Irish/ness Is All Around Us

Language Revivalism and the Culture of Ethnic Identity in Northern Ireland

Olaf Zenker

• Editore: Berghahn Books
• Anno: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780857459145
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Scienze sociali
• Categoria: Antropologia culturale e sociale

Focusing on Irish speakers in Catholic West Belfast, this ethnography on Irish language and identity explores the complexities of changing, and contradictory, senses of Irishness and shifting practices of 'Irish culture' in the domains of language, music, dance and sports. The author's theoretical approach to ethnicity and ethnic revivals presents an expanded explanatory framework for the social (re)production of ethnicity, theorizing the mutual interrelations between representations and cultural practices regarding their combined capacity to engender ethnic revivals. Relevant not only to readers with an interest in the intricacies of the Northern Irish situation, this book also appeals to a broader readership in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history and political science concerned with the mechanisms behind ethnonational conflict and the politics of culture and identity in general.

Chapter 1

A Walk of Life

Entering Catholic West Belfast

On a Friday afternoon in September 2004, shortly before returning home from my ethnographic fieldwork, I took my video camera and filmed a walk from the city centre into Catholic West Belfast up to the Beechmount area, where I had lived and conducted much of my research. I had come to Catholic West Belfast fourteen months prior with the intention of learning about locally prevailing senses of ethnic identity. Yet I soon found out that virtually every local Catholic I talked to seemed to see him- or herself as ‘Irish’, and apparently expected other locals to do the same. My open questions such as ‘What ethnic or national identity do you have?’ at times even irritated my interlocutors, not so much, as I figured out, because they felt like I was contesting their sense of identity but, to the contrary, because the answer ‘Irish’ seemed so obvious. ‘What else could I be?’ was a rhetorical question I often encountered in such conversations, indicating to me that, for many, Irish identity went without saying. If that was the case, then what did being Irish mean to these people? What made somebody Irish, and where were local senses of Irishness to be found? Questions like these became the focus of my investigations and constitute the overall subject of this book.

One obvious entry point for addressing such questions consisted in attending to the ways in which Irishness was locally represented. Listening to how locals talked about their Irishness, keeping an eye on public representations by organizations and the media, and explicitly asking people about their Irishness in informal conversations and formal interviews all constituted ways of approaching this topic. But for reasons that will be discussed in the next chapter, my theoretical interests went beyond the level of representations. I wanted to come to terms not only with ‘representational’ practices of Irishness but also with the realities of therein ‘represented’ practices of Irishness, and finally with the interrelations between these two levels.

For this purpose, the Irish language caught my attention. Irish is one of six Celtic languages usually classified as a branch within the Indo-European language family, which is composed of several other branches such as the Germanic languages including English, to which Irish is only distantly related. Although Irish historically constituted the mother tongue of most of Ireland’s inhabitants, it was increasingly replaced throughout the nineteenth century with English as the dominant first language (Hindley 1990; Purdon 1999; Murchú 2000; Price 2000; Schrijver 2000). Against this background, the Irish language experienced some local revival in Catholic West Belfast during the second half of the twentieth century despite its continued minority status in a predominantly English-speaking world. As I soon learnt during my stay, the Irish language was thereby represented by many locals as related to their Irish identity and also constituted a practice, the realization of which could be investigated in daily life.

My point of reference, therefore, narrowed down to the category of Gaeilgeoirí (i.e. Irish learners and speakers), with whom I could get in contact and hang around in various Irish language classes, groups and meeting places in Catholic West Belfast. While my research thus came to focus exclusively on local Gaeilgeoirí and on how they represented and practised the Irish language (and hence deliberately excludes the perspectives of non-speakers on both language and identity), I continued to ask both how these actors represented and practically experienced their sense of Irishness, and how language and identity were interrelated for them. Thus, if senses of Irishness were possibly but not exclusively found in representations and practices of the Irish language, where else could they be found? This question persistently stuck with me, and it was behind my idea of filming and later describing some of the impressions I had when walking in(to) my field. The following observations from my walk are therefore aimed at letting the reader participate in an initial search for local Irishness. At the same time, they are also intended as an introduction to the social field in which I conducted my research, thereby transforming this walk into a preliminary emblem of local walks of life.

