Shared Identity and the End of Conflict? How Far Has a Common Sense of ‘Northern Irishness’ Replaced British or Irish Allegiances since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement?

Abstract

Despite political progress in Northern Ireland, the polity may arguably only fully stabilise when its population regards themselves as ‘Northern Irish’ rather than merely as subsets of British and Irish parent nations. Power-sharing and relative peace since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement may have offered the possibility of the development of a common Northern Irish identity, to allow consolidation of a political entity challenged by sections of the nationalist minority since its formation in 1921. Alternatively, the consociational nature of the Agreement may have legitimised ‘separate but equal’ identity politics constructed on the British versus Irish faultline. This articles tests whether there has been a significant growth of cross-community Northern Irishness since the Agreement, capable of eroding inter-communal rivalry.

Notes

1 ‘Dr Richard Haass raises idea of potential new NI flag’, available at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-northern-ireland-25198298 (accessed 12 January 2014). For the full Haass proposals, see ‘Proposed Agreement 31 December 2013’, available at http://www.northernireland.gov.uk/haass.pdf (accessed 12 January 2014).

2 We opted for using year dummies instead of a continuous variable so the significance of changes from 2000 can be appreciated year by year.

3 We also ran a model (not shown) including random effects by year instead of dummies, and period effects were significant for Protestants.

4 Interactions between age and periods are not significant.

5 All probabilities mentioned in the text have been calculated holding all other variables at their means.

6 We only include two categories of social class: professionals and managers, and skilled/unskilled workers (and a separate category for those that have not been employed in the past few years). The way in which social class is measured in the Northern Ireland Life and Times surveys has changed over time and so these categories correspond to the lowest common denominator across surveys.

7 Without controlling for those variables, professionals and managers from both communities are significantly more likely to feel Northern Irish.

8 15.61 per cent of respondents are DUP identifiers; Sinn Féin identifiers amount to 10 per cent of the sample.

9 In particular, we interacted religion with age and period dummies, but also education, gender and urbanisation as those variables had previously been reported to have different effects for each community.

10 Probabilities have been calculated holding all other variables at their means.

11 Here, we follow Kam and Franzese (2007), who recommend interpreting interactions by testing for differences in marginal effects.