Tolerance and diversity in Ireland, north and south

By Manchester University Press

Examines the treatment of cultural and religious diversity – indigenous and immigrant – on both sides of the Irish border to analyse the current state of tolerance and the kinds of policies that need to be developed to respect diversity

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Nov 1, 2015
• ISBN: 9781784996567

Book preview

Introduction

Iseult Honohan and Nathalie Rougier

The way in which society should deal with religious and cultural diversity continues to be a burning issue on the island of Ireland as in many other countries. In June 2013, an ESRI / Integration Centre study showed that the Republic of Ireland, once regarded as displaying the most liberal attitudes to immigration in Europe, now recorded more negative attitudes towards migrants than countries such as Germany, Spain and the Netherlands (RTE, 2013). Six months earlier, in December 2012, a decision to fly the Union Flag over Belfast City Hall only on twenty designated days, rather than all year round as previously, led to nearly forty days of protests, including serious riots, in various parts of the province (BBC, 2013). Unionists argued that they considered the changes regarding the Union Flag to be an attack on their cultural identity.

In this book we examine how cultural and religious diversity may be perceived, conceptualised and addressed in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland through the prism of tolerance. Tolerance arises as a practical matter in the issues above: where should we draw the bounds between what is to be tolerated and what is not to be tolerated, and between what is to be merely tolerated, and what is to be given special recognition? These also introduce a deeper set of issues at a more theoretical level: is ‘tolerance’ the appropriate attitude to address diversity at all? Should discussions about how people can live together in societies that are religiously and culturally diverse be framed in terms of tolerance and mutual accommodation, or of more substantial forms of recognition, or yet again in terms of transformative reconciliation?

Tolerance and beyond

While different practices of accommodation have emerged historically in certain traditions and societies that have allowed space for diversity, the practice and idea of tolerance emerged in Western Europe from the seventeenth century as a response to the religious and cultural diversity that emerged there. Tolerance, in its most general and most widely used sense, refers to an openness to different practices and perspectives. Understood in the strict sense, however, it means allowing a belief or practice of which one disapproves and which one is in a position to obstruct.¹ It thus has both a positive, permissive dimension and a negative, disapproval dimension (King, 1976).

Tolerance has been subject to criticism not only because it has an essential negative element but also because it appears to be an exercise of power by the one (be it a person, group, institution or society) who permits the behaviour of another. In an influential critique Wendy Brown (2006) has made the argument that tolerance can constitute the subjects of tolerance as inferior or marginalised, and acts as part of the process of governmentality. But this is not the only way to conceive of or practise tolerance. Rainer Forst (2013) for example, distinguishes toleration as permission from toleration as respect. The first is inherently hierarchical and allows minority practices only selectively and conditionally. The second acknowledges the equality of the other as a person and the need for reciprocal justification for sustained objection to the practices of others, even where these are tolerated (Forst, 2013). The deconstructive and analytic normative approaches may be seen as representing paradigmatically different perspectives on tolerance that have continuing purchase (Brown and Forst, 2014), and we will see both represented in this volume.

An alternative attempt to formulate a more egalitarian conception of toleration suggests that liberal toleration should be reconceived as recognition in order to include members of marginalised groups as full members of society (Galeotti, 2002). This requires more than ending discrimination against those who are different. It responds to the movement towards more substantial endorsement of diversity often termed ‘recognition’. Recognition itself can be seen as having several dimensions – ranging from acknowledging the equal status of all in their diversity to public endorsement of that diversity. But it is the latter dimension with which it has come to be identified in the ‘politics of recognition’, which received its fullest theoretical expression by Charles Taylor, for whom the importance of specific identity, its reliance on culture and its dialogical nature meant that justice requires recognition rather than toleration of others’ beliefs and practices (Taylor, 1994). On this understanding, in the modern world it is not enough to respect the universal dignity of human beings, but it is necessary to acknowledge and give public endorsement to their specific beliefs and practices, language or religion, as valuable. This reflects a distinction between respect – which may be due to someone independent of their achievements – and esteem – which expresses a positive appraisal of their achievements or practices.