Thus on that particular Friday afternoon, I left my place in Broadway and hailed one of the many black taxis that drive along the Falls Road to and from the city centre, as I had done so many times before when travelling within Catholic West Belfast. Established as a ‘community’ transport system in the 1970s when public buses for some time stopped serving West Belfast during the height of the Troubles, the classic black London taxis can be entered and exited at any point along their various routes. I got off in the city centre at the black taxi terminal, which was located in the basement of a parking block labelled ‘The Castle Junction’ in English and ‘gabhal an chaisleain’ in Irish

.¹ I took out my video camera, started filming and slowly walked up to Divis Street the way I had just come.

During my stay, I had only rarely used my video camera. I had been afraid that extensively filming within Catholic West Belfast would nurture suspicions of me being a spy. I had consciously decided against a cross-community research setting and deliberately focused exclusively on the Catholic side of Belfast in order to reduce such mistrust from the very beginning. However, I had still encountered suspicions that I was a spy and was aware that some locals seemed unconvinced that I was only doing research; thus I did not want to further enhance their distrust. However, shortly before leaving, I felt that filming the Falls Road into Catholic West Belfast would be no big deal. I assumed that people would take me for a tourist, and indeed, with the exception of some pupils who later jokingly asked what I was doing, no one paid attention to my filming.

Map 1.1 My walk into Catholic West Belfast

Walking up Divis Street, I could see the ridge of the Black Mountain, which delimits the city of Belfast to the west. I passed St Mary’s Primary School

, which like many schools in Catholic areas was run by the Council for Catholic Maintained Schools (CCMS). At the corner of Divis and Westlink, the recently opened Millfield Campus of the Belfast Institute of Further and Higher Education (BIFHE)

rose into the partly cloudy sky.² There was quite a bit of traffic, with many cars entering the motorway. Those heading straight entered what a road sign indicated was ‘Falls (Divis Street)’. Someone had added in yellow graffiti the letters ‘HQ’ on the sign, presumably standing for ‘headquarters’, thereby expressing a widespread perception that one was now entering a heartland of Irish Nationalism and Republicanism. There were also other boundary markers communicating a similar message: on a number of lampposts around the junction were attached flags. Some had appeared a couple of months earlier during the annual marching season of the Protestant Orange Order, while others were weatherworn and seemed older. Apart from the Irish tricolour, I could discern the remnants of a Starry Plough, a flag that was first used by James Connolly’s socialist Irish Citizen Army in the early twentieth century. Featuring the constellation of Ursa Major (known as The Plough in Ireland and the U.K.) against a blue background, this flag has been used by various socialist and Republican groups. Another flag displayed the name ‘Larsson’ against a green and white striped background. Having spent a year in Belfast, I knew that it referred to the Celtic Football Club in Glasgow, and to its famous Swedish striker, Henrik Larsson. Larsson had just left Celtic for FC Barcelona in the summer of 2004 after having played seven years for the club with the emerald green and white hooped jerseys. As the saga goes, Celtic, whose emblem is a four-leaf shamrock, was founded in 1888 in Glasgow with the stated purpose of alleviating poverty among the local working class, many members of which were Irish migrants. Thus having an ‘Irish dimension’, as I was so often told, Glasgow Celtic had and continues to have a strong following among Irish Catholics in Ireland. The longstanding rivalry between Glasgow Celtic and the Rangers Football Club in Glasgow, whose supporters include many Protestants from Northern Ireland, has thereby transported and restaged religious, ethnic and political antagonisms prevalent in the North of Ireland.³

Passing these boundary markers, I entered the Nationalist and Republican areas of Catholic West Belfast. Yet what is Catholic West Belfast? At the time of the then last Northern Ireland census in 2001, a total of 277,391 people lived in the city of Belfast as defined at the level of Local Government District (LGD).⁴ Belfast is subdivided into four parliamentary constituencies: Belfast East, North, South and West. However, the figure of 87,610, indicated in the census as the total population of the parliamentary constituency Belfast West, is in a way misleading.⁵ This is so because in 2001 the constituency Belfast West consisted of seventeen electoral wards, four of which on its south-westerly edge did not belong to Belfast but to Lisburn on the level of LGD.⁶ In other words, only thirteen of the seventeen wards of the constituency Belfast West, with a total population of 70,447, also belonged to the LGD of Belfast (see Map 1.2).⁷ Taking these thirteen wards as an approximation for what I refer to as ‘West Belfast’, a pronounced internal division between these wards can be observed in terms of the religious backgrounds of their inhabitants. In the 2001 census, a new variable, ‘community background’, was introduced, recording ‘a person’s current religion, if any, or the religion brought up in for those people who do not regard themselves as currently belonging to any religion’ (see Northern Ireland Statistics and Research Agency [NISRA] 2003).

