Race Relations in the Six Counties: Colonialism, Industrialization, and Stratification in Ireland

Methodological nationalism and the Northern Ireland blind-spot in ethnic and racial studies

“…Prior to the peace process in the 1990s, only a few scholars attempted to correct the NI blind-spot in ethnic and racial studies. Moore (1972) examined NI as a "race relations" situation, and concluded that it did fit the description. McKernan (1982), in the pages of this journal, drew parallels between NI and the USA.…”

Is racism the new sectarianism? Negativity towards immigrants and ethnic minorities in Northern Ireland from 2004 to 2015

“…Northern Ireland's history of sectarian conflict around national and religious identities (as either Protestant -British or Catholic Irish) makes the country a special case in Europe. Hence, much of the literature has linked Northern Ireland's high rates of racially motivated hate crimes and the strong prevalence of negative attitudes towards ethnic minorities to the region's sectarian past (Moore 1972;McVeigh and Rolston 2007;Knox 2011;Savaric 2014;McKee 2015;McVeigh 2015). This view has also been the predominant public discourse, e.g.…”

“…Because sectarianism, negative attitudes and behaviours towards the religious "other" have been conceptually linked to intolerance towards other minorities in Northern Ireland (Moore 1972;Hayes and McAllister 2009;Knox 2011;McVeigh 2015), we aim to capture sectarian attitudes and correlate these with negativity towards immigrants and ethnic minorities. Is sectarianism more strongly related to negativity towards immigrants and ethnic minorities than other variables?…”

Religion, Ethnicity and Colonialism as Explanations of the Northern Ireland Conflict

“…Protestants themselves have ceased to proclaim their pride in their settler origins (Jackson 1989), which is not surprising since the fate of most settlers in the twentieth century has been dispossession. More regrettably, few writers on Northern Ireland have accepted that the settler colonial origins of the six counties still play an important part in the explanation of the current stalemate (for useful expositions of some who do hold this view see Clayton 1996, Lustick 1985, MacDonald 1986, Moore 1972, O'Dowd 1990, Weitzer 1990). Yet Ireland's history has been colonial since the reign of Elizabeth I of England and the Plantation consisted in the brutal seizure for Protestant settlement of large tracts of land, and the removal of Irish inhabitants.…”