It was such an understanding that underpinned the broad set of policies described as multiculturalism. For most of its proponents multiculturalism means precisely acknowledging the value of and giving public recognition to minority cultures. The exact policy implications are a matter of debate. But these have included, for example, special political representation, exemption from universal requirements with respect to dress or diet, and support for separate schools for religious and linguistic minorities (Kymlicka, 1995).

In the early years of the twenty-first century, however, there has been increasing criticism of ideas and practices identified with multiculturalism and the politics of recognition, which has been seen variously as reifying identities, undermining social cohesion and threatening freedom and equality. In particular the fear that special recognition provisions would lead to increasing distance between the majority and minorities in society was addressed by the formulation of ‘interculturalism’. While it is an even less clearly defined term than multiculturalism, it may be seen in Europe at least as emphasising two-way communication between cultures as the basis of living together, rather than either expecting minorities to assimilate entirely to the mainstream or allowing them to become segregated into parallel societies. It could be said that interculturalism also goes ‘beyond toleration’, at least in the sense that it requires not only allowing others’ beliefs and practices but also being prepared to engage with them, and seeing them as having potential value. For some interculturalism is explicitly opposed to multiculturalism, and addresses the increasing distance that they saw as emerging between social groups in society when special provisions are granted to religious and cultural minorities. For others, for whom multiculturalism is wrongly accused of essentialising identities and fragmenting society, interculturalism is just a supplement to multiculturalism rather than replacing it (Meer and Modood, 2012).

Across Europe, there has been a broad movement away from the presumption that all instances of diverse cultural and religious practices should be accommodated or recognised towards a more selective or critical approach, whether this concerns religious dress, the use of immigrant languages or other cultural practices. Although the extent to which there has actually been a major shift away from multicultural policies in Western states is debated, there is a real questioning as to which practices should be accommodated or recognised in liberal democratic states, and which should not. In addition there is evidence across European countries of the reality of broader, less principled forms of intolerant attitudes and behaviour. This brings tolerance strictly speaking – allowing what one disapproves of and could obstruct – to centre stage once more.

The current retreat from recognition thus gives rise to the question whether the only available options are not tolerating (albeit on a principled basis, in forms of ‘liberal intolerance’) or merely tolerating diverse cultural practices that do not fit within existing social norms, thus threatening to marginalise minorities once more. Under what conditions is intolerance justified? And for whom? Further questions arise: Is there a new role for ‘mere’ tolerance, between intolerance and recognition? And is there a more egalitarian kind of tolerance, even where more substantial respect or recognition cannot be realised? What are the bounds and limits of each of these?²

Tolerance on the island of Ireland

This book is designed to address the state of responses to diversity in Ireland, North and South, within the frame of this broad range of issues. It springs from an international, interdisciplinary project, in which the editors were partners: ACCEPT Pluralism: Tolerance, Pluralism and Social Cohesion: Responding to the Challenges of 21st Century in Europe (EU FP7 2010–13) (www.accept-pluralism.eu/). This project aimed to examine the treatment of indigenous and immigrant cultural and religious diversity in fifteen EU states (and one applicant country, Turkey) to examine the current state of tolerance and the kinds of policies needing to be developed to respect diversity. It focused more specifically on issues of tolerance in education and civic and political life in each country, and included a number of comparative studies.

Among the overall findings of the project at the European level was that it is religious diversity that politicians, policy makers and the public are most concerned about, along with the corresponding question of how much, and what kind of, religious diversity can be accommodated. Furthermore two groups attract the most negative attention in public debates, because they are assumed to be unable to be integrated into mainstream European secular, modern, democratic societies: Muslims and Roma. Yet it also emerged clearly that minority claims are of different kinds in different countries, and may demand different sorts of solutions; likewise, the level and kind of accommodation that can be made in each country are different and correspond to its specific historical experience.

One of the concluding ACCEPT reports noted also that there is often a gulf between current sociological analysis of diversity in specific contexts – from which the analysis of normative values and principles are often absent – and normative political theory, which has often tended to overlook specific sociological realities and political debates. The authors suggested that these should be brought together: ‘it is necessary to consider normative modalities of acceptance or non-acceptance, their correspondence to sociological formations of difference and their treatment in political discourse’ (Dobbernack, Modood and Triandafyllidou, 2013: 18). Making these kinds of connection is one of the aims of this book.

