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Separate but equal? Schools and the politics of religion and diversity in the Republic of Ireland focuses on the historical and current place of religion in the Irish education system from the perspective of children’s rights and citizenship. It offers a critical analysis of the political, cultural and social forces that have perpetuated the patronage system, looks at the ways in which the denominational model has been adapted to increased religious and cultural diversity in Irish society and shows that recent changes have failed to address persistent discrimination and the absence of respect for freedom of conscience. It relates current debates on the denominational system and the role of the State in education to Irish political thought and conceptions of national identity in Ireland, showing the ways in which such debates reflect a tension between nationalist-communitarian and republican political outlooks. There have been efforts towards accommodation and against instances of discrimination within the system, but Irish educational structures still privilege communal and private interests and hierarchies over equal rights, either in the name of a de facto ‘majority’ right to religious domination or by virtue of a deeply flawed and limited view of ‘parental choice’.
Divisions between north and south Ireland were prevalent since the 1920s. Yet, until the 1970s, nobody in public life in the Republic of Ireland argued that partition was justified. This book examines in detail the impact of the Northern Irish Troubles on southern Irish society during the period 1968-79. It begins with the aftermath of the civil rights march in Derry in October 1968 and traces the reaction to the events until the autumn of 1972. The impact of August 1969, the aftermath of internment and the response to Bloody Sunday are examined. The book looks at violence south of the border, particularly bombings and shootings and their human cost, and examines state security, censorship and the popular protests associated with these issues. A general outlook at the changing attitudes to refugees and northern nationalists is provided before describing the impact of the conflict on southern Protestants. The controversies concerning the Irish Republican Army and their activities are highlighted. The book looks at the question of revisionism and how debates about history were played out in academia as well as at a popular level. A variety of social and cultural responses to the conflict are examined, including attitudes to Britain and northern Unionists. For many southerners, Ulster was practically a foreign country and Northern Ireland did not seem very Irish. By 1979, the prospect of an end to the conflict seemed dim.
In the last decade, Ireland's immigrant population grew to more than one in ten. Now in the midst of an economic crisis, the integration of immigrants has become a topical issue. This book offers a detailed account of how immigrants in Ireland are faring. Drawing extensively on demographic data and research on immigrant lives, immigrant participation in Irish politics and the experiences of immigrants living in deprived communities, it offers a thorough study of the immigrant experience in Ireland today. Chapters and case studies examine the effects of immigration on social cohesion, the role of social policy, the nature and extent of segregation in education, racism and discrimination in the labour market, and barriers faced by immigrants seeking Irish citizenship. The book contributes to the field of integration studies through its focus on the capabilities and abilities needed by immigrants to participate successfully in Irish society. It follows two previous books by the author for Manchester University Press: Racism and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (2002) and Immigration and Social Change in the Republic of Ireland (2007).
In the last decade Irish society has visibly changed with the emergence of new immigrant communities of black and ethnic minorities. This book draws upon a number of academic disciplines, focusing on the relationship between ideological forms of racism and its consequences upon black and ethnic minorities. Media and political debates on racism in Ireland during this period have tended to depict it as a new phenomenon and even as one imported by asylum seekers. Ireland was never immune from the racist ideologies that governed relationships between the west and the rest despite a history of colonial anti-Irish racism. Citizenship reproduced inequalities between nationals on the basis of gender and race and ethnicity. The book explores how the processes of nation-building which shaped contemporary Irish society and the Irish state were accompanied by a politics of national identity within which claims of social membership of various minority groups were discounted. It examines the exclusionary and assimilationist consequences of Irish nationbuilding for Protestant, Jewish and Traveller minority communities. The book also considers anti-Semitism in Irish society from independence in 1922 until the 1950s. It examines how contemporary responses to refugees and asylum seekers have been shaped by a legacy of exclusionary state practices. Finally, the book talks about anti-Traveller racism, the politics of Traveller exclusion, the work of SPIARSI, and the efforts to contest racism and discrimination faced by minorities in Ireland as expressions of multiculturalism.
Written by one of the leading authorities on Irish cinema, Irish cinema in the twenty-first century is an important contribution to debates on the possibility of a national cinema in the age of globalization. Designed to be accessible to students and to provide guidance to lecturers in structuring a course on Irish cinema, Ruth Barton’s book is divided by genre and theme. Chapters cover new areas in Irish film production, such as the creative documentary, animation and the horror film, and revisit key themes, including the representation of history, post-Troubles cinema and Northern Ireland, rural representations and the cinema of the city. Each chapter is followed by the analysis of a short film. Barton’s writing throughout is informed by theories of globalisation, the transnational, cultural trauma and spatiality. One of her key concerns is over questions of gender representation, but equally how the new social structures of Ireland from the Celtic Tiger to today are treated in the films discussed. Irish cinema in the twenty-first century discusses the work of leading filmmakers – Lenny Abrahamson, John Crowley, Neil Jordan, the McDonagh brothers and Jim Sheridan – as straddling both the local and the global industries, with a particular focus on certain films as exemplary case studies.
This book will appeal to third-level students in film studies and Irish studies, academics and those interested in how Irish cinema has developed in the twenty-first century.
Agreement. This Agreement included provision for an institutional role for the Republic of Ireland in the governance of Northern Ireland in the form of the Council of Ireland. Anti-Agreement Unionists in Northern Ireland fought the election with the slogan ‘Dublin is just a Sunningdale away’, and overwhelmingly defeated their pro-Agreement opponents. Opposition to the Sunningdale Agreement and the Council of Ireland crystallised in May 1974 in the Ulster Workers Council (UWC) strike in which loyalists took to the Anglo-Irish relations and the British Labour
, Mohammed Morei, a young eighteen-year-old man was quickly captured and taken into custody. Racist and angry comments were thrown at Mohammed as he was detained at Dundalk court. Public responses to the event were stark. Mohammed was thought to be an asylum seeker. It was reported that he had had his asylum application rejected somewhere in Great Britain; that he took the ferry to Belfast and crossed into the Republic of Ireland – sleeping rough in an abandoned site in Dundalk. Claims were also made that Mohammed travelled to Dublin but then returned to Dundalk, where on
The focus of this chapter is on the emerging implications of the decision of the United Kingdom to leave the European Union (Brexit) for the lives of migrants on both sides of the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Brexit is likely to reduce the rights and entitlements of future prospective immigrants to Northern Ireland but it is becoming increasingly likely that the impact on many migrants from European Union countries, and in particular those from countries that joined the EU after 2004, may be mostly
Introduction Iseult Honohan and Nathalie Rougier The way in which society should deal with religious and cultural diversity continues to be a burning issue on the island of Ireland as in many other countries. In June 2013, an ESRI / Integration Centre study showed that the Republic of Ireland, once regarded as displaying the most liberal attitudes to immigration in Europe, now recorded more negative attitudes towards migrants than countries such as Germany, Spain and the Netherlands (RTE, 2013). Six months earlier, in December 2012, a decision to fly the Union
8 Flocking north: renegotiating the Irish border Sara McDowell According to Beck and Sznaider (2010: 390), capital ‘tears down all national boundaries and jumbles together the “native” with the “foreign”’ producing new patterns of consumption and mobility. But, where the national boundary is one of contention, and the identities of those on either side even more so, the influence of economics on a political divide is more difficult to determine. The changing economic fortunes of both the Republic of Ireland (the South) and Northern Ireland (the North) since 2007