As Anne Enright has noted, fiction by Irish women writers in recent years has been characterised by a ‘resurgent modernism’.[1] In a 2015 tweet posted by Tramp Press, she cited as examples Eimear McBride’s feted A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing (2013), a harrowing first-person account of a teenager’s sexual abuse set in late twentieth-century Ireland, and Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond (2015), an evocative set of contemplations by a young woman who electively retreats to the west in the wake of the 2008 economic crash. 2015 also saw the publication and positive reception of similarly modernist-leaning novels that featured Irish characters, among them Sara Baume’s Spill Simmer Falter Wither, Caitriona Lally’s Eggshells and Anakana Schofield’s Martin John. Each offered readers an isolated and alienated central character, a narrative heavily inflected by stream of consciousness, and formal tactics ranging from non-linear plots to broken syntax to unconventional punctuation, among the various other aspects of style, tone, form and content that collectively telegraph the mode of modernism.

My new book, Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode (Oxford University Press, 2024), examines this twenty-first-century phenomenon. Further, it demonstrates that an express engagement with modernism informs not only these recent novels but also a surprising array of Irish women’s fiction from both the South and the North written from the immediate aftermath of the movement’s early-twentieth-century prime into the present day. The book constructs a new literary history of Irish writing that reveals how and why modernist experiment so powerfully inflects the work of the writers mentioned in this essay, as well as others including Kate O’Brien, Mary Lavin, Maeve Kelly, Evelyn Conlon, Deirdre Madden, Emma Donoghue, June Caldwell and Louise O’Neill. In fits and starts across the past century, these women have rehearsed and refashioned aspects of Euro-American modernism, employing in their fiction features easily recognisable from the movement’s forms and themes, its canonical texts and authors.

Recent decades in Ireland, both North and South, have been characterised by a dizzying array of political and social transformations. Across these years, from some perspectives, the Republic can appear to have moved from the conservative and insular economic and political gestures of the mid-twentieth century to a more open-armed embrace of globalism and progressive social policies in the twenty-first, while, following the violence of the Troubles, the North has achieved a measure of peace and stability with the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, even as Brexit threatens to undermine those hard-won achievements. My analysis of women’s fiction deepens and complicates such sweeping historical narratives, to illuminate their hidden features as experienced and understood by individual female characters. By attending closely to fictional depictions of female interiority across these years, this study explores how women writers have employed the modernist mode to depict the understanding of and response to such conditions. This includes those specific to Ireland (such as wartime neutrality or the Troubles) as well as those more general (such as emigration or class struggle), both positive (such as first love or the pleasures of summer camp) and pernicious (such as childhood sexual abuse or political violence). Such an approach can help to explain how and why certain literary frameworks persist across almost a century of Irish women’s writing, as well as why certain cultural conditions across these years, good and bad, appear intractable. The methodology seeks to provide readers a useful feedback loop: we can understand contemporary conditions better when we isolate a particular body of work; we can understand a particular body of work better when we isolate contemporary conditions.

Strikingly, the ‘new’ modernism that seemingly distinguishes this body of fiction looks much like the ‘old’ modernism of the early twentieth century. For these authors, modernism is a mode: a pliable and portable set of features readily and broadly identified as ‘modernist’ by readers. The mode, in the words of Fredric Jameson, is ‘a particular type of literary discourse … not bound to the conventions of a given age’ and, as the many scholarly accounts of the ‘melodramatic mode’ have demonstrated, the mode can move among not only historical periods but also genres, media, national traditions, settings and audiences.[2] Amid these travels, the mode remains recognisable because it adheres tightly to its original conventions. But it is also adaptive, and may resist or exceed those conventions.

The mode, and the history it accrues, can generate a kind of interpretive friction for readers familiar with its norms, one that helps to showcase certain cultural fault lines, particularly those historical problems that persist into the present moment. For example, the quiet allusion to W.B. Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’ (1920) in Sally Rooney’s novel Beautiful World, Where Are You (2021) reminds readers of the feeling of impending catastrophe conveyed by this poem, which was written in the midst of violent political conflicts and the 1918 flu pandemic; a similar anxiety about the future appears throughout Rooney’s novel, written a century later, which considers various present-day crises and concludes during the Covid-19 pandemic. Likewise, by reimagining Katherine Mansfield’s biography and adapting her impressionistic style, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne’s short story ‘Summer’s Wreath’ (2013) invokes Mansfield’s modernism to elucidate the changed textures of sexual shame in contemporary culture, while Deirdre Madden’s Molly Fox’s Birthday (2008) revamps the work of Virginia Woolf to think about the emotional legacies of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. In both, the modernist mode underscores the surprising traction of certain personal and societal challenges, as well as showing how they morph with time.

But if the mode is already defined by its durability and portability, by its detectable appearance in different moments and venues, why add the descriptor ‘stubborn’ when thinking about modernism in contemporary fiction by Irish women? To be stubborn, the dictionary tells us, is to refuse to change one’s position or attitude, to be likened to a mule or a child. It is a strategy of repetition and adamancy, of overstaying your welcome, of demanding to be acknowledged. Often gendered, such behaviour undergirds disparaging tropes like the nagging wife, mutton dressed as lamb, the aggressive career woman, and the entitled Karen. Such stubbornness, for many female protagonists in Irish women’s writing, has real costs. Think, for instance, of ‘stubborn’ Eily, the teenager who follows her desires, becomes pregnant out of wedlock, and finds herself consigned to an adult fate of madness and drugged obeisance in Edna O’Brien’s short story ‘A Scandalous Woman’ (1974), or of The Mai, an accomplished professional who, despite repeated counsel, cleaves to her faithless husband until her tragic death in Marina Carr’s play The Mai (1994).

A public and political stubbornness also represents for oft-silenced women a means of advocating and forging necessary if unwelcome change. Such a logic is reflected by the feminist rallying cry ‘Nevertheless, she persisted’, repurposed from a dismissive putdown when Senator Elizabeth Warren in 2017 refused to cede the floor during a debate in the United States Senate. In a case from the other side of the American political spectrum, when Nikki Haley, the former United States Ambassador to the United Nations, refused to suspend her campaign for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, members of her party quickly moved from celebrating her ‘adaptability’ to bemoaning her stubborn refusal to ‘step aside for the good of the country’ and ease Trump’s path to victory.[3] These examples are not meant to erase obvious particularities, but instead to demonstrate the pervasive gendered deployment of ‘stubbornness’. Similar examples abound in Irish writing and practice. A deliberate recalcitrance imagined as productive social intervention characterises the position of the speaker in Eavan Boland’s poem ‘Mise Éire’ (1987), who insists ‘I won’t go back to it’ and refuses to recapitulate the feminine tropes used to justify and promote the Irish national project, and the efforts of the real-life historian Catherine Corless, celebrated in 2021 by Taoiseach Micheál Martin as a ‘tireless crusader of dignity and truth’ for her relentless investigation of the records of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Tuam.[4]

Irish women writers using the modernist mode are among this cohort. Many regarded modernism as too inward-focused, too reluctant to embrace its potential to activate social change. In a 1944 essay for The Bell, Elizabeth Bowen eulogised her childhood friend Mainie Jellett, noting that their last conversation centred on the work of Dorothy Richardson, ‘whose strain of genius has not yet been enough recognized by the world’.[5] She read Jellett’s essay ‘An Approach to Painting’ (1942) as confirmation of her belief that ‘an artist’s natural place is in the heart of human society’.[6] She further cited Jellett’s contention that the artist’s ‘gifts are vitally important to the mental and spiritual life of that majority. Their present enforced isolation from the majority is a very serious situation and I believe it is one of the many causes which has resulted in the present chaos we live in.’[7] Iris Murdoch was another who was notoriously dismissive of the principles that would come to define literary modernism, asserting that ‘The work of the great artists shows up “art-for-art’s sake” as a flimsy frivolous doctrine. Art is for life’s sake … or else it is worthless.’[8]

Many works of fiction that use the stubborn mode suggest that high modernism can correct the past, as well as provide a relevant tool to represent the present. There is a deliberate knowingness baked into the use of modernism by Irish women writers, one insisting that the assimilation of its more well-known features does not preclude but rather enables its interventions. The stubborn mode helps to remind readers of the sweep of history, using literary form and content to accentuate certain ongoing cultural problems as well as to spotlight remedies previously imagined for such stubborn problems, whether the outcomes of those interventions have proved to be successful, unsuccessful or (more likely, as seen across time) a measure of both. Many women writers neither eschew nor evade the pre-packaged quality of high modernism to accomplish this end; they neither disavow their complicity in the literary marketplace nor perform the calculated irony often associated with postmodernism. Instead, the writers I study call to attention the inherent aesthetic and social potential of a commodified and popularised modernism, laying bare the deep work the movement’s tenacious surface gestures might provoke in the present day.

The persistence of Irish women writers using the modernist mode surfaces in other ways. For example, there are plenty of good reasons they should have shed such experimentation as mere imitation, as outmoded (to indulge the obvious play on words). My book is rich with striking examples of writers being neglected and even demeaned for their invocation of modernism past its perceived ‘sell-by’ date. In the review of a special issue on women’s writing published in 1954 by Irish Writing: The Magazine of Contemporary Irish Literature, a critic for the Irish Times took particular exception to the work of the, even then, critically venerated Bowen, dismissing her innovative representation of modern temporality as merely ‘a reductio ad absurdum of that of the well-known male author, Henry James’.[9] In another example, Edna O’Brien explained in a 1975 interview that, for employing recognisable modernist tactics in her fiction, ‘in Dublin, I have a nickname among some of the intellectuals. It’s “the bandwagon.” It’s supposed to mean that I climb on bandwagons, that I’m a whore.’[10] The metaphor of ‘the bandwagon’ dismisses O’Brien’s experiments, suggesting that she is uncritically following rather than setting aesthetic trends, and to call her a ‘whore’ announces, in overtly sexual and sexist terms, that she has compromised literary experiment for material gain.

