Contrary Regionalisms and Noisy Correspondences: The BBC in Northern Ireland circa 1949

2015 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-43
Author(s):  
Damien Keane
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
The Political ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
The North ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
Cultural Regionalism ◽  
Dynamic Interplay

This essay examines the limits and possibilities of the mid-century broadcasting field in Northern Ireland, by attending to the dynamic interplay at the BBC's Belfast station of three competing regional formations: the political regionalism of the Northern Irish state; the cultural regionalism of a coterie of Northern Irish writers and intellectuals; and the broadcasting regionalism instituted as part of the BBC's policy of national programming. These contrary regionalisms each had different and, at times, competing criteria for what constituted particular and typical details of life in the North, and broadcasters had to negotiate the inexact correspondences among them with ears tuned to the political relations triangulated by Belfast, Dublin, and London. Beginning with a consideration of how broadcasters in Northern Ireland produced forms of mediated actuality both in and beyond the studio, the essay concludes with Sam Hanna Bell's This is Northern Ireland (1949), a feature that explores the tension of overspill and containment effected less by the partition of Ireland than by the contradictions inherent to the broadcasting field.

George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Post-Conflict Northern Ireland

2019 ◽  
pp. 259-276
Author(s):  
Andrew Sanders
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Presidential Election ◽  
Barack Obama ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Hillary Clinton ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
2008 Presidential Election ◽  
Post Conflict

After Clinton’s second term in office ended, President George W Bush moved the Special Envoy to Northern Ireland to the State Department, but his Envoys, led by Richard Haass and Mitchell Reiss, were no less engaged in Northern Irish affairs as the political figures there sought to create a functional government at Stormont Parliament Buildings. A series of significant obstacles emerged, but the Northern Ireland Assembly finally formed in 2007 before Bush left office. He was succeeded by President Barack Obama who had little interest in Northern Ireland but Obama’s initial Secretary of State, former Senator Hillary Clinton, was well-versed in Northern Irish issues. This chapter also examines the role of Northern Ireland in the 2008 Democratic Primary contest and, to a lesser extent, the 2008 Presidential Election.

THE POLITICAL FUTURE OF SCOTLAND AND NORTHERN IRELAND. TWO WAYS – ONE CHOICE?

2019 ◽  
pp. 87-98
Author(s):  
M. A. Mosora
Keyword(s):  
United Kingdom ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
The Political ◽  
Present Stage ◽  
Distinctive Features ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Current State ◽  
Political Relations ◽  
The Future

The article analyzes the features of the politicization of the Scotland and Northern Ireland at the present stage. The basic identifiers for the com­munities in these regions are revealed. The important role of devolution pol­icy in the political relations of the Center with regions in the United Kingdom is justified. Emphasis is placed on the exceptional importance of Brexit in the context of strengthening the separation of the Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is marked common and distinctive features of both regions in the vision of the political future. The current state of the factors contributing to separatism in both regions is compared. Estimates of the likelihood of increased separa­tion movements in the Scotland and Northern Ireland in the future are given.

scholarly journals ‘The Troubles' and the peace process in Northern Irelanda in Seamus Heaney’s "The cure at Troy"

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan José Cogolludo Díaz
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Social Problems ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Seamus Heaney ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Sectarian Violence ◽  
The Future ◽  
Irish People

Based on Philoctetes, the tragic play by Sophocles, the poet Seamus Heaney creates his own version in The Cure at Troy to present the political and social problems in Northern Ireland during the period that became known euphemistically as ‘the Troubles’. This paper aims to highlight the significance of Heaney’s play in the final years of the conflict. Heaney uses the classical Greek play to bring to light the plight and suffering of the Northern Irish people as a consequence of the atavistic and sectarian violence between the unionist and nationalist communities. Nevertheless, Heaney also provides possible answers that allow readers to harbour a certain degree of hope towards peace and the future in Northern Ireland.