As with most such projects, the focus of the ACCEPT Pluralism research was comparative analysis among states, carried out by collaborating national teams, and, accordingly, state boundaries defined the scope of each team’s research. The research design required each national team to focus in depth on specific immediately controversial diversity issues within its country. The Irish team addressed both historical and new religious and cultural diversity by exploring cuts in special funding for Protestant secondary schools, pupils wearing the hijab in schools and the issue of the Sikh turban in the Garda (police) reserve (Honohan and Rougier, 2012). The UK team focused on minority accommodation in Britain and examined Muslim requests for educational accommodation, Muslims’ participation in electoral politics and the way in which Black history and the history of the slave trade are presented in secondary education (Dobbernack, Modood and Meer, 2012). As a result, neither team addressed the Northern Ireland context at all. But Northern Ireland represents a locus where issues of tolerance have not only arisen acutely over a long historical period but have also been the subject of intense analysis and political discussion. It will be immediately evident, moreover, to anyone examining the evolution of tolerance and related issues in the Republic of Ireland that this cannot be considered without reference to Northern Ireland and the evolution of the peace process between unionists and nationalists, with its major institutional and legal changes (in Northern Ireland, between North and South, between Ireland and Britain) and the resulting uneven changes in social and cultural relations between Protestants and Catholics in both parts of the island (Honohan and Rougier, 2012). This has been a context and driver for contemporary developments in tolerance and related discourses, whose importance it is hardly possible to overestimate. Thus the study of tolerance in the island as a whole is worthwhile in its own right. A heuristic notion suggests not only that the course of tolerance in the Republic is deeply intertwined with issues and events in Northern Ireland but also that we may find different discourses and patterns of tolerance in the two jurisdictions.

Historically Ireland was not at the forefront of the articulation of ideas and practices of tolerance, and the language of tolerance has not been prominent in discussions of diversity. In the twentieth century the dominant national and religious settlement in the Republic provided some institutional toleration of religious minorities; other institutional toleration, attitudes and practices of tolerance were until recently more limited; tolerance for Travellers continues to be a significant issue. Looking at the discourse around these issues, we can see that, from a historical context in which any tolerance of diversity was seen as suspect, the Republic has evolved to a situation in which ‘mere’ tolerance or (minimal) accommodation are seen as inadequate responses to diversity. Rather the official emphasis has been on equality and the integration of diverse religious and cultural communities. This has in recent years been framed with respect to migrant diversity in terms of ‘interculturalism’, defined in Ireland by the National Consultative Committee on Racism and Interculturalism (NCCRI) as the ‘development of strategy, policy and practices that promote interaction, understanding, respect and integration between different cultures and ethnic groups on the basis that cultural diversity is a strength that can enrich society, without glossing over issues such as racism’ (NCCRI, 2006: 29). This official emphasis on interculturalism as a strategy for integration and social cohesion distinguishes Ireland from other EU countries whose focus has been on either assimilation or multiculturalism. In our studies for the ACCEPT Pluralism project, we repeatedly encountered the view that, in the Republic, we are ‘beyond tolerance’, and the use of the term was resisted by potential tolerators and tolerated, members of the majority and minorities alike, as it was by a number of academics (Honohan and Rougier, 2012).

The book aims to extend the framework of the initial ACCEPT Pluralism research by bringing together research originating from, and focusing on, both sides of the Irish border, thus allowing comparisons and contrasts to be drawn between the two jurisdictions with regard to how diversity and tolerance issues have been conceptualised and addressed.

The historical evolution and current demographics of cultural and religious diversity on both sides of the border are of importance and interest here, although it is not only numbers that count but the salience of distinctions.

First there are the well-known communal divisions between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland; since the 1960s, their proportions of the population have converged to represent 41 and 42 per cent respectively in 2011. The composition of the Republic remains more homogeneous in this respect, with 84 per cent of the population describing themselves as Catholic and only 6.3 per cent as Protestants in 2011 (CSO/NISRA, 2014). The main indigenous cultural minority, Travellers, are estimated to constitute 0.7 per cent of the population in the Republic, while only 0.1 per cent in Northern Ireland.