Such examples manifest that the portability of the stubborn mode often has provided an excuse to label the modernism found in Irish women’s fiction imitative or derivative, even morally suspect. Nonetheless, these writers demonstrated over and over the particular suitability of the modernist mode to the representation of female experience in contemporary Ireland. Sara Ahmed has explored the consequences of bodies, language, gestures and affective registers that refuse to accommodate surrounding norms and expectations, among them the ‘feminist killjoy’ who speaks uncomfortable but necessary truths. The stubborn mode represents a literary manifestation of similar recalcitrance, one marked by its anachronistic aesthetics and uneven history. The interpretive challenges the stubborn mode of modernism poses, even today, demand that readers work harder to identify and understand certain intransigent socio-cultural problems still before us, as well as to attend closely to those characters who encounter, assess and seek with uneven success to solve them.

There are certain practical benefits to this strategy. The stubborn mode can be an easier sell in the contemporary moment: like the coffee drinker who seeks out Starbucks in an unfamiliar city, many readers welcome the overt deployment of modernism in contemporary fiction. Such familiarity is not inherently and inevitably a liability. Instead, it suggests that the disruptive potential of these books rests not always in radical formal innovation but instead in the creative adaptation of old forms to convey aspects of female experience that are upsetting and unsettling – and marketable to large audiences curious about the complex interior lives of such characters as well as able to decipher modernism’s codes. Read in such a materialist context, these novels might be interpreted as product, with their refashioning of modernism the literary equivalent of upcycling, the creative reuse of old materials.

A contemporary manifestation of the modernist objet trouvé, the stubborn mode seems to resist the planned obsolescence that typifies the consumer market, its value stemming from the apparent artistry that transforms an old object into a particularly desirable new one constructed from salvaged forms. Just as the recycled object has become a political statement with a certain social value, so too has a recycled modernism in contemporary writing – in part by similarly refusing the ever-quicker cycles of planned obsolescence. Readily recognisable, the modernist mode nonetheless continues to pose interpretive challenges: ones that, like the problems it represents in these books, require readers to attend carefully to what stands before them, despite having seen it many times before.

Today, Irish women writers do not lack for critical accolades when they use the stubborn mode, as evident in the Booker Prizes awarded to Enright’s The Gathering in 2007 and Anna Burns’s Milkman in 2018. The current enthusiasm for these authors and books has been enabled by recent structural changes supporting female artists more broadly: women have enhanced access to institutions that encourage them to produce, publish and promote their work; new technologies enable cheaper printing, targeted print runs and more expansive marketing strategies for lesser-known talents; gender equality initiatives, such as VIDA: Women in Literary Arts and Time’s Up, have pulled the spotlight to women artists internationally. As the most recent chapter in a long history of feminist literary activism, grassroots initiatives in Ireland such as Waking the Feminists and Fired! Irish Women Poets and the Canon have drawn global attention to the inequities that plague women theatre makers and poets. Marketing and celebrity have a role to play as well. Perhaps most notoriously, Rooney’s best-selling novels have been championed by millennial celebrities including Lena Dunham and Taylor Swift on platforms such as Instagram.

But we still have a long way to go. Women might be stubborn, but so too are the systems, beliefs and practices that seek to marginalise their achievements. For example, if the expansiveness of the ‘new modernisms’ as a critical approach created a pathway to take seriously the contributions of Irish women writers to the modernist tradition, current conceptions of the ‘global novel’ might threaten once again to erase their contributions, given that their fiction so often is focused tightly on the experiences of Irish women and set in the Republic or Northern Ireland. Yet to denigrate Irish fiction that piggybacks on familiar (and marketable) aspects of national identity, to denounce it because it focuses on characters who stay home and are plagued by the same old problems, and therefore seem untouched by certain contemporary crises, is to refuse to see how such labels elevate certain types of writers and subjects, and necessarily preclude others. That Irish women for so long fell victim to critical biases that charged them with parochialism or traditionalism or crass commercialism is troubling. That they now seem to be so neatly avoiding those same charges invites us to consider how and why this pattern changed. By turning to the past, Modernism in Irish Women’s Contemporary Writing: The Stubborn Mode documents aspects of the fascinating history that precipitated this dramatic transformation. But it also looks to the future by asking how we – as scholars, teachers and readers – might sustain the current momentum by identifying, calling out and seeking to solve the stubborn problems that thwart these writers and diminish their contributions.

Paige Reynolds

preynold@holycross.edu

[1] Tramp Press (@TrampPress), ‘Anne Enright: “since the crash a lot has been disrupted. There’s a resurgent modernism in writers like Eimear McBride and @emollientfibs”’, 8 March 2015, 11:23 a.m., tweet.

[2] Fredric Jameson, ‘Magical narratives: romance as genre’, New Literary History 7 (1) (autumn 1975), 135–63: 142.

[3] See Michael Kruse, ‘Nikki Haley is turning her biggest criticism into a campaign strategy’, Politico, 29 September 2023; Dylan Wells and Marianne LeVine, ‘Far behind Trump, Haley confronts prospect of first South Carolina loss’, Washington Post, 24 February 2024.

[4] Megan Specia, ‘Report gives glimpse into horrors of Ireland’s mother and baby homes’, New York Times, 12 January 2021.

[5] Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Mainie Jellett’, in Allan Hepburn (ed.), People, places, things: essays by Elizabeth Bowen (Edinburgh, 2008), 115–20: 116.

[6] Bowen, ‘Mainie Jellett’, 116.

[7] Bowen, ‘Mainie Jellett’, 117.

[8] Iris Murdoch, ‘The sublime and the good’, in Peter Conradi (ed.), Existentialists and mystics: writings on philosophy and literature (London, 1997), 205–20: 218.

[9] Thersites (Thomas Woods), ‘Private views’, Irish Times, 31 July 1954.

[10] John Corry, ‘About New York: an Irish view of city’s charms’, New York Times, 10 January 1975.

‘I’ve been made to understand that I don’t quite make the cut,’ announced Karyn Harty, a lawyer and partner at Denton’s Ireland. Along with Senator Malachai O’Hara, the leader of Northern Ireland’s Green Party, and Dr Una O’Neill, a GP partner at Mercer’s Medical Centre, Harty was asked to respond to the question: ‘When is othering an unwelcome act?’  

This question came with a slew of others posed by Mark Hennessy, the Ireland and Britain Editor of the Irish Times. Hennessy, Harty, O’Hara and O’Neill gathered in the meeting room of the Royal Irish Academy in Dublin on Thursday, 11 July for a panel titled ‘Northerners Not Welcome?’, meant to explore the lived experiences of Northerners (i.e. people born in Northern Ireland) living and working south of the border. The panel was hosted by the ARINS Project, a partnership between the University of Notre Dame’s Keough-Naughton Institute and the Royal Irish Academy.  

panellists in the Royal Irish Academy
L-R Karyn Harty, Mark Hennessy, Mal O'Hara, Una O'Neill

In the build-up to the 12th of July celebrations in Northern Ireland, an occasion on which massive bonfires are lit and loyalist bands march to their favorite tunes to celebrate the victory of Protestant King William of Orange at the Battle of the Boyne, one might expect a panel to delve into the ways division and sectarianism prevent Catholics or people from the South feeling welcome in the North. Instead, the ‘Northerners Not Welcome?’ panel forced audience members to turn the mirror inwards and look at the ways in which Northerners of every persuasion are made to feel othered or excluded in the Republic of Ireland.  

Chair Mark Hennessy kicked off the panel with the question ‘How often have you felt welcomed?’, to which the panelists unanimously answered ‘always’. Karyn Harty stated that ‘I’ve loved it here ever since I crossed.’ Similarly, Senator O’Hara claimed that he was ‘welcomed with open arms in the Oireachtas’. Una O’Neill offered a justification for any othering she experienced, saying ‘I didn’t know them either!’  

But beneath these unanimous declarations of comfort in the Republic, each Northerner noted moments in which they were made to feel as if they didn’t quite fit into the social fabric of their new home. Each speaker remarked that this feeling of ‘other’ didn’t just occur in the Republic of Ireland. Instead, it was the result of a seeming consensus that Northerners are an unknown entity to those who have never lived or interacted with people from the North.  

Dr O’Neill recounted an amusing story in which she worked as a 24-hour nurse for an English couple. Upon telling the family that she was from Northern Ireland, O’Neill watched as a flicker of uncertainty crossed their faces. She half-joked that the couple thought, ‘Oh gosh, they’ve sent me a terrorist!’  

In response to the title of the day’s event, Senator O’Hara remarked that he has never felt that Northerners are not welcome. Instead, he posed the alliterative alternative ‘Northerners are Not Known.’ It is from the multifaceted identity that Northerners hold as a result of the Troubles that O’Hara, and later the other two speakers, felt that they donned such an unusual status.  

Karyn Harty noted that human beings have a strong desire to exist in binaries. But being a Northerner means that one does not fit into the binary that has been established on the island of Ireland. Many of the speakers themselves hold seemingly contrasting identity traits. Harty revealed that she is a Presbyterian, nationalist, Gaeilgeoir.  

Despite, or perhaps because of, Northerners’ fluid identity, each speaker noted instances in which people from the South tried to box them into a single identity trait. Harty recalled being asked what her father did for work by a colleague in the South. In her eyes, it was a firm and forward attempt to categorise her: ‘People here like to place you into the square mile of land you are from.’ O’Hara noted that Northerners too try to delineate each other, but in a much more subtle fashion: ‘When you meet other Northerners, we do the little dance of sorting each other’s identity.’  

a man and a women speaking on a panel
Mal O'Hara and Una O'Neill

Boldly, O’Hara claimed that attempting to categorise others meant ‘something about jockeying for a hierarchical position with someone’. In the South, knowing what someone’s father did for work might delineate the person’s social class. Class, as the speakers went on to discuss, had as much to do with their feeling of being a Northern ‘other’ as religion or culture did.  

It was here that O’Hara joked that his strong Belfast accent meant that many of the staff in the Oireachtas assumed he was a ‘Shinner’ (i,e. a member of the nationalist political party Sinn Féin). In response, Una O’Neill offered that class plays a massive part in accent, which in turn plays a major role in how people perceive one another.  

