The Irish border as a cultural landscape

Abstract

State borders are commonly understood to be lines that divide economic, political, social and cultural landscapes. Those divisions are informed by distinctions made between ‘self’ and ‘other’, ‘us’ and ‘them’, ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, and ‘include’ and ‘exclude’. Who decides on these divisions and distinctions rests on the power relations involved (Newman, 2006a, pp. 143-7; 2006b, p. 176). The power of the British state in Ireland was demonstrated by its partition of the island and the creation of the imperial Irish border in 1921. The binary distinctions between Catholic nationalist and Protestant unionist ethno-national communities, and between the unionist North and nationalist South were used to justify partition politically. Religious difference between these indigenous ethno-national communities served as a cultural bulwark to support partition and the creation of the Irish border as a ‘spiritual divide’ (Heslinga, 1979, p. 78) and ‘religious frontier’ (Heslinga, 1979, p. 204). Problematically, however, Northern Ireland corralled a substantial Irish Catholic nationalist population, one which has grown in the intervening decades. The 2001 census found 44 per cent of the population of Northern Ireland to be Catholic. For the Northern Protestant unionist community, therefore, the threat from Irish nationalism existed within Northern Ireland, as well as south of the border. Perfidious Albion added to a sense of unionist insecurity through perennial threat of ‘sell-out’ to Irish nationalism.