But other kinds of religious and cultural diversity have shown rapid increases both in the Republic and Northern Ireland since the beginning of the twenty-first century. Immigration has meant that by 2011 those born outside the jurisdiction constituted 17 per cent of the population in the Republic and 11 per cent in Northern Ireland – in both cases well above the EU average of 6.5 per cent (Irish Times, 2012). At the same time, an increasing number of people adhering to religions other than Catholicism or Protestantism were recorded, representing 1.9 per cent of the population in the Republic and 0.8 per cent of the population in Northern Ireland; in addition 7.5 per cent in the Republic and 16.8 per cent in Northern Ireland indicated ‘no religion’ or did not state their religion. None the less, Ireland as a whole remains quite racially homogeneous, with 95.7 per cent in the Republic and 98.3 per cent in Northern Ireland describing themselves as having a ‘white ethnic background’ in the respective 2011 censuses. Proportionally, however, although there was a very small change in that respect in the Republic since the last (2006) census (from 4.7 to 4.3 per cent), the percentage of people belonging to a ‘non-white’ minority doubled from 0.85 per cent to 1.7 per cent since the previous (2001) census in Northern Ireland.

Patterns of migration also differ somewhat between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. The pattern of diversity emerging in the Republic has been distinctive in a number of ways. The Republic has a long history as a country of emigration; it has never been a colonial power and it did not have a guest worker programme in the 1950s and 1960s. Emigration continued to exceed immigration until 1996. The 2002–6 period witnessed record population growth, with the annual increase amounting to 79,000 including an annual net inward migration of 46,000. As a result, the country experienced a rapid growth in ethnic, religious and cultural diversity. The 2011 census revealed that, despite the economic crisis and a return of emigration, the Republic’s population continued to grow after 2006, albeit at a slower pace than in the previous intercensal period (2002–6), to reach almost 4.6 million, its highest level in 150 years (CSO, 2012). It also revealed that the make-up of the Republic’s population today encompasses more nationalities, ethnicities, religions and languages than ever before.

Migration to Northern Ireland in recent decades can be viewed in terms of three phases. During the 1970s and 1980s, Northern Ireland experienced a consistently large net population loss due to out-migration. This period coincided with the ‘Troubles’, when Northern Ireland was not perceived as a very attractive destination. From the 1990s, population movement was approaching a balance between numbers of people coming to Northern Ireland and leaving, but the situation started to change in 2000–1, when the food processing industry began recruiting workers from Portugal, and hospitals started to hire nursing staff from South Asia and the Philippines. The tipping point came in 2004 with the accession to the EU of eight Central and Eastern European countries, followed by an unprecedented wave of migration to Northern Ireland, peaking in 2007 (Russell, 2012). With the recession, since 2008, there has been a downward trend in immigration, and Northern Ireland had the lowest immigration rate in the UK in the year up to the end of June 2012 (Williams, 2013). Even if net migration falls in the coming years as projected, the migrant populations who have arrived in Northern Ireland since the millennium have turned a relatively insular country into a culturally diverse society. In 2010, the Northern Ireland Life and Times survey (NILT) indicated that a substantial majority (69 per cent) of the population agreed that migrants had enriched the country, by making it open to new ideas and cultures (Russell, 2012).

In this context, this book addresses issues of intolerance, mere tolerance and recognition as they arise with regard to – cultural and religious, historical and immigrant – diversity in Ireland North and South. It examines institutional arrangements, public policy, social attitudes and behaviour in certain key areas. Uniting sociological and normative research, it also aims to examine how the frames of reference of debate in Northern Ireland and the Republic compare with one another.

Plan of the book

The thirteen chapters that constitute this book analyse ways in which issues of tolerance emerge in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland with respect to a range of challenges associated with diversity. The five chapters in the first set address issues of diversity in education; chapters in the second set deal with issues arising in civic and political life, and later chapters address more general discussions about the terms in which such issues need to be framed.