Moving from this discussion on class, the speakers began to exchange narratives from their childhood, such as whether the television channel BBC was seen to be ‘posh’ or not. Harty recalled the ways her mother ascribed particular bad behaviours to watching certain television channels. Noting the connection that the speakers made to their families, Hennessy astutely asked, ‘What do you say to your family and friends when you go back North and, just as importantly, what do they say to you?’ Candidly, Una O’Neill replied, ‘It doesn’t come up.’ 

O’Neill then followed, ‘My relations from Derry just think they’re Irish and it doesn’t occur to them that they’re not as Irish as they think they are.’ Upon reflection, this declaration offered an interesting lens into the way she has been made to feel in the Republic. Though she has lived in the South for the greater part of her life and is a passport-holding Irish person, she maintains the sentiment that she does not feel fully Irish. Karyn Harty echoed that sentiment: ‘I’ve been made to understand that I don’t quite make the cut.’ 

Whether it be their accent or some other undefined cultural characteristic, all three speakers noted that there was an intangible element to their identity that prevented them from being ‘100% Irish’, if there even is such a thing. So, though the speakers began with the sentiment that they have never felt unwelcome, their answers did not mean that they felt fully Irish either. Holding such a fluid identity status, the panelists seemingly exist in a limbo state between Irish and Northern Irish.  

Closing out the session, Hennessy asked the panelists whether or not they supported a unity referendum. In reply, O’Neill returned to a common theme in her responses: relationships. In reference to Northern Ireland unionists, she claimed ‘If you don’t feel seen, you don’t feel welcome.’ Perhaps that statement was more than a comment on the potential referendum. In any case, O’Neill was decided in her opinion that unionists must feel represented in any future of Ireland.  

Similarly, O’Hara noted that ‘We need to have a rational, long conversation about what a united Ireland looks like.’ The ‘ground is moving’, said the senator, and DUP politicians need to make a plan for a shifting version of Ireland. O’Hara argued that DUP members can be pragmatic and engage in potential plans for a united Ireland without conceding any ideological ground. Otherwise, the Green Party senator claimed that they ‘may be left behind’. 

11/07/24 Northerners not welcome? ARINS, in association with the Irish Times at the Royal Irish Academy. Mark Hennessy, Britain and Ireland editor at the Irish Times, chaired an exploration of the experiences of Northerners working and living south of the border, with Karyn Harty, Partner at Dentons Ireland; native of Carrickfergus, Co. Antrim, Malachai O'Hara, Leader of the Green Party Northern Ireland and a Senator in the Oireachtas; Belfast native and Una O'Neill, a Derry-born GP partner at Mercer's Medical Centre. Photo: Johnny Bambury-no reproduction fee

Karyn Harty, relying on her law background, returned to the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) of 1998. Harty noted that those in the middle ground, those that did not fit into the binary of unionist or nationalist, were left behind in the GFA. In a potentially united Ireland, Harty made the case for the support and amplification of so-called middle grounders.  

It was on that note that Hennessy turned the microphone over to audience members for questions. For anyone watching, the most interesting thing about the Q&A portion was the lack of questions. In lieu of questioning the panelists on their previous statements or opinions, audience members instead felt the need to share their own experiences of being Northerners in the South. One woman told an amusing anecdote about moving from the North to the South in the 1970s and having a priest forcibly try to bless her new home. She is in fact not a Catholic nor even religious at all.  

What stood out from these audience narratives was the fact that each person stated they resonated with panelists’ interviews. They felt both seen and heard by Mark Hennessy, Karyn Harty, Mal O’Hara and Una O’Neill. 

Karyn Harty and Mark Hennessy

—

 

Clodagh McEvoy-Johnston is a global affairs and peace studies major with a minor in civil and human rights, studying at the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. During her summer internship with the ARINS Project, as part of the Dublin Global Gateway Internship Program, she attended the ‘Northerners Not Welcome?’ panel.

Labour’s victory in the British general election has already shown signs of a reset in British–Irish relations, with early contact between the two governments and a date set for a meeting between the prime minister and the Irish taoiseach. The structural challenges facing Keir Starmer will, however, not be easily resolved. He has so strongly ruled out any prospect of the UK rejoining not only the EU itself but also the Single Market that tensions on EU–UK trade will continue, and with them the GB–Northern Ireland ‘sea border’.

In Northern Ireland, the results confirmed that post-Brexit political shifts are continuing and have not yet reached a new steady state. Sinn Féin, despite standing aside for the Alliance Party in three constituencies and the SDLP in one, still emerged as by far the largest party in Northern Ireland, now at all three levels of government – local, NI Assembly and Westminster. Sinn Féin increased its vote share by 4.2 percentage points over the 2019 Westminster election, and none of its constituencies could now be termed marginal. It failed to capture East Derry from the DUP by only 179 votes, while Fermanagh and South Tyrone – once the UK’s most marginal seat – now seems relatively safe for the party. The SDLP may be content with holding its two seats, but has seen its vote fall again – by almost 4 percentage points since 2019. Claire Hanna seems safe in South Belfast but John Hume’s old seat in Foyle is now more marginal than Fermanagh and South Tyrone, and will be a very winnable Sinn Féin target next time.

The post-Brexit growth in support for Alliance has reversed, with a drop of almost 2 percentage points to 15 per cent. Victory in Lagan Valley was offset by the loss of North Down by a significant margin, and party leader Naomi Long did not come close to winning back her former seat in East Belfast from the DUP. As Brendan O’Leary has frequently pointed out, we do not have a 40:40:20 split of opinion in NI – more like 42:42:16.

The DUP made headlines as the big losers in this election – losing three seats, one each to Alliance, the Ulster Unionists and the Traditional Unionists. Ian Paisley losing his seat made headlines, but East Antrim and East Derry are also now very marginal, to Sinn Féin and Alliance respectively. Three of NI’s top four most marginal seats are held by the DUP. The difficulty for the DUP is that it faces challenges in every political direction. If it collapses power-sharing again, or adopts more conservative unionist positions to win back TUV votes, it will lose just as many seats, perhaps more, to Alliance and the UUP.

Post-Brexit, there is no majority in Northern Ireland for an anti-EU, socially conservative, anti-power-sharing unionist party. The DUP with that stance may win back many TUV voters, but if such a party is solidified as the dominant voice of unionism, it risks further increasing the proportion of middle–ground voters who are willing to support Irish unity as a means of rejoining the EU, creating some political stability and growing the NI economy. Calls for ‘unionist unity’ inside a single party will have little appeal for many young voters from unionist family backgrounds if the price they have to pay is hostility to the EU, the LGBT community, abortion rights, etc.

Unionism now hovers between 43 per cent and 40 per cent support, depending on the electoral system used in a given vote. To defeat an almost inevitable future referendum on Irish unity (at some stage), it needs to win a clear majority of those currently voting Alliance (or not voting at all). That requires an appeal to more liberal, pro-EU voters, for whom a traditional call, based only on hostility to the South, will have little chance of success.

Some progressive unionist voices are hopeful that a Labour government in London will increase public spending at an overall UK level and that improved public services and/or economic growth in Northern Ireland will strength pro-Union opinion among the undecided. It may do, but the route to such growth and improved public services across the UK is not clear. Labour has ruled out increasing any of the main sources of taxation – income tax, national insurance, VAT and corporation tax. It has also committed to reducing the large fiscal deficit that it inherited from the Tories. Only strong economic growth can allow it to improve public services without increasing taxes or borrowing, and outside of the Single Market that may not be forthcoming. Many of its newly secured seats are the result of a Tory–Reform divide, while parliament/Senedd elections in Scotland and Wales will provide a 2026 mid-term test outside of England. In those circumstances, a recalculation of UK public expenditure rules to more accurately reflect Northern Ireland’s level of underdevelopment may be modest in terms of what additional public expenditure is possible in Northern Ireland.

 

Professor John Doyle

Dublin City University

Editor, Irish Studies in International Affairs

Ben Lowry, Editor of the long-running Northern newspaper The News Letter, has always admired journalists who keep their political views to themselves. He might have remained such a journalist – ‘you know, when you don’t know what their thoughts are?’ But he made a ‘conscious decision’ after he became Deputy Editor in 2013 to reveal his politics in columns. The reason for this? ‘There is a lot of bias against unionism and I felt it needed help in defending its position,’ he explained in the RIA Dawson Street on Monday, 29 April at a public interview as part of the ARINS My Identity series.

Lowry was interviewed by Professor Colin Graham of Maynooth University in a room filled with political enthusiasts eager to hear his insights. (The interview ended with an audience Q&A and ARINS writers caught up with Lowry afterwards. These conversations form the basis of this article).


L-R: Professor Colin Graham and Ben Lowry

Lowry has worked for 17 years in The News Letter, the world’s oldest English language daily, founded in 1737. He joined as News Editor and became the paper’s Deputy Editor in 2013. Editor since 2021, with a close understanding of the paper’s readership, which on Saturdays is a print sale of approaching 20,000, we thought he was well placed to answer questions of identity expression and identity promotion that concern the ARINS project, and in the course of the afternoon he offered the audience an impassioned and sometimes trenchant sense of what it means to be unionist today.

As a history enthusiast, he takes a long view of politics in Northern Irish society. He said he is the only editor, perhaps in the world, to have run an On This Day 275 Years Ago and 280 Years Ago daily column because no other daily newspaper is old enough to have done so, except a German language paper. He did this using The News Letter‘s archives, which stretch back almost 300 years.

Among ‘random incredible stuff’, from early 1738 and 1739, reports on Jonathan Swift in Dublin, and what he believes would have been The News Letter’s reports on Handel’s Messiah in 1742 (but papers from that year are lost), he pieced together for the RIA audience a picture of what seemed to be a basic Ulster society in the 1730s but by the 1780s had become a flourishing society, around the time of the revolutions in America and France and before the attempted Irish revolution of 1798. ‘You see the foundations of your society,’ he said. Lowry also said that much later, in the early 1900s, ‘you could see the complacency of a privileged community that led to its near ruin.’

