What does it mean to be Irish? Are the predicates Catholic and Irish so inextricably linked that it is impossible to have one and not the other? Does the process of secularisation in modern times mean that Catholicism is no longer a touchstone of what it means to be Irish? Indeed was such a paradigm ever true? These are among the fundamental issues addressed in this work, which examines whether distinct identity formation can be traced over time. The book delineates the course of historical developments which complicated the process of identity formation in the Irish context, when by turns Irish Catholics saw themselves as battling against English hegemony or the Protestant Reformation. Without doubt the Reformation era cast a long shadow over how Irish Catholics would see themselves. But the process of identity formation was of much longer duration. Newly available in paperback, this work traces the elements which have shaped how the Catholic Irish identified themselves, and explores the political, religious and cultural dimensions of the complex picture which is Irish Catholic identity. The essays represent a systematic attempt to explore the fluidity of the components that make up Catholic identity in Ireland.

The struggle to create and sustain meaning in our everyday lives is fought using cultural ingredients to spin the webs of meaning that keep us going. To help reveal the complexity and intricacy of the webs of meaning in which they are suspended, Tom Inglis interviewed one-hundred people in their native home of Ireland to discover what was most important and meaningful for them in their lives. Inglis believes language is a medium: there is never an exact correspondence between what is said and what is felt and understood. Using a variety of theoretical lenses developed within sociology and anthropology, Inglis places their lives within the context of Ireland's social and cultural transformations, and of longer-term processes of change such as increased globalisation, individualisation, and informalisation.

This book presents a series of essays that examine the ideological, personal, and political difficulties faced by the group variously termed the Anglo-Irish, the Protestant Ascendancy, or the English in Ireland, a group that existed in a world of contested ideological, political, and cultural identities. At the root of this conflicted sense of self was an acute awareness among the Anglo-Irish of their liminal position as colonial dominators in Ireland who were viewed as other both by the Catholic natives of Ireland and by their English kinsmen. The work in this volume is highly interdisciplinary, bringing to bear examination of issues that are historical, literary, economic, and sociological. Contributors investigate how individuals experienced the ambiguities and conflicts of identity formation in a colonial society, how writers fought the economic and ideological superiority of the English, how the cooption of Gaelic history and culture was a political strategy for the Anglo-Irish, and how literary texts contributed to the emergence of national consciousness. In seeking to understand and trace the complex process of identity formation in early modern Ireland the essays in this volume attest to its tenuous, dynamic, and necessarily incomplete nature. David A. Valone is an Assistant Professor of History at Quinnipiac University. Jill Marie Bradbury is an Assistant Professor of English at Gallaudet University.

This book examines the experience of the Irish Catholic working class and their descendants in Britain as a minority experience which has been profoundly shaped by the responses of both the British state and the Catholic church to Irish migrants. The book challenges notions that the Irish have smoothly assimilated to British society and demonstrates how the reception and policies that greeted the Irish in 19th century Britain created the framework within which the experiences of Irish migrants to Britain in the 20th century have been formed. Research about the education of Irish Catholics is used to investigate how a labour migrant group who, in the 19th century were large, visible and problematized were socially constructed as invisible by the mid-20th century through a process of incorporation and denationalization.

The struggle between Catholic and Protestant has shaped Irish history since the Reformation, with tragic consequences up to the present day. But how do Catholics and Protestants in Ireland see each other? And how do they view their own communities and what these communities stand for? Tracing the history of religious identities in Ireland over the last three centuries, Marianne Elliott argues that these two questions are inextricably linked and that the identity of both Catholics and Protestants is shaped by the way that each community views the other. Cutting through the layers of myths, lies, and half-truths that make up the vision that Catholics and Protestants have of each other, she looks at how mutual religious stereotypes were developed over the centuries, how they were perpetuated and entrenched, and how they have defined modern identities and shaped Ireland's historical destiny, from the independence struggle and partition to the Troubles of the last four decades.

In The Eternal Paddy, Michael de Nie examines anti-Irish prejudice, Anglo-Irish relations, and the construction of Irish and British identities in nineteenth-century Britain. This book provides a new, more inclusive approach to the study of Irish identity as perceived by Britons and demonstrates that ideas of race were inextricably connected with class concerns and religious prejudice in popular views of both peoples. De Nie suggests that while traditional anti-Irish stereotypes were fundamental to British views of Ireland, equally important were a collection of sympathetic discourses and a self-awareness of British prejudice. In the pages of the British newspaper press, this dialogue created a deep ambivalence about the Irish people, an ambivalence that allowed most Britons to assume that the root of Ireland’s difficulties lay in its Irishness. Drawing on more than ninety newspapers published in England, Scotland, and Wales, The Eternal Paddy offers the first major detailed analysis of British press coverage of Ireland over the course of the nineteenth century. This book traces the evolution of popular understandings and proposed solutions to the "Irish question," focusing particularly on the interrelationship between the press, the public, and the politicians. The work also engages with ongoing studies of imperialism and British identity, exploring the role of Catholic Ireland in British perceptions of their own identity and their empire.

This book examines the changed, and changing, face of Irish Catholicism and Irish Catholic identity at the beginning of the third millennium. There has never been any formal philosophical training in the Irish educational system that allows space for the type of intellectual engagement with issues of a religious nature that characterises a society like France, for example. So Irish and Catholic is in some ways an attempt to fill a void and to launch a debate that is absolutely necessary if we are to come to terms with a vastly changed socio-religious landscape that could effectively be termed as 'post-Catholic.' The essays are written by people who are both intimately associated with the Catholic Church in their role as priests and commentators, or who have an interest in the topic from a literary, theoretical or historical perspective. It is the different prisms and lenses through which the issue of Irish Catholic identity - or identities - is examined that makes this such a challenging and fascinating study. It avoids the danger of putting forward an apologia for the church or of embarking on an irrational attack on perceived abuses within the institution.

Focusing on Irish speakers in Catholic West Belfast, this ethnography on Irish language and identity explores the complexities of changing, and contradictory, senses of Irishness and shifting practices of 'Irish culture' in the domains of language, music, dance and sports. The author’s theoretical approach to ethnicity and ethnic revivals presents an expanded explanatory framework for the social (re)production of ethnicity, theorizing the mutual interrelations between representations and cultural practices regarding their combined capacity to engender ethnic revivals. Relevant not only to readers with an interest in the intricacies of the Northern Irish situation, this book also appeals to a broader readership in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, history and political science concerned with the mechanisms behind ethnonational conflict and the politics of culture and identity in general.

For much of the 20th century, Catholics in Ireland spent significant amounts of time engaged in religious activities. This book documents their experience in Limerick city between the 1920s and 1960s, exploring the connections between that experience and the wider culture of an expanding and modernising urban environment. Síle de Cléir discusses topics including ritual activities in many contexts: the church, the home, the school, the neighbourhood and the workplace. The supernatural belief underpinning these activities is also important, along with creative forms of resistance to the high levels of social control exercised by the clergy in this environment. De Cléir uses a combination of in-depth interviews and historical ethnographic sources to reconstruct the day-to-day religious experience of Limerick city people during the period studied. This material is enriched by ideas drawn from anthropological studies of religion, while perspectives from both history and ethnology also help to contextualise the discussion. With its unique focus on everyday experience, and combination of a traditional worldview with the modernising city of Limerick – all set against the backdrop of a newly-independent Ireland - Popular Catholicism in 20th-century Ireland presents a fascinating new perspective on 20th-century Irish social and religious history.

Presents the experiences of two burgeoning cities and the Irish people that helped to establish what it is 'to be Irish' within them