The volume does not aim to deal comprehensively with every minority or potential issue in every context. Rather the areas and groups discussed show the diversity of challenges that arise, and go beyond this to show the way in which specific issues reveal different meanings attached to ‘tolerance’, and different ways in which ethno-cultural and religious diversity are problematised, analysed and addressed in a variety of contexts. The book also brings together an interdisciplinary group of authors from both sides of the Irish border and further afield, whose disciplines range from sociology, education, political theory, anthropology, geography and social psychology to law, and thus offers a variety of approaches and perspectives on the issues and questions related to tolerance. As well as advancing different conceptions and evaluations of tolerance itself (in particular, Fanning, McBride), chapters variously address institutional structures (Daly, Gallagher and Duffy, Morrow); laws and policies (Gilligan, Hamilton, Bloomer and Potter, Rougier and Honohan) and individual or collective attitudes (Darmody and Smyth, MacAreavey, O’Boyle, Crowley and Kitchin, Jarman).

In the context of examining approaches to diversity, education is a crucial area. Education can be both an engine of inclusion and one of exclusion. As Dympna Devine puts it, ‘Sociologically, education systems have a pivotal role to play in society, not only because of their potentially formative power on young minds, but also because of their significance in regulating and reproducing patterns of power and control between social groups in society’ (Devine, 2011: 1). In Ireland, where children constitute a high proportion of minority groups and migrants, education is a particularly important focus for understanding practices with respect to diversity.

Thus the early chapters focus on education, examining the ways in which ethnic, cultural and religious diversity challenges are addressed in education in Ireland, North and South. They reveal the kinds of cultural diversity that are salient in schools, the limits of tolerance, the practices considered tolerant or intolerant, and the values and norms considered to promote or undermine tolerance in schools.

In the first chapter, Merike Darmody and Emer Smyth highlight the part that schools can play in helping young people to develop strategies for living in a diverse society. They report on data gathered in a large research project dealing with cultural and religious diversity in the Irish education system, Adapting to Diversity, and focus here on the views of native Irish students on migration in general and on migrant students in a school context. They discuss students’ views of one another, and a range of issues pertaining to language abilities, religion and curriculum. They also discuss the significance of the timing of migration for inter-group contact, the measures Irish schools have put in place to cater for diversity in the student body and the question of the size and proportion of the migrant students’ body. The findings presented provide new insights into the perspectives of Irish students and on the range of their attitudes, ranging from ‘intolerant’ through neutral or ‘tolerant’ to active acceptance and recognition of diversity, echoing, in many cases, broader public discourse about immigrants in contemporary Ireland.

Tony Gallagher and Gavin Duffy (Chapter 2) address developments in the Northern Irish school system with respect to the historic communal divisions. While established with an inclusive ambition, the system evolved as Protestant in all but name, with a parallel system of Catholic schools. They explore the impact on attitudes and community cohesion of the establishment of integrated schools, and more recently of a new model of shared education in the context of consociational and integrationist approaches to conflict resolution. They analyse the place and value attributed to tolerance and recognition in different categories of school system: unitary, segregated, multicultural and plural, and reflect on the place these might have in the Northern Ireland education system in realising the overarching goals of reconciliation and equality. In particular, they examine the effects of the Sharing Education Programme (SEP), a structure in which schools co-operate within an interdependent network, on approaching a balance of cohesion and identity.

Eoin Daly (Chapter 3) addresses a timely issue: school patronage in the Republic of Ireland. He analyses changes in arguments about the structure of education in the context of the growing secularisation of Irish society. He argues that ‘diversity’ and ‘choice’, which are understood as core constitutional values, have become keywords in an evolving understanding of the constitutional basis of the patronage model, and contrasts these to its previous basis in the value of religion. He goes on to unpack the rhetoric of ‘choice’ that currently frames public debate on reform of the patronage model in the light of increased religious diversity, and suggests that there is a limited place for concepts of toleration and recognition in this model.