He was fortunate that his own upbringing was not one affected by sectarian violence, but he did have early memories of army checkpoints in the mid 1970s. Born in Portland, Maine, in 1971, his parents, both medics from Northern Ireland, returned to Belfast to raise their four children in 1974. This was just after the height of the Troubles. ‘But they thought it was solved, because of Sunningdale’, he said with a heavy dose of irony, referring to the attempt at power-sharing hashed out by the British and Irish governments in December 1973, an agreement which broke down in part due to unionist opposition.

British, Northern Irish, Protestant Irish, Scots Irish – these are some of the identities he felt aligned with growing up in Bangor in Co. Down, in a house along the coast where, on a clear day, you could see Scotland.

An avid follower of politics at Sullivan and then Campbell College in Belfast, he said that he later came to feel that even in those schools he had been taught what he described as an ‘anti-British’ history, when they used the Northern Ireland Board rather than the Oxford and Cambridge Board’s History syllabus. While at Campbell he cultivated the unusual habit of buying The Guardian and in his late teens espoused a left-wing nationalist ideology almost unheard of among his peers.

But his politics, and his understanding of faith, have shifted and evolved during a career that took him from qualifying as a Barrister at Law in London, to News International in London, working on The Sun and The Times, and later The Belfast Telegraph. He has come to appreciate the importance of Britain as a world power, and what he sees a its fiscal generosity and ‘gentleness’ towards terrorism in Northern Ireland. That he became more unionist than his parents was partly in response to what he described as ‘the scale of Irish nationalism and the feeble response of unionism. I developed not only a liking of it but a disliking of the maligning of it’.

‘There is a triumphant and aggressive nationalism on the island,’ he said. Appalled at the ‘bombing, murder and mayhem’ of the Troubles, he felt that unionism had suffered from this complacency and lack of leadership. A watershed moment for Lowry is the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985. He describes something of a ‘unionist nirvana’ before October 1985, the month before the British and Irish governments made a deal which, he said, was a ‘seminal disaster for unionists’, a form of ‘betrayal’ of unionism which has continued, in Lowry’s view, to the present day (he added that he is usually wary of using the word betrayal).

When asked about the nature of the state in Northern Ireland from partition to the beginning of the Troubles, Lowry recognised that there was some active sectarianism and discrimination but suggests that it has been grossly overplayed.


Ben Lowry

‘Complacency’ is term he often used about unionism in this period and later. So, for example, he thinks that unionism was complacent about the potential of the Independence referendum in Scotland in 2014. There was ‘no interest in it. We tried to generate interest in it in the paper.’ Similarly with the Brexit vote in 2016: ‘There was no real thinking about it, no thinking about the perils’. In August 2016, he published an editorial on Brexit with the headline ‘Despite what supporters of Brexit say, it might just blow the UK apart’. And while he predicted then that Brexit might ‘blow the UK to smithereens’ he is more optimistic today.

While suggesting that ‘Brexit could have led to much greater bitterness on both sides’ he argues that the fall-out of the Brexit vote, via the Protocol and the Windsor Framework, has done damage to Northern Ireland’s place in the Union. He added to this his view that ‘the IRA through all its different tactics were unable to do what Brexit has done in disrupting internal UK trade’.

Does he have insights into what unionism might offer to a younger generation? ‘The maintenance of a connection to one of the wealthiest countries on earth. Unionism is a very important tradition on this island that should not be ignored.’ And looking into the future of unionist politics he agrees that the current situation is almost impossible to extrapolate into the future. Thinking about whether there might be a realignment in the unionist political parties, Lowry recalls an interview one of his fellow school pupils did with then UUP leader Jim Molyneaux, in which Molyneaux was asked whether unionism would be better served by one unified political party than the then two. Molyneaux suggested that if there was only one party then in fact there would be three unionist parties because the liberals and hardliners would both break away.

For Lowry there will always need to be two – one party which works pragmatically, one which is able to say no. He gave a sense of both why unionism sometimes fails to act pragmatically and why it needs to be able to say no.

Lowry is a newspaper man in a digital era with print readers of all newspapers dropping fast and digital not yet rising fast enough to counter that. His concerns were clear: ‘Newspapers are on life support.’

But it is not declining as badly as he feared. Ten years ago, he admitted, ‘I didn’t think I’d still be here. I was thinking of exit strategies.’ He added that the rate of decline has lessened and many people still value a printed newspaper.

One of the key challenges is getting younger readers to pay for quality journalism – which they will do, he said with confidence: ‘Because they will be old one day soon as well.’


L-R: Pauric Dempsey, Ben Lowry, Colin Graham

How does it feel to wear a jersey representing a place, an affiliation and a culture which is foreign to you? One sportsman who is well placed to reflect on the formation of identity is Pat Fenlon, a former midfielder who, during his playing career, made the unique move to cross the border and a sectarian divide to play for Linfield F.C. in Belfast. Fenlon is now Director of Football at Bohemians F.C. in Phibsboro, the oldest League of Ireland football club, founded in 1890.

In a public interview as part of the ARINS My Identity Series in the RIA at lunchtime on Wednesday, 17 April 2024, Fenlon reflected on his experience of playing for Linfield F.C. in Belfast. He told interviewer, Professor Colin Graham of Maynooth University:

‘Sport is a great leveller of people. What I found [moving to Belfast, in 1994] was that all these lads were the same as me. There was no difference between us and there was a common goal – to win football. You had to respect everybody whether it was their politics or religion.’

Closeup of Pat Fenlon speaking to Colin Graham on stage.
L-R: Colin Graham, Pat Fenlon, Photo: Kelan Molloy/JBambury Photo

Born in Ballymun in north Dublin in 1969, Fenlon grew up in Finglas South, attending a primary school where soccer ‘wasn’t allowed’ and the hurling was, he laughs, ‘rough’. He moved on to Patrician College in Finglas, whose former pupils included the legendary player Ronnie Whelan, and where he was able to pay more attention to his football than his academic studies. At seventeen, after the Inter Cert, Fenlon went to London to play a trial game for Chelsea. ‘The game didn’t go very well,’ he recalled. ‘We were beaten 10–1 by Tottenham, but I scored the only goal.’ Fenlon talked about the excitement and the anxiety of being a young Irish man alone in London in the 1980s; being homesick and occasionally treated with suspicion and yet loving the city and playing football.

Returning from London, Fenlon joined what he fondly remembers as a ‘group of rejects’ at St Patrick’s Athletic under the management of Brian Kerr. An immensely successful League of Ireland career with St Pat’s, where he won the League, and Bohemians, where he was a cup winner and PFAI Player of the Year, came to an end when a new manager arrived at Bohs and Fenlon went in search of a new challenge. The approach from Linfield came, as Fenlon quipped, ‘out of the blue’, taking League of Ireland football by surprise. He had been ‘a little bit disillusioned’ towards the end of 1993 before he made this ‘high-profile and peculiar move’. Footballers from south of the border were playing for other Irish League teams in the North, but Linfield were the biggest club in the League and their reputation and history as a club representing Loyalism meant that Fenlon’s move was particularly controversial.

Asked how he handled the transition, Fenlon described a mixed reaction in his native Dublin:

‘I got more stick in Dublin for playing for Linfield than I did in Belfast. I was unique in that I got often called both a ‘Loyalist b****** and a ‘Fenian b******* on the same day.’

Sport is ‘a social glue and/or social toxin’, write ARINS contributors Katie Liston and Joseph Maguire in their insightful essay on sport. For Fenlon, football is a leveller of identity, both for fans and for supporters. ‘Football fans just want their team to be successful. They don’t care who you are or what you are, what your background or religion or your identity is.’ ‘If you’re successful you become one of their own,’ added Graham.

Fenlon recalled that his early weeks with Linfield were blighted by injury and when he did first get playing time he was slow to integrate into the team. But a few matches in, having started the game he was substituted. Linfield booed him coming off, but the realisation that they were booing because they wanted him kept on the field was the moment he knew they had accepted him. Though they did, comically, change his name. ‘They didn’t want to call me Pat, Paddy or Patrick,’ he laughs. So they called him Billy. To this day, Fenlon says, when he returns to Linfield, he is universally referred to as Billy Fenlon. And in the changing room, he says, apart from some banter, ‘my experience is that identity is not something we discuss as players or managers. I wanted to play football, I wanted to be successful, and Linfield gave me the best chance to do this.’

View from the crowd of Colin Graham in conversation with Pat Fenlon.
L-R: Colin Graham, Pat Fenlon Photo: Kelan Molloy/JBambury Photo

A 24-year old Fenlon had moved north in early 1994, just ahead of the IRA ceasefire. Linfield were a part-time team at the time and trained twice a week, in the evenings, and played on Saturdays. Fenlon’s cross-border experience was very much resonant of the time. Living in Dublin, but playing in Belfast, his journeys were interrupted by bomb scares on the train line, and on Saturdays he travelled with a group of other players from Dublin who had signed to Irish League teams. The Linfield kitman was assigned to collect Fenlon from Newry and drive him to and from the train station, to be sure he arrived safely at practice and matches. It was a ‘sheltered’ time, he recalled: ‘They looked after me tremendously well.’

When his playing career was finished Fenlon had an extremely successful managerial career, winning trophies and taking Shelbourne further in the Champions League than any other League of Ireland team has gone before or since. A spell as manager of Hibernian in Edinburgh showed him football at an even more elevated level, in a city where it is the foremost sport and the team’s performance is under constant media scrutiny. Being Irish was neither a help or hindrance to management of a club traditionally associated with the city’s Irish population, Fenlon noting that the rivalry between ‘Hearts and Hibs’ is probably less based on sectarian grounds than it is with the big two Glasgow clubs. ‘Hibs fans hate Rangers and Celtic’, he wryly told us.