Politics and Devolution in Northern Ireland, 1998–2007

2021 ◽  
pp. 209-240
Author(s):  
Jonathan Bradbury
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Policy Development ◽  
Power Sharing ◽  
The Political ◽  
Resource Limitations ◽  
The North ◽  
Political Management ◽  
Management Approaches ◽  
The Uk

This chapter analyses politics in Northern Ireland in the context, first, of the failed attempts to implement devolution that led to its suspension, then the St Andrews Agreement in 2006, elections and the restoration of devolution in 2007. It reappraises the tortuous years in terms of the territorial strains that were still present in Northern Ireland, the resources available to the Republican/Nationalist and Unionist party leaderships in Northern Ireland as well as to the Blair government, and the political management approaches that they each pursued. It focuses on the political imperatives and constraints that determined the Northern Ireland Assembly's journey between intermittent existence and suspension, and eventually led to the unlikely agreement between the leaders of the extreme representatives of Republicanism and Unionism. The chapter is informed by the proposition that both sides in Northern Ireland still recognised their resource limitations in asserting their ideal outcomes in the short term. The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Sinn Fein still pursued power-sharing devolution in the short to medium term to realise their long-term objectives of Irish unity. This was principally to be achieved through electoral success and the cultivation of the North–South institutions under strand two of the Belfast Agreement to normalise Irish governance through instrumental arguments, shared policy development and functional spillovers. Meanwhile, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), as the principal Unionist party, competitively sought to use devolution as a new framework in which to sustain an inter-governmentalist approach to governing within the UK, asserting the very different long-term aim of maintaining Northern Ireland within the Union.

Workers Entering the Prison

Qui Parle ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 343-372
Author(s):  
Christopher McGowan
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Care Work ◽  
The Political ◽  
Hunger Strike ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
Affective Dimensions

Abstract This article argues that Steve McQueen’s Hunger (2008) represents an unexpected but compelling mutation of the genre of postindustrial labor film. Hunger depicts the protests of Irish republican prisoners inside the Maze Prison that culminated in the 1981 Irish hunger strike. At the same time, the film develops an extended representation of the labor of the prison workers who beat, humiliate, care for, and counsel the prisoners throughout the protests. By combining and reworking the genres of labor film, prison film, and Irish Troubles film, Hunger imagines the prison as a microcosm of a deindustrialized Northern Irish economy where labor has left the factory and become conjoined to the disciplinary power of the state, either as police work or as care work. In this way, Hunger attends to the “spirit” of what Lenin called the “labor aristocracy,” here reduced to the work of maintaining the very boundary between itself and those excluded from it. McQueen’s attention to the body and to the affective dimensions of labor and struggle, the article argues, allows Hunger to achieve a uniquely committed, totalizing representation of the political economy of Northern Ireland.

‘Room to Rhyme’: Heaney, Arts Policy and Cultural Tradition in Northern Ireland 1968–1971

2019 ◽  
Vol 71 (300) ◽  
pp. 554-568
Author(s):  
Conor Carville
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Cultural Policy ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Arts Policy ◽  
The North ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Complex Development ◽  
The Public Sphere

Abstract Drawing on extensive research in Arts Council and government archives in Belfast and the collections of Seamus Heaney’s manuscripts, this essay reconstructs for the first time Northern Irish state cultural policy at the height of the crisis years 1968–1972. It also examines the response of a major poet to this policy, through a genetic mapping of the complex development of Heaney’s poem ‘The Last Mummer’, between 1969 and its publication in 1972. The poem refers to the mumming plays practiced at Christmas when troupes of young men, or ‘Rhymers’ would enter and perform in the houses of both communities in the North. This practice also informed ‘Room to Rhyme’, the Arts Council sponsored 1968 tour of several towns in Northern Ireland by Heaney and Michael Longley and the folk musician Davy Hammond. The make-up of the performers on the tour, the itinerary and accompanying booklet, suggest a deliberate attempt on the part of the Arts Council Northern Ireland to assert a role for itself, and for culture, in the political thaw of the time. In the years immediately after the tour, however, major confrontations between civil rights marches and police, widespread sectarian rioting and ultimately troops on the streets, resulted in even more extreme polarization in the North. As this essay shows, Heaney’s manuscripts from this period provide a valuable resource for the examination of the relationship between poetry, the public sphere and notions of cultural tradition in early 1970s Northern Ireland.

scholarly journals El impacto del Brexit sobre el estatus jurídico-político de Irlanda del Norte: ¿una oportunidad para la reunificación de Irlanda?

