Beyond the Catholic-Protestant divide : religious and ethnic diversity in the North and South of Ireland

This paper explores the challenges posed by the ethnic diversification of contemporary Irish society for conventional understandings of and responses to issues of religion, community and politics. It argues that the particularities of social and institutional histories and structures in the North and South have eclipsed wider considerations of both race and ethnicity and religious identity beyond the Catholic-Protestant divide. This has, in turn, served to obscure the many dynamic changes that such diversity has catalysed both within Irish civil society generally, and within the island’s traditional religious institutions themselves. The paper discusses the promises and potentials of conceptualising religion or religious identity and the relationships between religion and ethnicity within broader cultural and political fields, and their implications for the “new” (multicultural) Ireland.