In recent years Fenlon has developed the Director of Football role both within the Irish League and the League of Ireland. Going back to Linfield in 2018 as General Manager was much less controversial than his 1994 move. ‘Nobody batted an eyelid. The times had changed.’ This managerial role gave him a new perspective on football as a business, and here Linfield’s heritage, and its structure, present an interesting problem. Linfield is owned by its members. Other clubs in the Irish League are not fan-owned and they can benefit from injections of investment cash from individuals who buy all or part of the club. Linfield’s structure does not allow for this and so other income streams are needed. But Fenlon noted that it is occasionally difficult to persuade sponsors to come on board with Linfield, given their political associations. This is in contrast to his current club, Bohemians F.C. Bohs is also fan-owned and its current success has involved creating a strong community base. While Bohs was recently referred to in the Irish Times as a ‘hipsters’ paradise’ in a profile of Fenlon, he is proud that Bohs home games are now regularly sold out.

Irish football had been partitioned since the 1920s, but Fenlon’s cross-border experience in football, allied with his responsibility for the financial health of clubs in both leagues, means that he is very open to the development of new football competitions involving teams from across the island. He noted that the women’s game in Ireland currently has such a competition. Fenlon’s experience is that those who love football – players and fans – have a passion for the sport which will allow them traverse traditional boundaries of political identity.

Colin Graham and Pat Fenlon pose for a photo together on the RIA staircase.
L-R: Colin Graham, Pat Fenlon Photo: Kelan Molloy/JBambury Photo

The ‘My Identity’ conversation series is an initiative of the ARINS project. This series seeks to understand the diverse identities and traditions on the island of Ireland and how they are understood, felt, expressed and promoted. The next event is taking place on Monday, 29 April. Find out more

The ARINS project is a joint project of the Keough Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame and the Royal Irish Academy.

Abstract

This article investigates cross-border engagement between women’s organisations and other groups working on gender equality policy. It draws on interviews with activists and practitioners and two seminars—one in Belfast and one in Dublin. It is set in the context of the post-Brexit debate on the future of the island of Ireland, and the international Women, Peace and Security agenda’s emphasis on the role of women and the centrality of a gender equality perspective to peacebuilding. Participants had very positive attitudes to cross-border collaboration, but in practice there was very little cross-border engagement between groups, and this lack of activity predates Brexit. The key barriers to cross-border work were perceived to be post-Brexit political turmoil, a lack of appropriate funding and a lack of knowledge of policy differences between the two jurisdictions. Participants had very little knowledge of the ‘other’ jurisdiction and their views were strongly shaped by historic stereotypes.

Introduction

The international research on United Nations Security Council Resolution (UNSCR) 1325 on the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda demonstrates that a focus on gender equality in peace processes, and in the negotiated outcomes of those processes, is an important factor in ensuring effective conflict resolution and also successful political transitions. This is based on evidence that women as community activists and civil society representatives are more willing to take part in cross-community engagement than elected representatives, and therefore they are important actors if the goal is to reach out to and engage with diverse communities that otherwise would be underrepresented in the major political and policy debates.1 In the current contexts of debates on the future of the island of Ireland, this aspect of the public engagement of women’s organisations and community groups takes on a particular relevance, not just for cross-border cooperation but also for cross-community engagement in Northern Ireland, which is also a key part of building a peaceful future for the island. The policy agenda on gender equality is an area of cross-community and cross-border cooperation that has not been sufficiently well developed. This policy area provides a point of entry for women’s organisations into wider debates on political and policy change, while providing an essential element to these debates. Crucially, it also mainstreams gender issues and gender equality into the debates on the future of the island.

Read on muse

ARINS research is published open access in Irish Studies in International Affairs and can be read on Muse.

Irish Studies in International Affairs has been published since 1979 as the leading Irish-based, peer-reviewed, journal in the discipline, with an increasing international reputation and circulation. Each issue includes contributions on a special theme and other original articles related to Ireland and international affairs broadly defined, to include issues such as development aid, conflict resolution, trade and human rights.

Pictured l-r: Eileen Connolly Tajma Kapic, John Doyle

A man sits alone at a communal meeting table, playing the flute (Figure 1). The walls are bare and sparse. He looks as if he is remembering more than just the tune he’s playing. This is one of a series of similar images from Brian Newman’s new photobook entitled Association. Newman’s project began when, working as a news cameraman, he visited the site of Inverhall Orange Hall in 2011 on the day it had been burnt down in an arson attack. That day he photographed the remnants of the hall with two women looking in through the windows. There was clearly something about the women’s position outside the building, the event of the fire, and the scorched darkness visible through the windows of the building that piqued Newman’s interest, because he then dedicated himself to making a carefully crafted photographic study of Orange Halls along the border region.

Figure 1

The usefulness of the Orange Order’s role in helping us understand contemporary loyalism and unionism was highlighted recently in the fallout within unionism over the DUP’s decision to return to the Assembly and Executive. Rev. Mervyn Gibson, the Order’s Grand Secretary, came out early to back the deal that the DUP had come to with the British Government via the ‘Safeguarding the Union’ Command Paper, describing it as ‘a win for unionist determination and unity’. At the same time, Rev. Gibson tried to anticipate the dissent that he knew would follow the deal, arguing that unionism should ‘not turn a significant victory into a defeat’.(1) As it happened, the first organised event protesting against the deal occurred in an Orange Hall in the village of Moygashel, County Tyrone. And three days after reporting on Gibson’s support for the deal, Suzanne Breen of the Belfast Telegraph was quoting an anonymous member of the Order, well versed in the rhetoric of the deal’s opponents, who was warning that Gibson’s support for the deal was premature.(2) The Orange Order’s official newsletter, Orange Standard, meanwhile, was non-committal, with Grand Master Most Wor. Bro. Edward Stevenson acknowledging receipt of the Command Paper and saying it needed ‘careful consideration’.(3)

This division in the Orange Order situates itself precisely at the fundamental dilemma, between pragmatism and dogmatism, faced by unionism now. That, in order to set up acceptance of the deal, DUP leader Jeffrey Donaldson felt the need to state a commitment to the principle of devolved government (in the Northern Ireland [Executive Formation] Bill debate on 24 January 2024: ‘To be absolutely clear, the Democratic Unionist Party supports devolution’ (4)), shows the post-Brexit state of disarray in which unionism has found itself. In the debate in the Commons on ‘Safeguarding the Union’, Donaldson tried to regather unionism to, as former secretary of state Julian Smith put it, make ‘Northern Ireland a success’ (5); a sentiment—that effective devolved government is the way to secure support for the Union—that is a long way from the rhetoric of those associated with the anti-Protocol and anti-Windsor Framework factions of unionism with whom Donaldson had shared a platform in April 2022.

The predicament that unionism finds itself in post-Brexit is an intensified version of the unsettled sense of its future that it has had since at least the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985)—looking to restate and reinforce Northern Ireland’s Britishness but unsure if the ‘Britain’ that unionism attaches itself to recognises unionism’s very own version of Britishness. Unionism and loyalism will continue to be pulled between these forces: the defiance of the anti-Protocol faction, led by TUV MLA Jim Allister and loyalist blogger Jamie Bryson, on the one hand and, on the other, the attempt, currently represented by Donaldson’s acceptance of the Safeguarding the Union deal, to ‘make Northern Ireland work’. In his passionately sympathetic account of interviews with members of the Independent Orange Order, James Wilson notes that ‘Independent Orangeism’s Northern Ireland is an idealised 1950s historical theme park’ (6) and certainly this is one possible outcome of the strain caused by these forces and choices—a kind of impotent benign nostalgia that hopes to see a supposedly amenable past erupting into and replacing the unsettled present. The Orange Order’s role in unionism’s current dynamic is probably not crucial to the new Executive’s political success (though, as McAuley et al. point out, ‘Orangeism remains bigger than the formal membership of the Orange Order’ (7) and is thus influential in unionism in a way that is disproportionate to the falling numbers of its membership). However, as unionism reorients itself after the DUP’s return to Stormont, the Orange Order will remain a kind of weather station for unionism, where the temperature can be taken and from which future atmospherics can be projected.

The Orange Order member who sits at the table in Brain Newman’s photograph, playing his flute, as with the rest of Newman’s work in Association, is the epitome of the state of confusion and uncertainty (and potential entropy) that unionism faces. In the inscrutability of this man’s gaze (into the future or the past?) is the quandary of unionism and the Orange Order. This is mirrored by the photographer’s difficulty in seeing inside the heritage, thinking and everyday existence of Orangeism—a difficulty that is deliberately integrated into the aesthetics of the images in Association.

Figure 2

It was perhaps this sense that the Orange Order is both out-of-time and significant that led Brian Newman to begin a photographic project about the Order, and perhaps this is why his final manifestation of that project is, in effect, a journey inside its fabric. His book begins with the exteriors of Orange Halls and enters those spaces, gradually and tentatively, in the company of those who care for the buildings.

The prefatory image in the book is of a bench and a hedge (Figure 2) and is a distillation of what is to follow. The bench in the image is slightly decayed; the hedge, in the form of a barrier and boundary marker, is unkempt; the tarmac on the ground is mossed. This photograph, then, sets the tone for Association—the Orange Order, as seen here, rests on a desire for certainty, for solid and knowable patterns, but is currently, in an understated way, overwhelmed and unable to keep its physical (and, perhaps, ideological) structures in a state of ‘order’.

Newman’s photographic approach to the Orange Order is intimate and empathetically analytical. He does not intrude or interpret. He offers up a close (but not close-up) portrait of an institution. His photographic style sits between art photography and documentary photography in a way that has a clear lineage in recent decades in Northern Ireland. (8) It is a mode of photography that allows for a long, slow look at things, and in which the physical textures of objects, landscapes and materials become meaningful. Most obviously, this is undramatic photography. We might think of the Orange Order primarily through its parades—public, colourful, performative acts of celebration and heritage, or triumphalism and intimidation, depending on one’s viewpoint. In Newman’s work the colour and bombast have been drained, so that the images are dominated by the grey and the drab—the concrete of the car park, the rendering on the wall, the industrial steel of the shipping container. And the lines where these dullnesses meet draw the eye to the banal—a perhaps symbolic closed door and a barrier (Figure 3).

