University Press 1997).
28
Seamus Deane, ‘Wherever the Green is Read’ in Interpreting Irish History: The
Debate on Historical Revisionism 1938- 1994 ed. Ciaran Brady (Irish Academic Press
1994), pp 242.
Lyons, Culture and Anarchy, pp 17. c.f. Roy Foster, ‘Varieties of Irishness’, in
Cultural Traditions in Northern Ireland, ed. Maurna Crozier (Institute of Irish Studies
1989).
30
The Government of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and the
Government of Ireland, Agreement Reached in the Multi-Party Negotiations (Her
Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1998) pp2.
31
Agreement, pp6.
32
Robin Whitaker ‘Where Difference Lies: Democracy and the Ethnographic Imagination
in Northern Ireland’ in Nationalism and Multiculturalism: Irish Identity, Citizenship
and the Peace Process ed. Andrew Finlay, (LIT, 2004) pp 170.
33
See Paddy Logue, ‘Letters to the Editor’, The Irish Times, 20/4/04. See also Editorial,
The Irish Times, 17/4/04.
34
The Sunday Times, 11/4/04, and The Sunday Tribune, 25/4/04
35
The Irish Times, 20/4/04
36
Mary Hickman, ‘Multiple Identities’, Through Irish Eyes Seminar Irish Attitudes to
the UK (Dublin: British Council Ireland, 11/02/04).
37
Gerard Delanty, ‘From Nationality to Citizenship: Cultural Identity and Cosmopolitan
Challenges in Ireland’, in Nationalism and Multiculturalism: Irish Identity,
Citizenship and the Peace Process, ed. Andrew Finlay (LIT, 2004) pp. 186.
38
Article 9 actually states: ‘Fidelity to the nation and loyalty to the State are fundamental
political duties of all citizens’. Bunreacht Na hÉireann:
http://www.taoiseach.gov.ie/upload/static/256.pdf
39
The Sunday Business Post, 25/4/04
40
The Irish Times, 4/9/04.
41
Jus sanguinis, or citizenship by descent. See Alan Mulligan, Letter to the Editor, The
Irish Times, 26/3/04.
42
Peter Finlay, ‘Equality Should be Cornerstone of Law on Citizenship’ The Irish
Times, 4/6/04
43
David T. Goldberg ed. Multiculturalism A Critical Reader, (Blackwell 1994).
44
Robin Wilson, ‘Am I Me Or Am I One of Them? Who Has Rights: Groups or People?’
Fortnight, 414 (May 2003) 11. See also Colm O'Cinneide, Equivalence of Rights? The
Belfast Agreement, Institutional Rights and Citizenship, (Department of Sociology,
Trinity College Dublin: MPhil in Ethnic and Racial Studies Seminar, 20/2/04).
45
NIHRC The Bill of Rights Culture and Identity (Belfast, 2000).
http://www.nihrc.org.
46
Wilson, ‘Am I Me…’ pp11.
47
Christian Joppke ‘The retreat of multiculturalism in the liberal state: theory and policy’,
in The British Journal of Sociology, 55, 1 (2004), pp237-257,.
48
Maurna Crozier, ‘Pre-Political Groundwork and Cultural identity: the Northern Ireland
Experience’ in Nationalism and Multiculturalism: Irish Identity, Citizenship and the
Peace Process ed. Andrew Finlay, (LIT, 2004) pp 39.
49
Wilson mentions data from a Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey that ‘suggest that
around 30 per cent of both Catholics and Protestants – never mind members of ethnic
minorities – would prefer not to be labelled as “nationalist” or “unionist”’. Wilson ‘Am I
me …’ pp11. It is worth noting that while the Bill of Rights has taken into account the
rights of members of ethnic minorities, it has not done this through reference to the GFA,
which takes care of the rights of only two communities, but by incorporating international
conventions. See The News Letter, 21/4/04 and Brice Dickson, ‘Human Rights in
Ireland North and South, Irish Association Seminar (Dublin 8/5/04).
50
Stuart Hall, ‘Conclusion: the Multicultural Question’ in Un/Settled Muliculturalisms:
Diasporas, Entanglements, ‘Transruptions’ ed. Barnor Hesse, (Zed Books, 2000) pp
233.
51
Whitaker ‘Where Difference Lies …’: pp 177.
29