Turning to Travellers, the indigenous group whose members repeatedly emerge in studies as those most subject to intolerance in Ireland, Jennifer Hamilton, Fiona Bloomer and Michael Potter (Chapter 4) address the ways in which social exclusion, discrimination and disadvantage are experienced by the Traveller community in Northern Ireland with respect specifically to education. They draw on their empirical research to evaluate the adequacy and effectiveness of primary-level education from the perspective of Traveller children and parents, as well as related voluntary and statutory sector organisations, and to assess the broader policy context for Traveller educational provision in Northern Ireland.

Finally, Nathalie Rougier and Iseult Honohan (Chapter 5) make a bridge between the domains of education and civic and political life by exploring the subtexts of controversies generated by the growing religious and cultural diversity in two major Irish institutions: schools and the Garda (police force). Using a critical discourse analysis approach, they examine the main argumentative strategies through which the issues of the Muslim hijab in schools and of the Sikh turban in the Garda reserve have been constructed and debated in Ireland. They analyse what these reveal about the level of acceptance of diversity in Irish institutions, as assessed on a spectrum of non-tolerance, tolerance and respect or recognition.

The second set of chapters addresses issues related to civic and political life broadly understood. They explore issues of ethnic, cultural and religious diversity in these spheres in Ireland, North and South, and, again pose the questions which kinds of diversity are tolerated in political and civic institutions and the restrictions or limits of such tolerance. Here issues of integration into society, and of equal citizenship arise for indigenous minorities and newly settled migrants in different ways. But in both cases there are issues concerning the extent to which the political sphere is open to the interests or participation of diverse groups; whether there are public policies of inclusion and exclusion, and the kinds of institutional support or obstacles these groups encounter. Finally, how tolerant or intolerant is political discourse when it comes to cultural and religious diversity? The chapters in this section address some issues which have already come to the fore in Ireland North and South.

In Chapter 6, Ruth McAreavey explores the way in which migrants navigate public and private space, and how tolerance is displayed between minority and majority social groups, drawing on data from her empirical research on migrant groups in Northern Ireland. She conceptualises integration on the basis of a matrix of tolerance, and presents an understanding of integration as a complex process that requires adjustment and change from all groups in society. She challenges the notion that tolerance is always the best strategy, showing how in particular circumstances a certain kind of non‐tolerance can be more constructive than ‘mere’ tolerance. She argues that positive integration requires responses right across society, rather than being realised through either legislation or locally based responses alone. She concludes by identifying ways in which society could move beyond ‘mere tolerance’ to become more genuinely integrated.

Addressing the issue of migrant inclusion in political participation, Neil O’Boyle (Chapter 7) examines the particular case of African immigrants in Ireland as a means of reflecting more generally on tolerance and intolerance in political and civic life in Ireland. He identifies a tension in the approach of African candidates for political office in the Republic between a commitment to politics as a profession and as community service. Drawing on his empirical research, he aims to reflect on the experience of entering politics for African candidates in Ireland. He examines a political internship scheme, ‘Opening Power to Diversity’, running since 2012, which matches volunteer migrants with TDs (Members of Parliament) in a shadowing exercise, and discusses the significance and limits of such initiatives.

Úna Crowley and Rob Kitchin (Chapter 8) return to one of Ireland’s indigenous minorities, Travellers. They argue that contemporary discourses of tolerance, diversity and multiculturalism, rather than leading to respect for Travellers and increased ‘tolerance’ of their lifestyle, have merely perpetuated their historical situation and an assimilationist approach towards Traveller culture. To shed light on why negative and intolerant attitudes to Travellers continue to prevail, they trace and deconstruct the way in which academic research has been an influential element of the complex discursive landscape which frames Travellers’ lives. They describe some of the processes of thought and styles of investigation by which academics and sedentary society have come to ‘know’ Irish Travellers, and discuss how academic research and the construction of particular ‘knowledges’ has contributed to creating and maintaining power relations of inequality. They suggest the importance of alternative forms of scholarship which draw on stronger participatory approaches and examine broader societal narratives pertaining to the sedentary society.