Figure 3

The exteriors of Orange Halls, as seen by Newman, are austere and often securitised with lights and alarms. For all its public swagger on the Twelfth, the Orange Order in the border counties has a long (and recent) history of feeling under threat from its surroundings. (The final image in Association is of a member of the Order locking the gates outside Fawney Orange Hall, near Lisnaskea in Co Fermanagh—the Hall there has been burned down twice in its history and was most recently attacked in 2013, when it was broken into and vandalised. (9)) Therefore an image of a member of the Order opening a door for, as it were, Newman’s camera to enter, has a particular resonance. (Figure 4) It is a reminder of the need for security, and of the challenges that the Order presents to others and feels are directed towards it. Again Newman’s careful photography underlines this fraught caution—the viewpoint in the image means that the actual unlocking of the door is hidden.

Figure 4

Once he is inside the Orange Halls, this sense of discretion and guardedness is constantly repeated in the gestures that Newman’s portraiture chooses to show. The men (they are all men) who let him into these institutions are seen primarily as caretakers; opening curtains, tidying things away, making preparations (Figure 5). In this context a photograph as apparently ordinary as that of two institutionally comfortable chairs with a radiator behind them and a tablecloth in front of them takes on a resonance because we look at it for longer than usual and try to place it in the sequence of images. The expectations of this specific setting are that there will be a communal gathering and that business will be done. And yet the interiors of the Halls in Association are continually and melancholically empty, always being prepared for use by their caretakers, but never actually in use.

Figure 5

The Orange Halls in Association are clearly places where ‘community’ is meant to happen. The series of images is not devoid of politics—Queen Elizabeth II’s portrait appears in one image, as does an Orange banner in just one photograph. But so does a Cornetto ice-cream fridge. And the interiors of these Orange Halls are places of performance—there are signs of musical performance (including a cowboy hat), singing, playing the flute, preaching, and there are carefully tended stages. But this is mostly a very different type of performance—intimate, social—than that of the parades that we normally associate with the Orange Order.

Perhaps the most significant thing about Newman’s work here is that there are no face-on portraits. All the men are seen from the back or from the side. We see them accidentally, as if they are busy or shy. The effect is to make this inside view of the Orange Order remain partial and to reaffirm that what it represents is not fully seen here. And that leaves us with a question about how much we know about the lives, motivations and futures of the people we see in these images, and the ideas and affiliations that they represent. As the series of photographs leaves the Orange Halls towards the end of the book and returns to the outdoors, there are images of the countryside surrounding the Halls in the border region. But these are not sweeping landscape views. They are stifled and enclosed and often, as in the image of the telegraph pole, visually split down the centre. (Figure 6)

The banality of these photographs is their point, since what lies inside the Orange Halls is very ordinary. In that, Association is a chance to pause and think about the politics that surfaces through the images; the religiosity, which is apparent occasionally; the loyalty, of those who attend these Halls, to what the British royal family means to them; the relationship of those who move in and then out of Hall to the border landscape outside.

Figure 6

The real or potential isolation of loyalism, which is empathetically imagined in Newman’s work, has perhaps no better recent political expression than during Jamie Bryson’s oral evidence to the House of Commons Northern Ireland Affairs Committee in October 2023. After some tetchy exchanges with the Chair and two other Conservative members of the committee (including former lord high chancellor Sir Robert Buckland) about Bryson’s bona fides in speaking for loyalism and his legal views on the Protocol, Carla Lockhart, DUP MP for Upper Bann, began her questions to Mr Bryson with a complaint:

Sadly, for any loyalist watching these proceedings, I think they will see the hostility in which the loyalist voice is held by the Government of this land.(10)

The ‘sadly’ here is meant as a rhetorical rebuke to the committee and to the British government, but it also captures something of that sense of the separation from Britishness, as it currently exits, from unionism: something that has haunted, bedevilled and caught out unionism throughout the Brexit process. It is perhaps this too that Newman manages to distil in these photographs in Association—the uncertainty that comes from a sense of abandonment and the misapprehension of those to whom you feel you should be close to and understood by. In aesthetically depicting and creating the interiority of this feeling within unionism/loyalism, Newman allows us to see and think, via his aesthetic care and consideration, about the future for these people and the ideas they live by.

Brian Newman’s Association is published by PhotoMuseum Ireland and can be purchased in the PhotoMuseum Ireland Shop in Meeting House Square, Temple Bar, Dublin or at https://shop.photomuseumireland.ie/products/association-by-brian-newman

Colin Graham is Professor of English at Maynooth University and author of Northern Ireland: Thirty Years of Photography (2013).

1 Suzanne Breen, ‘Orange Order grand secretary backs Donaldson’s deal as “a win for unionist determination and unity”’, Belfast Telegraph,

2 February 2024. 2 Suzanne Breen, ‘Orange Order Grand Secretary’s backing of Union deal may backfire on him: Grand Lodge member’, Belfast Telegraph, 5 February 2024.

3 ‘Safeguarding the Union’, Orange Standard, February 2024, 1.

4 ‘I simply say to my fellow Unionists in Northern Ireland, whatever their political persuasion or background, that the notion that a Unionism that turns in on itself is a Unionism that can deliver for Northern Ireland, to make Northern Ireland work and to secure the Union for the future, is not the way to go.’ Hansard, 24 January 2024, cols 329, 331–2.

5 Hansard, 1 February 2024, col. 1042.

6 In Senator Mark Daly, Unionist concerns & fears of a United Ireland: based on the recommendation of the report by the Joint Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the Good Friday Agreement (n.d.), 40–1, available at: https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/issues/politics/docs/govirl/Daly_2019-07-18_Unionist-Concerns.pdf (14 February 2024).

7 James W. McAuley, Jonathan Tonge and Andrew Mycock, Loyal to the core? Orangeism and Britishness in Northern Ireland (Dublin, 2011), 192.

8 Newman attended photography classes taught by Paul Seawright, one of the most prominent Northern Irish art photographers of the past 30 years, who also made work about the Orange Order in 1991: see Paul Seawright (Salamanca, 2000). For more see Colin Graham, Northern Ireland: 30 Years of photography (Belfast, 2013) and Declan Long, Ghost-haunted land: contemporary art and post-Troubles Northern Ireland (Manchester, 2017).

9 ‘Orange Hall targeted in sectarian attack’, BBC News, 14 September 2013.

10 Northern Ireland Affairs Committee, ‘Oral evidence: Effect of paramilitary activity and organised crime on society in Northern Ireland’, HC 24, 17 October 2023, Q543, available at: https://committees.parliament.uk/oralevidence/13684/pdf/ (14 February 2024).

‘Fear is a huge thing. A lot of us hold back on what could be our true potential through fear. But we all have a story to tell. The risk is in thinking we’re not saying anything of value. You could have something extraordinary to say that’s ordinary to you.’ Visual artist Colin Davidson made brave links between the political and the personal at Part I of the ARINS ‘My Identity’ conversation series, which took place at lunchtime on Friday 1 March in the Royal Irish Academy on Dawson Street, Dublin.

Image 1: L-R: Colin Graham, Colin Davidson

Davidson, who is Chancellor of Ulster University and a painter perhaps best known for his virtuoso, star-studded portraits, was interviewed by Professor Colin Graham, literary scholar and Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Maynooth University.

In a wide-ranging public interview on a morning of heavy snowfall in Dublin, the two Belfast natives discussed the formation of identity in the wake of turbulence, the intention behind some of Davidson’s immense body of work, and the interrogation of individual identities for an artist whose subjects have ranged from royalty to rockstars and political pathbreakers, to survivors of the Troubles, and inwards, to the window self-portraits or ‘selfies’ that form a vibrant aspect of his current practice.

Described by Graham as a ‘technically brilliant painter and a person of extraordinary integrity and thoughtfulness,’ Davidson confronted the question of identity with reserve: ‘I’ve had to formalise and sort out what my identity was. There are so many facets to it and aspects to it. You can’t grow up in south Belfast without still feeling uncomfortable about who you are.’

In the community of his hometown, identity was ingrained and imposed according to sectarian principles: ‘Your identity could be the difference between being killed or not if you walked down the wrong street.’

Born into a Protestant household in 1968, his father taught art and painted at home, and his family were involved in an interdenominational Christian community which opened his mind to inclusive values.

But he described how, attending Finnaghy primary school and later Methody grammar school, ‘I was being exposed to demeaning words about Catholics that I hadn’t been exposed to before. I realised that the stereotypes weren’t accurate at all.’

His 2002–4 exhibition, No Continuing City, sought to depict Belfast as it evolved after the Troubles. ‘I’ve had a love affair with Belfast throughout my life.’

Image 2: A photo of Looking Over Belfast From Castlereagh. C Davidson 2017.

‘People had made paintings of the destruction of the city after the bombings. I was interested in going back to the tradition of Irish landscape. Belfast affords you many treats. There are many vantage points, from Black Mountain to Castlereagh where you can get a panoramic view by standing on your two feet with a sketch pad.’

‘Here was a city living and breathing, rediscovering itself after the decades of tragedy that it went through.’

Graham, for his part, described the period after the 1998 Belfast Agreement as a ‘pivotal time’ in the northern psyche. ‘It was as if everyone was going around holding something very breakable and nobody wanted to shout in case you dropped it.’

Image 3: Colin Davidson

It was after this ‘delicate time’ that Davidson chose to paint many of the protagonists of the Agreement, including Ian Paisley, Martin McGuinness, John Hume and David Trimble, some in their later and more vulnerable years.

Asked by Graham how it feels to be in the room with a subject he is painting, Davidson said, ‘I’m out of my comfort zone. I’m out of my depth. Two people are in a room, one of them is looking intently at the other. We haven’t met before. That’s unnatural. It’s not like anything else.’

‘That uncomfortable position is the space that you need to inhabit to make anything of substance.’

He painted Martin McGuinness and Ian Paisley with the intention of displaying the paintings side by side, a concept he encouraged both of his sitters to agree to.