2017 ◽  
pp. 59-98
Author(s):  
Eneko COMPAINS SILVA
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
The Political ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Political Status

LABURPENA: Idazlan honen helburua Brexit-ak Ipar Irlandan uzten duen eskenatokiaren azterketa egitea da, aintzat hartuta Brexit-a Ipar Irlandako herritarren gehiengoaren aurka gauzatuko dela. Horretarako, lehenik, lurralde honek egun duen estatus juridiko-politikoaren azalpena egingo da. Bigarrenik, Brexit-aren ondorio juridiko-konstituzionalen azalpena egingo da, bereziki erreparatuz Ipar Irlandak hura frenatu edota baldintzatzeko dituen tresnei. Hirugarrenik, azken hauteskundeen ondotik geratu den eskenatoki politikoaren azalpena egingo da; eta azkenik, ondorio moduan, etorkizunari begirako aukerak aztertuko dira. ¿Brexit-ak Irlandaren batasunera hurbiltzen gaitu? ¿Erreferendumik egongo da? RESUMEN: El presente trabajo analiza el incierto escenario que deja en Irlanda del Norte el Brexit, que cuenta con el rechazo de la mayoría ciudadana norirlandesa. Para ello, se explicará primeramente cuál es el estatus jurídico-político que tiene Irlanda del Norte a día de hoy. En segundo lugar, se explicarán las implicaciones jurídico-constitucionales del Brexit así como las herramientas legales que tiene Irlanda del Norte para frenarlo o condicionarlo. En tercer lugar, se analizará el escenario político que queda en la isla tras las últimas elecciones; y en cuarto y último lugar, a modo de conclusión, se analizarán las opciones de futuro. ¿Nos acerca el Brexit a la unidad de Irlanda? ¿Habrá referéndum? ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to analyze the uncertain scenario that Brexit, which is rejected by a majority of the Northern-Irish society, leaves in Northern Ireland. With this purpose, we first explain the legal-political status of Northern Ireland nowadays. Secondly, we explain the legal and constitutional implications of the Brexit as well as the legal tools that Northern Ireland has to curb or condition it. Thirdly, we analyze the political scenario that remains on this devolved region after the last elections; and finally, we analyze future options. Are we approaching the unity of Ireland? Will there be a referendum?

The Right to March Parading a loyal Protestant Identity in Northern Ireland

1996 ◽  
Vol 4 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 373-396 ◽  
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Social Situation ◽  
Roman Catholic ◽  
General Nature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
Political Resource ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Rituals

AbstractRiots taking place in the Northern Irish town of Portadown are analysed in the context of the 'right to march'. The paper concentrates specifically on the demands by a number of Protestant organisations that they should be allowed to parade along roads which they have followed for many years despite the objections of a large majority of the Roman Catholic, Nationalist community living along parts of the route. To understand fully these disputes it is necessary to examine the political and social situation that pertains to a particular time and place. The paper will also draw on comparative material in order to explore the general nature of political rituals since they are also elements of what took place locally which are common to most societies. I particularly wish to reject any notion that ethnic groups in N. Ireland are in some way trapped by their history since, on the contrary, research into public rituals such as these parades reveals the ways in which they are used as a dynamic political resource through changing historical circumstances.

Burning Churches and Victim Surveys: The Myth of Northern Ireland as Low-Crime Society

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mike Brogden
Keyword(s):  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Irish Society ◽  
Northern Irish ◽  
The North ◽  
Police Reports

This paper challenges common portrayals of Northern Ireland as a low-crime society. Such portrayals are often based on victim surveys and other positivist criminological approaches. The paper proposes that much criminality may he concealed by social and political characteristics of northern Irish society. These characteristics mean that current frameworks for measuring crime, such as victim surveys or police reports, are inappropriate as are comparisons of the north of Ireland with other societies.

Exceptional Procedures to Correct Miscarriages of Justice in Common Law Systems

2019 ◽  
pp. 959-990
Author(s):  
Kent Roach
Keyword(s):  
North Carolina ◽  
Northern Ireland ◽  
Review Process ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
The Political ◽  
Compelling Evidence ◽  
Criminal Cases ◽  
Wrongful Convictions ◽  
The North

This chapter examines exceptional procedures that are used to correct miscarriages of justice in common law systems. Exceptional procedures refer to second or subsequent appeals or extraordinary forms of collateral review after the ordinary appellate or collateral review process has been exhausted. The chapter first provides a historical background on the Criminal Cases Review Commission (CCRC), which has been operating for England, Wales, and Northern Ireland since 1997, before discussing its composition, powers, applications, how it makes referrals to the court, and systemic reforms designed to reduce wrongful convictions. It also considers the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission (SCCRC), the North Carolina Innocence Inquiry Commission (NCIIC), other exceptional American procedures tied to innocence, the creation of a second right of appeal based on “fresh and compelling evidence” in two Australian states, and Canada’s 2002 reform of a system that allows the political executive to grant relief on applications for mercy and clemency.

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