A major contemporary issue in divided societies is the extent to which tolerance means outlawing the expression of views hostile to particular groups, and whether crimes motivated by such hostility should be treated as more serious than other crimes. Tackling the issues of racism and sectarianism in Northern Ireland through the specific angle of ‘hate crimes’, Chris Gilligan (Chapter 9) outlines public attitudes towards additional penalties for racial aggravation in race hate crimes, showing that the public are split on whether to support such penalties, with a slight majority being opposed. He then examines the rationale for these views. Judging hate crime laws against John Stuart Mill’s defence of tolerance, he argues that hate crime laws are antithetical to liberal tolerance in its classical conception, contending that they undermine both the principle of equality – seen as fundamental to anti-racism – and tolerance – seen as fundamental to personal liberty.

The next two chapters focus on understanding the specific history and trajectory of conflict and reconciliation in Northern Ireland, addressing the question of what kinds of structures and attitudes are required to realise the shared future that was envisaged at the time of the peace process, to what extent tolerance features in this and to what extent there has been progress in this direction.

Neil Jarman (Chapter 10) attempts to unpack the notions of tolerance and prejudice in relation to the current situation in Northern Ireland. Analysing closely records of public opinion with respect to different groups, he argues that tolerance and prejudice are not singular notions but rather may differ in relation to the nature and construct of the ‘other’, the background and status of the individual, and that expressions of intolerance may be triggered by different types of events and activities. These factors lead to an informal hierarchy of prejudice and tolerance, with some communities being less tolerated than others, while some sections of the community present themselves as more tolerant than others. Furthermore levels of tolerance vary according to the current state of community relations. Thus he argues that, in the absence of a clear strategy and leadership to promote engagement and respect, outbursts of collective intolerance are likely to increase.

Duncan Morrow (Chapter 11) provides an historical perspective on the evolution of relationships among communities in Northern Ireland since 1922, focusing especially on the reconciliation process from the Belfast (Good Friday) Agreement of 1998, its commitment to reconciling the different traditions in Northern Ireland and the constraints its structures have placed upon the kinds of change possible through subsequent policy initiatives. He argues that the largest parties in Northern Ireland have moved away from reconciliation, and have produced a government sharing out among parallel sectarian interests. He explores the way in which inter-community reconciliation has been superseded and considers the proposed alternative approaches to pluralism and their potential consequences.

The two following chapters move on to address more general questions and debates relating to tolerance in Ireland, North and South. They examine the meaning(s), norms and practices of tolerance that emerge in the kinds of ethnic, cultural and religious diversity challenges analysed in the previous chapters.

Bryan Fanning (Chapter 12) considers recent manifestations of intolerance that claim a liberal inheritance. He argues that these need close analysis. Contemporary liberal intolerance draws upon the kind of ethnocentric liberalism elaborated on a philosophical basis by Richard Rorty. But independent, practical forms emerged after the attack on the World Trade Center in New York in 2001 and in the anti-multiculturalism that gained ground in Europe following the murder of Pim Fortuyn in the Netherlands. Fanning presents Dutch and Irish examples of ethnocentric liberalism, and considers why ethnocentric liberal prejudice towards Muslims was widely condoned in the former but has not been in Ireland, where, in contrast, he identifies anti-Traveller prejudice as an example of this kind of ethnocentric liberalism, and an expression of modern social rules of belonging in the nation-state.

Cillian McBride (Chapter 13), reflecting on experience of the practical institutionalisation of policies inspired by theories of recognition, defends the ongoing value of toleration for the construction of a shared future for a divided society such as Northern Ireland. Against challenges to toleration as embodying undesirably negative attitudes to minority practices and reflecting inequalities of social and political power, he claims that the proposed alternative of positive recognition fails to come to terms with the complex nature of struggles for recognition within a society like Northern Ireland. He outlines the range of kinds of recognition struggles evident within Northern Ireland, and defends a model of equal respect, grounding both toleration and civility, as the most desirable and realistic basis for a shared future for citizens of divided societies.

The editors’ conclusion draws out some comparisons and contrasts between the preceding chapters, and between the responses to the various challenges that have arisen in Ireland, North and South. It considers how comparable are the issues arising, to what extent are similar or different frames of reference in operation in the two jurisdictions, and what are the limits of tolerance in terms of institutions, policies and attitudes. It concludes by examining whether there are lessons to be learnt by comparing practices on each side of the border.

This book approaches the accommodation of religious, ethnic and cultural