Image 4: Ian Paisley. C Davidson, 2013-15. Martin McGuinness. C Davidson, 2015-16

‘This was meant to be a duo of paintings, not to be seen apart.’ He describes with a note of poignancy when he looked at the finished paintings. ‘I remember thinking, why couldn’t you two guys have got together 20 years ago? I didn’t say it, but I felt it.’

Portrait painting is an attempt to capture the honesty of who this person behind the façade – the ‘glimpses behind the façade’. It is a process of self-discovery and learning for the artist. ‘I think Picasso said that every painting is a self-portrait. For me, it’s like starting again to paint, every time I meet someone new.’

‘You come out of every encounter slightly changed, slightly altered, even slightly traumatised.’

Both speakers discussed the parts of the Good Friday Agreement that were badly resolved, ‘the promises it didn’t make,’ and the trauma that was ‘swept under the carpet’. ‘Things were still broken. Things are still broken. Things will always be broken,’ said Davidson. Dismayed to realise that the testimony of survivors and victims was barely included in the Agreement, he wanted to acknowledge the trauma, hurt and grief. This led to ‘Silent Testimony’, his series of 18 paintings of survivors of the conflict.

Image 5: HM Queen Elizabeth II. C Davidson, 2016

‘Instead of painting the great and the good, I wanted paint people who weren’t known outside their families and friends, to afford them the same gravitas as the Queen, or Heaney, or Clinton. They had lost loved ones. This meant looking at raw human loss, not Protestant loss or Catholic loss.’

‘My sense was that if we were to have a future, it needed to be built on us being willing to acknowledge what we did to each other.’

‘What we’re trying to figure out,’ said Davidson, is ‘why we’re here, and how we’re going to get through it.’

Davidson told the story of painting Paul Reilly, a former school caretaker, in 2014 at the home he shared with his wife Ann in Warrenpoint. They had lost their only daughter, Joanne, in a no-warning bomb on 12th April 1989, when she was just 20.

Image 6: ‘Silent Testimony’ survivor Paul Reilly. C Davidson, 2014-15

For many of his subjects, life was ‘tangibly broken and the stories would just pour out. But Paul was somebody whose life had just frozen. He could hardly talk about what had happened.’

Davidson described entering Joanne’s bedroom with her grieving father. It had been kept exactly as it was the morning she left the house, with a teenage bedspread and matching curtains, a pink clock on the wall, and a self of cassette tapes, with a tape still in the cassette player. Reilly sat on his daughter’s bed and it was there Davidson found the right place to paint him: ‘The light streaming through the window was beautiful.’

As they began to talk, Reilly described being at work when he heard the bomb going off. ‘He said it just sounded like a door closing. I thought, you are unaware of how profound that statement is. It was a door closing on the rest of your life.’

Only through bearing witness to this devastating suffering can healing come about. The ‘Silent Testimony’ series will go on display in the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2024. ‘Paul [Reilly] was quietly living out his life in grief,’ said Davidson. ‘Now, potentially millions of people will be able to hear his story.’

He added: ‘The best that we can hope for in any wound is that it leaves a scar.’

Main image is: ‘Silent Testimony’ survivor Margaret Yeaman. C Davidson, 2014-15

See more of his paintings on colindavidson.com

The ARINS project is a joint project of the Keough Naughton Institute for Irish Studies at the University of Notre Dame and the Royal Irish Academy. ARINS stands for Analysing and Researching Ireland North and South Authoritative, independent and non-partisan analysis and research on constitutional, institutional and policy options for Ireland, north and south.

How post conflict societies deal with legacy issues is one of the most complex questions that emerges in the aftermath of violence. Ireland is no different and the most robust attempt yet by the British government to draw a line under the Troubles has now resulted in Ireland taking the United Kingdom to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) for only the second time in over five decades. Such a step is being taken after much deliberation by the Irish government. Their formal decision was long anticipated, but was not announced until just four weeks before the deadline. There is much at stake. Taking the UK to the world’s oldest human rights court could impact years of carefully managed diplomacy at a time when the relationship between the two governments has plummeted. What is at stake and what might such a case involve?

How Northern Ireland has dealt with the legacy of the Troubles to date

Despite numerous multilateral agreements including the Good Friday Agreement/Belfast Agreement 1998 (GFA), to the St. Andrews Agreement 2006, Stormont House Agreement 2014, Fresh Start Agreement 2015 and New Decade New Approach in 2020 – the question of how to investigate and bring to justice those responsible for unlawful killings during the Troubles has neither been fully prescribed nor agreed upon. A fragmented approach through inquests, police ombudsman investigations, civil actions and police investigations has been growing in recent decades and has gradually become more effective. All of these processes were strengthened by the implementation of the European Convention on Human Rights into UK law in 1998 (as agreed under the GFA). This ensured thorough and transparent determinations to emerge in such matters as the Ballymurphy inquest where, in 2021, the 11 victims were found to be innocent and their killings unlawful. The 11 people were shot by British soldiers who stated they were returning fire on Republicans. From 1971 until 2021, that remained the official record. This is what is at stake in legacy issues – determining a rigorous truth recovery process how to tell the truth about history at its most serious level. On 18 September 2023, the Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023 (‘the Legacy Act’) was passed in Westminster despite opposition from all of the political parties in Northern Ireland. The Irish government had urged the UK government (through diplomatic channels) that the Act was a serious deviation from most recently agreed approaches in the Stormont House Agreement 2014 and a breach of the ECHR. The decision by the UK to legislate in such a way was an entirely unilateral one; in contrast to decades of previous collective consultative action by all parties to the GFA since 1998.

What have other jurisdictions done?

Other post conflict societies have dealt with legacy issues in different ways. The approaches can range from the restorative approach of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996-2002) to the retributive method implemented by the Nuremburg trials (1945-46), or an agreement to simply ignore the legacy of violence seen in post Franco Spain’s Pact of Forgetting 1971, subsequently addressed in Spain’s Memory Law (2022). Indeed on this island, the Free State passed the Indemnity Acts 1923 and 1924 which granted amnesties for anti-treaty activists and British forces along with the national army. 100 years on, the Legacy Act proposes similar measures of indemnity and immunity in Northern Ireland, through the establishment of the Independent Commission for Reconciliation and Information Recovery (ICRIR), although twenty-first century standards of justice and human rights may yet prove to be the Act’s greatest adversary.

What does the Act propose to do?

The Act proposes to establish a process through the ICRIR that would deal with all Troubles related cases. It defines the Troubles as a period commencing on 1 January 1966 and ending on 10 April 1998. Functions of the ICRIR will include reviews of deaths and other ‘harmful conduct’ during the Troubles and determinations regarding the granting of immunity to certain persons. It will also bring an end to any further inquests or civil actions related to the Troubles.

Critics of the Act include the Council of Europe Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Commissioner for Human Rights, all political parties in Northern Ireland, the Oireachtas Committee on the Implementation of the GFA, Amnesty International, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, the Committee of Administrative Justice Northern Ireland and Church leaders. The foremost complaint is that the Act breaches Article 2 (right to life) of the ECHR by its immunity provisions, where victims’ families have an entitlement to due process and a system that ensures perpetrators can be brought to justice. It is alleged that the Act is in breach of the GFA in that it will limit the ability of people in Northern Ireland to potentially challenge breaches of the ECHR. Furthermore, it is argued that the Act interferes with policing and justice issues which are devolved powers under the GFA, without seeking consent of the legislature to do so (as is required by the GFA). The Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission (NIHRC) has distinguished the South African legacy framework from this Act stating that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission was established following consultation with civil society for one year, it then formed part of a broader reconciliation process and hearings were held in public. In contrast, no such consultative process was carried out prior to the introduction of the Act; it provides the ICRIR with powers to withhold evidence and information from families seeking justice. Where ECHR rights are at stake, procedural aspects are vital. Investigations must be thorough, impartial and independent.

What is Ireland’s position and what is an interstate case?

Under the ECHR, cases are taken against states either by individuals (Article 34) or by other states (Article 33). Since 1953, there have only been approximately 30 interstate cases taken to the ECtHR (the Court has received over one million individual applications since its inception). Ireland took its first interstate case against the UK in 1971 in relation to the actions of the British forces at the outset of the Troubles. The Court ultimately held in 1978 that Article 3 violations occurred (regarding inhuman and degrading treatment but not torture). Ireland applied to the ECtHR in 2014 to revise this decision when new information came to light, claiming that the extent of the trauma suffered amounted to torture and the British authorities were aware of this at the time. The court considered the matter and refused the application in March 2018. The one dissenting judgment was given by Judge Síofra O’Leary, now President of the ECtHR. She criticised the narrow view taken by the Court and suggested it did not bode well for future interstate applicants, and might even reassure future interstate respondents.

An important aspect of the background of Irish government’s decision to take an interstate case is the fact that victim’s families are currently at the initial stages of a challenge to the Legacy Act in the UK courts. If the families’ ultimately want to bring their challenge to Strasbourg, this is how it begins as they must exhaust all domestic remedies first (Article 35 of the ECHR). Thus, in November 2023, their challenge commenced by asserting a breach of ECHR rights in the Belfast High Court. It is likely that this case could go to the UK Supreme Court but this in turn would require substantial time. It is only after this process (in the event of the UK courts finding against the families that there has been no ECHR breach), that families could proceed to take the case to Strasbourg. The procedure for interstate cases is separate but is subject to the same admissibility criteria as cases for individuals; Article 35 of the ECHR requires that all domestic remedies are exhausted first. Nonetheless, the ECtHR has tended to dispense with this requirement in interstate cases where the Applicant State alleges that the measure at issue contravenes the ECHR and the Applicant either does not or need not specifically claim on behalf of individuals.

Potential complexities

For cases involving historical crimes and access to justice, time truly is of the essence. Having now lodged an application, it is not clear how soon the case can be heard by the Grand Chamber of 17 judges. There is currently a backlog of approximately 76,000 cases pending but there are protocols to prioritise important cases, such as interstate cases.

Meanwhile, the ICRIR has been established and aims to commence its work as prescribed by the Legacy Act this summer (2024). It is open to Ireland to seek an interim measure (under rule 39) suspending the operation of the ICRIR until the matter is determined by the Grand Chamber. However, the ECtHR generally only accedes to such applications in cases where there is risk of imminent loss of life (such as ongoing conflict situations). Therefore, it is likely that the ICRIR will continue apace.

There are some complications that may arise for Ireland but overall, Ireland has a very strong case on the merits. There are different approaches to legacy issues (through approaches that will allow victims proceed through established channels in the courts and in public, to devising specific transparent and independent systems that are acceptable to victims, or on the opposite end, to agreements that no further investigations or ‘fault finding’ processes will occur), but regardless of one’s view, this Legacy Act appears to have challenges not least complying with Article 2 of the ECHR, demonstrating adherence to the GFA and that a transparent, independent process will occur. These challenges will be difficult for the UK to overcome as the Legacy Act proposes to deny due process where loss of life has occurred in accordance with Article 2 of the ECHR. The jurisprudence of the court is very consistent and a declaration of incompatibility is likely.

A bigger problem potentially arises however, should Ireland win the case, will the UK comply?

If the case were to continue in the UK courts, an identical potential problem that looms for victims’ families is the prospect of the UK courts accepting and declaring a breach of ECHR law, and the UK government failing to respond to the court’s decision. If both Ireland and individual cases were to be successful in Strasbourg, it is possible in the current political climate in the UK that the result could simply be ignored (which would have implications for the Council of Ministers’ function in overseeing execution of judgments). In the event of a change of government in the UK, the leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer has committed to repealing the Legacy Act. However, there is some scepticism that a full repeal would occur (particularly from Relatives for Justice and representatives of the victims’ families, as emphasised at an Oireachtas Committee hearing on December 7 2023), suggesting some future iteration of the Legacy Act is possible. Even if the UK government does comply with any outcome, it is clear that the ECHR has become something of a lightning rod in the UK where there is bound to be a polarised reaction from elements of society who are divided around the issue of the UK’s continuing participation in the ECHR. This could become a real test for the rule of law generally in the UK and with such high stakes, it could have a conscious or unconscious effect on the jurisprudence of the ECHR.

In announcing their decision to take a case, the Irish government stated there was no other option having exhausted all political options which failed to elicit successful engagement on legacy issues. It is certainly a change of political climate since 1998. This case will undoubtedly be long and could come to determine the tone of Anglo-Irish relations in the years to come.

Despite the politics, this case will be determined on its legal merits. President Síofra O’Leary of the ECtHR said in a speech earlier this year “As a court of law we are charged with interpreting and applying the law of the Convention whilst often navigating very choppy political waters…politics are never far from our courtroom, but politics is not what we do”. Perhaps it is fitting that the issue of the legacy of the Troubles will now be determined by law in a Court that emerged from the aftermath of Europe’s greatest wars.

Further reading:

In mid-February of 2020, I had to attend a routine outpatient appointment at the Royal Victoria Hospital (RVH) in Belfast. For the previous three weeks I had been working on pandemic preparedness and forecasting. On the morning of the outpatient appointment I had sent a message to a colleague simply stating the following, ‘the wheels have completely come off this now – pandemic for sure’, there was absolutely no question that the novel coronavirus, which would soon be named SARS-CoV-2, was going to cause a devastating pandemic. After the doctor had administered the vaccination I was attending the clinic for I said to him, ‘you’re going to be very busy, very soon’. He looked at me quizzically, and replied, ‘you mean the thing in China? We’re an island off an island – it’ll never get here’.

An island off an island. Although the underlying assumption behind his statement was correct, that the island of Ireland was well-placed, purely by virtue of its geography, to prevent a novel pathogen from arriving and taking hold on its shores. Tragically, we failed to do so, and as a result, thousands of people on the island of Ireland, in both the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, died unnecessarily. And although there was a multiplicity of reasons for this decision, what they boiled down to was this: an almost complete disregard by policymakers both north and south of the border of the fact that the island of Ireland is a single epidemiological unit (SEU). As the Belfast-born public health physician and then President of the Epidemiology and Public Health section of the Royal Society of Medicine, Dr. Gabriel Scally, stated in June 2020, ‘the virus does not respect borders and there are people who live and work on a cross-border basis. We treat Ireland as one epidemiological unit for animal health purposes, so why does it not make sense to treat it as a single unit for human health? To avoid doing so is throwing away our advantage’[1]. The advantage Dr. Scally was referring to was exactly that which the doctor in the RVH expressed – that islands provide unique opportunities for defending themselves from invading pathogens. Opportunities that we catastrophically missed.

There were two opportunities – both based on the fact that the island of Ireland is a SEU – that policymakers completely failed to utilise, the first can be described as the New Zealand approach, and second the cross-border harmonisation approach. The former approach, as will be seen, would have been contingent on the full adoption of the latter. Simply, the New Zealand approach would have involved maximum suppression of SARS-CoV-2 until effective vaccines became available at the end of 2020. The island of Ireland and New Zealand have roughly similar population numbers, and, had the political will been present to both treat the island of Ireland as a SEU and impose strict travel bans to and from both political jurisdictions on the island, as New Zealand did, it is perfectly possible that, following an initial short lockdown, cases of Covid-19, and attendant fatalities, could have been kept at an absolute minimum. To put this in stark perspective – combined fatalities from Covid-19 in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland from March 2020 to December 2020 were 3559; during the same period New Zealand had a total of 25 deaths. During that year, as I watched with horror as the disparity in deaths became obvious between Ireland and New Zealand, it was painfully clear to me that the mounting death toll on the island of Ireland was absolutely preventable, because we had simply folded the winning geographical hand that we had been dealt. So, what would this approach have required, and what, other than preventing the deaths of over 3000 people would we have gained? Simply put, it would have required, as previously noted, full cross-border harmonisation (in terms of pandemic response measures), and a willingness on the part of both the UK government and the Irish government to recognise that the health security threat posed by a novel coronavirus justified extraordinary but temporary geopolitical measures. These temporary measures would have disconnected the island of Ireland from the island of Great Britain for passenger travel, and, of course, from every other part of the globe. It is, of course, the former travel ban – to and from Great Britain – that would have been by far the most contentious, a damning indictment of the power of partisan politics in Northern Ireland. As the bodies piled high on the island of Ireland, to paraphrase Boris Johnson, it struck me that in Northern Ireland especially, a region that has made an industry out of exporting the peace process, there was an uncharacteristic and uncritical silence in the usual quarters on a death toll in ten months that came close to approaching the death toll of the entirety of the Troubles[2]. A death toll that was almost entirely preventable. Freight would still have had to move between the island of Ireland and Great Britain, but this could have been managed with only a modicum of disruption; biosecurity systems exist to allow offshore facilities to remain free of infection at minimal cost[3]. These same systems could easily have been put in place at every port on the island of Ireland. From an economic point of view, and assuming robust cross-border harmonisation of contact tracing services, it is entirely possible that after the initial short lockdown, the entire island of Ireland could have safely opened up every sector of society – education, industry, retail, hospitality, and entertainment, with the exception of non-domestic travel. By drastically reducing the number of imported cases, and by using a short lockdown to achieve a very low level of community transmission, contact tracing and isolation could have kept cases to a minimum until vaccines were deployed.

This, in turn, would have undoubtedly given Ireland the lowest number of Covid-19 fatalities in Europe, not to mention having a much more open and significantly less disrupted society than Great Britain.

It is very easy indeed to think of this and instantly dismiss the idea as being too complicated or too problematic, but if the enemy was not a virus, but a hostile state’s armed forces, then the health security is national security approach resonates more readily. And yet, the New Zealand approach was not seriously discussed between the UK and Irish governments.

However, even simple cross-border harmonisation of pandemic response measures could have made a significant difference to case numbers and fatalities. The island of Ireland is, by definition, a SEU, having different public health measures in place on either side of a highly porous border with significant cross-border interdependencies (especially traveling for work and education), was not only nonsensical, but posed a number of threats. First, differences in quarantine policy between the UK and Ireland regarding overseas travel led to the earlier and more stricter regulations in Ireland being diluted by international travellers simply bypassing them by flying to and from Belfast. Second, with no defined allowed travel radius in place for Northern Ireland residents, many flouted Northern Ireland public health regulations and travelled to border counties, especially Donegal, during the Easter Holidays of 2020. Third, in the summer of 2020, flights landing in Ireland from regions with high rates of Covid-19 posed a threat to Northern Ireland, and fourth, discrepancies in hospitality opening dates and times between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland during 2020 led to surges of cross-border travel – primarily by young people – during that period. Crowded cross-border public transport services almost certainly facilitated numerous superspreader events. In the face of all of these problems, the only real outcome of note was the April 2020 Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between the Departments of Health in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, which, while ambitious in scope, was vague, non-binding, and did not account for the consequences of Brexit on the Irish border – being described as, ‘much like a New Year’s resolution: good intentions, but capable of being cast aside when inconvenient’[4]. In short, even the self-evident benefits of the eminently sensible but minimal approach of cross-border pandemic response harmonisation was not implemented in any meaningful way.

While these missed opportunities seem much longer ago than 2020, another opportunity still waits to be seized, both north and south of the border of the island of Ireland: the recognition that proven solutions exist to reduce the transmission of Covid-19 and other airborne pathogens, specifically HEPA filtration of indoor air. Contrary to popular opinion, SARS-CoV-2 remains a dangerous virus, with a significant risk of chronic illness with each infection. Learning the lessons offered from 2020 and putting plans in place to reduce transmission will improve the population health of the entire island of Ireland.

Conor Browne is a biological risk consultant working in the global energy, and novel diagnostics sectors.

X: brownecfm

[1] https://www.eolasmagazine.ie/covid-19-turning-the-final-page-of-this-story-2/

[2] https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/victims/docs/group/htr/day_of_reflection/htr_0607c.pdf

[3] https://www.siemensgamesa.com/explore/journal/2020/07/siemens-gamesa-offshore-responds-to-covid-19

[4] Northern Ireland Legal Quarterly Summer Vol. 73 No. 2 (2022) Territorial approaches to a pandemic: a pathway to effective governance? Mary Dobbs and Andrew Keenan