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12 - Protestantism and Settler Identity

The Ambiguous Case of Northern Ireland

from Part VII - Northern Ireland

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2021

By
David Lloyd
Edited by
Nadim N. Rouhana  and
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
Nadim N. Rouhana
Affiliation:
Tufts University, Massachusetts
Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian
Affiliation:
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Queen Mary University of London
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Summary

This chapter addresses the ambivalent relation of Irish Protestantism to settler identity in the post-1922 period. In the Republic, Irish Protestants accommodated to the new state and majority Catholic government; in Northern Ireland, “a Protestant state for a Protestant people” took on the forms of a settler-colonial state. Protestant supremacy expressed itself in triumphalist cultural forms and in legalized and informal discrimination against Catholics. Northern Ireland offers a “laboratory” for the formations of the settler colony that clarifies the tendencies of settler-colonial entities: the necessary supremacism or racism, the sectarianization of working-class allegiances, the disproportionately violent response of the state to the demand for rights, and the necessity for the withdrawal of “mother country” support for a peace process to begin. Northern Ireland highlights how settler mentalities are the effect of a structure of dominance, not an unchangeable given. Analogies with Palestine/Israel are frequently invoked and the Northern Irish peace process might suggest a just way to end Israel’s colonization of Palestine. Northern Ireland indicates that the entrenched structures of racial or ethnic supremacy in settler-colonial societies are not necessarily permanent or endemic, but capable of transformation if relations of domination are dismantled.

Keywords

Northern IrelandProtestantismsettler colonialismracial state formationsupremacismIrish peace processPalestine/Israel
Type
Chapter
Information
When Politics are Sacralized
Comparative Perspectives on Religious Claims and Nationalism
 , pp. 309 - 336
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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