Irish Catholic Identities

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.

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.

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 problematised were socially constructed as invisible by the mid-20th century through a process of incorporation and denationalization.

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.

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.

Recent studies of the experiences of Irish migrants in Victorian Britain have emphasized the significance of the themes of change, continuity, resistance and accommodation in the creation of a rich and diverse migrant culture within which a variety of Irish identities co-existed and sometimes competed. In contributing to this burgeoning historiography, this book explores and analyses the complexities surrounding the self-identity of the Irish in Victorian Britain, which differed not only from place to place and from one generation to another but which were also variously shaped by issues of class and gender, and politics and religion. Moreover, and given the tendency for Irish ethnicity to mutate, through a comparative study of the Irish in Britain and the United States, the book suggests that in order to preserve their Irishness, the Irish often had to change it. Written by some of the foremost scholars in the field, these original essays not only shed new light on the history of the Irish in Britain but are also integral to the broader study of the Irish Diaspora and of immigrants and minorities in multicultural societies. This book was previously published as a special issue of Immigrants and Minorities.

After 1830 Catholicism in Britain and Ireland was practised and experienced within an increasingly secure Church that was able to build a national presence and public identity. With the passage of the Catholic Relief Act (Catholic Emancipation) in 1829 came civil rights for the United Kingdom's Catholics, which in turn gave Catholic organisations the opportunity to carve out a place in civil society within Britain and its empire. This Catholic revival saw both a strengthening of central authority structures in Rome, (creating a more unified transnational spiritual empire with the person of the Pope as its centre), and a reinvigoration at the local and popular level through intensified sacramental, devotional, and communal practices. After the 1840s, Catholics in Britain and Ireland not only had much in common as a consequence of the Church's global drive for renewal, but the development of a shared Catholic culture across the two islands was deepened by the large-scale migration from Ireland to many parts of Britain following the Great Famine of 1845. Yet at the same time as this push towards a degree of unity and uniformity occurred, there were forces which powerfully differentiated Catholicism on either side of the Irish Sea. Four very different religious configurations of religious majorities and minorities had evolved since the sixteenth-century Reformation in England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. Each had its own dynamic of faith and national identity and Catholicism had played a vital role in all of them, either as 'other' or, (in the case of Ireland), as the majority's 'self'. Identities of religion, nation, and empire, and the intersection between them, lie at the heart of this volume. They are unpacked in detail in thematic chapters which explore the shared Catholic identity that was built between 1830 and 1913 and the ways in which that identity was differentiated by social class, gender and, above all, nation. Taken together, these chapters show how Catholicism was integral to the history of the United Kingdom in this period.

The Lie of the Land is a highly engaging study of Ireland's fractured and shifting identities by one of its most talented writers. From its sometimes confused sense of place, caught somewhere between Europe and America, Ireland has redefined itself in the 1990s. Fintan O'Toole highlights the contradictions and the mythologies at work in Ireland's ever-changing idea of itself.