Political constructions of a cross-community identity in a divided society: how politicians articulate Northern Irishness

ABSTRACT

A shared identity has been shown to reduce prejudice between conflicting social groups. One such common national category is the ‘Northern Irish’ identity which can be inclusive of both Catholics and Protestants. This study analyses the plenary sessions of the Northern Ireland Assembly to show how the national category ‘Northern Irish’ is framed by politicians. Content analysis shows that it is used more often by centrist parties who tend to frame it positively and as part of their political viewpoint. There is also evidence of the instrumental use of this identity by unionists in line with the ingroup projection model.

KEYWORDS:

• Northern Ireland
• common ingroup identities
• intergroup relations
• political psychology
• content analysis
• political rhetoric

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kevin McNicholl is a Post Doctoral Researcher at Queen's University. His research uses the methods and theories of social psychology to better understand issues relating to identity in Northern Ireland.

Notes

1 It is beyond the scope of this paper to attempt to conceptualise the nature of this identity, but rather to look at how it is used in political rhetoric. There is a reasonable argument to be made that the Northern Irish identity is better viewed as a ‘cross-national’, rather than ‘cross-community’ identity. There are some indications however that suggest self-identifying as Northern Irish implies a rejection, rather than a synthesis of different national categories. Trew (1998) shows that the Northern Irish identity is a particularly weak identity, which points to the lack of importance given to national belonging generally among this group. For the purposes of this paper it is enough to say that identifying as Northern Irish should have an association with cross-community politics whether or not it is understood as a national or social category.

2 The use of the term Ulster was also used quite often (10,578), but it was not considered appropriate to directly compare these for two reasons. Firstly, this was often used as part of the title of the Ulster Unionist Party. Secondly, the term Ulster can be a noun or a verb. This means it would only be directly comparable to both Irish and Ireland, and British and Britain.

3 The reader will notice that in many instances the term ‘northern irish’ is given without capitalisation. This reflects the editorial decision of the compilers of Hansard. It is difficult to know why this decision was made, as the names of other countries are fully capitalised.