Geography, Religion, and Society in Ireland: A Spatial History

Even today, more than a decade after the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement, which marked an end to the Troubles, the visitor to Northern Ireland cannot help but be struck by the interplay between religion, ethnonational identity, politics, history, and geography. Protestant areas are demarked by the Union Flag (the flag of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, formerly the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland), backed up by red, white, and blue curbstones and murals representing events such as the Battle of the Boyne and the Siege of Derry. Protestantism is seen as synonymous with the politics of unionism and loyalism, which have the union with Great Britain and loyalty to the British Crown as their core tenets. Orange parades further emphasize these links—Orangemen march to church in a symbolic way that makes explicit the links between their religion, politics, history, and, most controversially, territory. So too in Catholic areas, except the flags are those of the Republic of Ireland, the curbstones are green, white, and orange, and the murals tend to focus on the sufferings and tribulations of the Gaelic Irish population from the Norman Conquest all the way through to the recent Troubles. Catholicism is seen as synonymous with Irish nationalism and republicanism, which have sought to remove British influence from Ireland.

Religion and territory thus are explicitly linked, a link that has at worst led to killing, arson, and other forms of violence aimed at establishing or protecting territorial control. While these are the most overt and unpleasant expressions of the impact of religious geography on Ireland, spatioreligious processes—the way in which religion and geography become intertwined with each other and a range of broader factors within society—have a long tradition. Recent work by Alexandra Walsham has drawn attention to this link, seeing religious space in Ireland as a sort of theological palimpsest, constantly being written and overwritten by competing Catholic and Protestant imaginings of the past. The idea of a more substantive link between geography and religion underpins the political ideologies of nationalism and unionism, which have shaped the island of Ireland since the Famine. The ways in which religion, society, and geography have evolved to shape Ireland over the past two centuries are the major themes that this book will explore in detail. It is important, however, to establish what we mean by religion. In this context it does not refer to religious practice, including acts of worship, church attendance, and systems of belief; instead, it is primarily concerned with religious identity, a person's background and the community with which that person identifies. As the opening paragraph makes clear, religion is often tied up with a wide variety of other factors in society, particularly ethnonational identity and politics, but also economic opportunity and a range of other issues affecting almost every aspect of a person's life.

This intermingling of geography, religion, and the wider society is not new. Protestantism arrived in Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries with the plantations, whose aim was to "plant" specific areas with English Protestants, loyal to the Crown, to defend English influence from the threats posed by indigenous Catholics. This took place against the backdrop of the wider European struggle between Protestant England and Catholic Spain and France. The plantations were focused on certain key strategic areas, including colonial Dublin and its historic sphere of influence known as the Pale, parts of Munster and the midlands, and west Ulster. Around the same time, Scottish Presbyterians arrived in large numbers in east Ulster, reflecting long-term economic and cultural links between southern Scotland and Ulster rather than the processes of large-scale, organized colonization.

The plantations laid the foundation for the fusing of religion, identity, politics, and geography, and, as chapter 2 will describe, many of the spatioreligious patterns that were laid down in this period have shaped, and been reshaped by, the processes that ran through nineteenth-and twentieth-century Ireland. These processes can be divided into two types. At one extreme there have been the short-term shocks—periods of intense violence or trauma that led to sudden upheavals. At the other there are the longer-term, more gradual processes associated with economic and social development.

The most obvious trauma was the period of violence from the Easter Rising in 1916 to Partition and the civil war in the early 1920s. The geographical legacy of this was the division of the island into the mainly Catholic Republic of Ireland—or the Irish Free State, as it was first called—and the predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland. As chapter 6 will identify, in this period religion, politics, and identity came together to tear the island in two. However, the resulting formal division of the island left both parts with significant populations of the "other" religion, and in some places in the north these minorities made up the majority of the population. In modern Northern Ireland this has had tragic consequences. The twentieth century's second period of violent trauma, described in the last chapters of the book, was the three decades of the Troubles, which have left Northern Ireland's two communities—defined by both religion and politics—as separated as they have ever been, emotionally as well as geographically. The so-called peace lines are the most obvious physical legacy of this period. These are high, ugly, concrete walls that scar Belfast's urban geography in their attempt to keep the two communities apart—a physical manifestation of a much deeper divide. In what is now the Republic, however, there have been fewer such problems, and the much smaller Protestant minority has generally coexisted in relative harmony with their Catholic neighbors.

These two periods of violence are not the only traumatic processes to have affected the geographies of Ireland over the past two centuries. The Great Famine of the late 1840s was the last major famine in western Europe, and its effects have been profound in both the short and...