Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Explores the creation of Northern Ireland and the conflicting understandings of the past that led to discrimination and sectarian violence in the Twentieth Century. Students with credit for HIST 462 may not take this course for further credit. Writing.

COURSE DETAILS:

            In 2021, some of the worst violence in years broke out between Catholic and Protestant neighbourhoods in Belfast, as epithets and petrol bombs were lobbed over a “peace wall” between communities, while police tried to intervene with water cannons and arrests.  Religion has permeated ethnic, political, and cultural identities in Northern Ireland in the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Yet the conflict that has plagued this area cannot be described as a religious war.  Rather, it has been a struggle for social, economic, and political capital that has played out along sectarian lines.

            These ethno-religious tensions are rooted deeply in Ireland’s past—in centuries of conquest, displacement, confiscation, colonialism, and resistance.  That past has been remembered quite differently by Protestants and Catholics, and this divergence in collective memories shaped twentieth-century Northern Ireland in profound ways.  A long-standing siege mentality spurred Ulster Protestant unionists to lobby, before the Irish Free State was created in the early 1920s, for partition of the six counties with Protestant majorities in the north.  After partition, they continued to view the Catholic minority as “enemies within the gates,” leading to decades of segregation and discrimination by successive unionist governments in areas such as education, housing, and employment.  Interdenominational cooperation was proscribed by Catholics and Protestants alike and, as a result, struggles around other systems of difference such as class and gender were muted.  In the late 1960s, a Catholic-led civil rights movement met with a violent Protestant ultra-loyalist response, which, in turn, provoked a Catholic republican backlash.  Thus began the “Troubles,” a period of escalating communal and state violence that extended from the late 1960s to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement three decades later.  And even as efforts towards peace were made, religion and ethnicity continued to shape unionist and nationalist agendas, and the shadow of the gunman continued to haunt the process.

            This course will interrogate the complexity of tensions that led up to the 1998 peace accord, a pact which many observers feel merely ushered in a fragile “long peace” rather than cessation of conflict in Northern Ireland.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING:

REQUIRED READING NOTES: