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The Case of Northern Ireland

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Understanding Religious Violence

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Abstract

Northern Ireland was born in a state of ethno-religious violence and to a large extent continues that way today. Its religious divisions and professional terrorist groups have almost become a byword for ethno-religious bigotry and violence in Western Europe. However, its protagonists more frequently present themselves in ethno-nationalist terms, as British (Unionist, the more hardline being referred to as Loyalist) or Irish (Nationalist, the more hardline being known as Republican). However, this merely highlights the common association or conflation of religion in most nationalisms, which illustrates the religious nature of nationalism and how nationalism has become a new religion. In Ireland as a whole, its partition in 1921 into Northern and Southern States (which no one wanted) merely illustrated the fundamental importance of religion and also highlighted some of the more prosaic interests and factors that lay behind it and have continued to plague Northern Ireland ever since.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Hervieu-Leger argues that an important role of religion lies in providing a ‘chain of memory’ that connects the present with the past, thus placing man in a timeless sense of continuity and order within the cosmos. As such it can also be seen as equating closely to Giddens’ (1990, 1991) ontological security.

  2. 2.

    Ulster-Scots, inspired by the radical philosopher Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) (an Ulster Presbyterian), provided many of the radical ideas behind the American and French Revolutions and the United Irish movement.

  3. 3.

    There are also an Anglican (St George’s, High Street) and a Roman Catholic (St Mary’s, Chapel Lane) Church in the City centre and whilst St Mary’s has no wall memorials celebrating individual parishioners, St Georges has ones that celebrate individuals’ public or government service. Thus the three churches symbolically reflect the respective roles and primary socio-economic and political relations dominating their congregations.

  4. 4.

    A point commonly overlooked, even by most Irish academics, is that any non-Anglican was excluded from full legal and political rights, although the number of such ‘disabilities’ was gradually reduced throughout the eighteenth century until by 1828–29 it only related to the right to sit in Parliament (not the right to vote) and these disabilities applied equally in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. As such they also reflected the pan-European post Treaty of Westphalia (1648) settlement, which permitted all states to discriminate against religious minorities. And although most permitted minorities the right to worship in private, some states, for example, France, did not. Religion was the politics of pre-industrial society and directly related to state authority and legitimacy (see, for instance, Bew 2009; Dingley 2015).

  5. 5.

    That is, Home Rule would lead to a Roman Catholic majority, hence the imposition of Roman Catholic religious, social and moral teachings on everyone, including Protestants.

  6. 6.

    It is a matter of some debate whether it was a serious effort to begin a rebellion against the Crown or just a symbolic gesture never intended to succeed, a kind of blood sacrifice for the cause (Dingley 2012).

  7. 7.

    Scholastic philosophy, until Vatican II, was the official philosophy of Roman Catholicism and can be found in Russell’s (1996) History of Western Philosophy under the section on medieval philosophy. As such it can be contrasted with modern scientific philosophy. Both posit fundamentally opposed world views.

  8. 8.

    O’Hearn was part of a long and acrimonious debate in the British Journal of Sociology with Chris Hewitt (1981–87) about discrimination in Northern Ireland that really summarises the two sides’ polar opposition. See Hewitt, vol.32, no.3; vol.34, no.3; vol.36, no.1; vol.38, no.1. And O’Hearn, vol.34, no.3; vol.36, no.1; vol.38, no.1. One can only read and draw one’s own conclusions.

  9. 9.

    The two main Loyalist terrorist groups were the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Ulster Defence Association (UDA), and whilst both were nasty, neither had the deadly efficiency and destructive capacity of the IRA.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

    James Dingley

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  1. James Dingley
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  1. Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast, UK

    James Dingley

  2. University of Messina, Messina, Italy

    Marcello Mollica

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Dingley, J. (2018). The Case of Northern Ireland. In: Dingley, J., Mollica, M. (eds) Understanding Religious Violence. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00284-8_6

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