Distinguishing between ‘Catholics’ and ‘Protestants’ on the basis of their community background rather than their religious practices and beliefs, this variable is useful because some of my informants had become atheist or even strongly anti-Catholic and anti-religious in their lives despite (or even because of) their Catholic background. When talking about Catholics and Protestants throughout this book, I thus refer to peoples’ religious backgrounds and reserve the terms ‘practising Catholic’ and ‘practising Protestant’ for those who describe themselves as religious. Thus, when one looks at dominant religious backgrounds in the thirteen wards of West Belfast as indicated in the 2001 census, a sharp division emerges. At the northern fringe, three wards – Glencairn (85.20 per cent), Highfield (94.01 per cent) and Shankill (94.34 per cent) – were predominantly Protestant, as the respective percentages indicate. In contrast, the remaining ten wards to the south were overwhelmingly Catholic: Falls (96.93 per cent), Clonard (96.09 per cent), Beechmount (92.19 per cent), Whiterock (99.04 per cent), Falls Park (97.72 per cent), Upper Springfield (96.90 per cent), Glen Road (97.19 per cent), Andersonstown (98.49 per cent), Glencolin (98.08 per cent) and Ladybrook (86.45 per cent). Against this backdrop, I refer to these ten wards with a total population in 2001 of 57,327, of which a total of 95.85 per cent were of a Catholic religious background, as unambiguously constituting ‘Catholic West Belfast’ when presenting statistical data.⁸ In everyday conversations, however, local Catholics tended to include with ‘Catholic West Belfast’ not only the above-mentioned four other wards in the south-west but also adjacent areas such as parts of Finaghy, which technically did not belong to West Belfast at all but were frequently inhabited by Catholics originally from West Belfast.

Map 1.2 depicts the distribution of religious backgrounds in 2001 for the whole of Belfast at the ward level, indicating the extent of religious segregation in the city. As Doherty and Poole (2000: 189) show, the current residential pattern can thereby be seen as the outcome of a ratchet effect whereby segregation since the nineteenth century has intensified, with precipitous increases following violent episodes and only slightly moderated in times of relative peace.

When I was crossing the Westlink, I was thus entering Catholic West Belfast. Yet the boundary markers I referred to above were political and possibly ethnic rather than religious. The flags seemed to mark some sense of Irishness as well as the political position of Nationalists and Republicans, both aspiring to independence from Britain and a united 32-county Ireland (i.e. including the six Northern Irish counties), though only Republicans endorsed violence as a legitimate means.⁹ Was I not thus conflating political and ethnic with religious identifications? Can these three levels of identification be used interchangeably? In his account of contemporary Northern Irish society, Coulter speaks of ‘“two principal communal blocs” in Northern Ireland, one variously described as “Catholic”, “nationalist” and “Irish”, the other designated as “Protestant”, “unionist” and “British”’ (Coulter 1999: 10). In her analysis of self-ascribed ethnic identities among Catholics and Protestants, Trew (1998: 66) summarizes her findings in the following way:

Protestants identify themselves as British, Northern Irish and Ulster but not Irish. Catholics identify themselves as Irish, Northern Irish or British but not Ulster. The majority of the population clearly identify themselves as either Irish Catholics or British Protestants but there is a sizeable minority who are Northern Irish.

This observation is supported by Coakley’s recent analysis of all available public opinion data on the topic, in which he shows that ‘religious background has been the most fundamental determinant of national identity in Northern Ireland’ (Coakley 2007: 577). What this cursory overview indicates is that, in practice, there is indeed a considerable homology between ‘Catholic’, ‘Irish’ and ‘Nationalist/Republican’, on the one hand, and ‘Protestant’, ‘British’ and ‘Unionist/Loyalist’, on the other, although some variations and cross-cuttings do exist and need to be explored.

Map 1.2 Distribution of reli...