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Reclamations of the Once Dominant

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Ethnic Dignity and the Ulster-Scots Movement in Northern Ireland

Part of the book series: Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series ((CAL))

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Abstract

The logic of peacebuilding in Northern Ireland runs something like this: peace will come when both the Protestants/British and the Catholic/Irish ‘communities’ can proudly declare a love of ‘their own’ identity whilst also celebrating the identity of the ‘other’. In other words, peace requires benevolent but absolute ethnic bifurcation. Since the 1990s, the principle of ‘parity of esteem’ has been the core value of the peace process and the cornerstone of power-sharing governance. Aside from its reification of ethnic boundaries, this peacebuilding philosophy foregrounds mutual recognition of a pluralist multicultural sort, foregrounding the ‘celebration of differences’ whilst ignoring the fundamental ‘power relations of the social structure’ (Kincheloe and Steinberg 1997, p. 17). The Northern Irish state in the twentieth century, and the civil war itself, was grounded—at least in part—in sectarianisation and the systemic marginalisation and exclusion of Catholics. However, with the conflict being read as being essentially about antagonistic and zero-sum cultural identities (Gilligan 2007; Finlay 2010), the key questions that came to be asked were not those related to how Northern Ireland could deal with its multifaceted history of social, political, economic and ideological violence and domination. Rather, questions of ethno-cultural recognition were foregrounded, including those related to the fact that Northern Ireland’s Protestants lacked a coherent narrative of ‘their’ cultural identity.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    For productive discussions on the topic, see Finlay (2010), Dixon (1997), Anderson and Shuttleworth (1998), Taylor (2009), Aitken (2007), Nagle and Clancy (2010), and Graham and Nash (2006).

  2. 2.

    The Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, 1998. I refer to this as ‘the Northern Ireland Agreement’ throughout.

  3. 3.

    By ‘peace’ in this context, I refer to something more expansive than simply the ceasing of armed violence in war-torn societies. Galtung (1969, p. 183) distinguishes between ‘negative peace’ (the absence of physical violence) and ‘positive peace’ (moving beyond both physical and structural violence). In this sense, all societies require the building of positive peace.

  4. 4.

    When challenged on this point, she argued that the white vote ‘cannot change this country in the way that when black people are unhappy about the current situation they can change it’.

  5. 5.

    Judge for Yourself, 2013: Season 11, Episode 12.

  6. 6.

    Rosen contends that there are four basic definitions of ‘dignity’. First, it is used to mean ‘rank or status’: either the high position of those positioned in the higher echelons of social hierarchy or, as in nineteenth-century Catholic thought, the subordination of the self to the position within society in which one finds oneself (2012, pp. 114). Second, it is used within the human rights tradition to describe the intrinsic value of human beings, in which all by virtue of being human to have inherent dignity which is to be upheld. Third, dignity can be used performatively, to act in a dignified manner. Fourth, dignity is understood in an interactional sense: ‘To treat someone with dignity is … to respect their dignity’ (2012, pp. 58). The first two of these correspond essentially to Schroeder’s (2008) aristocratic and Kantian forms of dignity respectively. The third, ‘performative’ category includes elements of both comportment and meritorious dignity.

  7. 7.

    Brubaker (2004, pp. 8) defines ‘groupism’ as the tendency to ‘take discrete, bounded groups as basic constituents of social life, chief protagonists of social conflicts, and fundamental units of social analysis’, ‘treat ethnic groups, nations, and races as substantial entities to which interests and agency can be attributed’, ‘reify such groups … as if they were internally homogeneous, externally bounded groups, even unitary collective actors with common purposes’, and ‘represent the social and cultural world as a multichrome mosaic of monochrome ethnic, racial, or cultural blocs’.

  8. 8.

    In the absence of an accepted ‘correct’ version, there is little consistency of written or spoken Ulster-Scots among its promoters.

  9. 9.

    For example, the spelling of ‘white ’ as ‘quhyt’ (pronounced ‘white ’).

  10. 10.

    USHC1: Interviewee 1 from the Ulster-Scots Heritage Council.

  11. 11.

    Also the Good Friday or Belfast Agreement.

  12. 12.

    As a cross-border body, this includes all nine counties of the province of Ulster, including the six counties of Northern Ireland and three counties in the Republic of Ireland.

  13. 13.

    These included the documents from ‘Ulster-Scots fur Weans’ for use in primary schools (available at: www.ulsterscotsagency.com/weans//), and the post-primary materials published in 2009, 2012 and 2016 (available at: www.ulsterscotsagency.com/education/teaching-resources/)

  14. 14.

    Members of Legislative Assembly.

  15. 15.

    NI21 stands for ‘Northern Ireland for the 21st Century’.

  16. 16.

    Given the focus on Northern Ireland, the three schools in the parts of Ulster within the Republic of Ireland were excluded.

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Gardner, P. (2020). Reclamations of the Once Dominant. In: Ethnic Dignity and the Ulster-Scots Movement in Northern Ireland. Palgrave Politics of Identity and Citizenship Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-34859-5_1

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