Contributor:

Professor Jennifer Todd

Talk Title:

Community, church and culture in boundary-making

Talk Synopsis:

This talk explores how partition ‘crystallised communities, empowered churches [and] slowed the process of cultural change’ on both sides of the border. It describes the ‘complex cultural mosaic’ that existed before partition and how much of this complexity was ‘transformed…‘into a sharp territorial line’ that ‘turned the cultural mosaic into solidary communities divided one from another on religious, national and political lines’. It suggests that ‘unionist and nationalist ideas and values were further simplified’ in the post-partition period and that whilst there were ‘areas of permeability in each society’, these ‘did not change the divisions’ and that the ‘new political systems stably reproduced ethno-religious divisions’ in ways that were ‘not seriously shaken until after the second world war.’ It also looks at social, economic and political change across the last 100yrs, including the recent effects of Brexit and suggests that a key legacy of partition has been ‘a failure of each to understand the other.’

Short Biography:

Jennifer Todd is Emeritus Professor in the School of Politics and International Relations, University College Dublin, Fellow of the Geary Research Institute, Research Director of the Institute for British-Irish Studies at the University College Dublin and Member of the Royal Irish Academy.

Further Reading:

Protestants in a Catholic State: Ireland’s Privileged Minority – Kurt Bowen