A shared future: territoriality, pluralism and public
policy in Northern Ireland
Brian Graham a,*, Catherine Nash b,1
a
School of Environmental Sciences, University of Ulster, Cromore Road, Coleraine,
Northern Ireland BT52 1SA, UK
b
Department of Geography, Queen Mary, University of London, Mile End Road, London E9 7HA, UK
Abstract
This paper addresses the making of post-conﬂict public policy in Northern Ireland. In particular it considers
an extended consultation process, A Shared Future: Improving Relations in Northern Ireland, initiated
in January 2003 by the Community Relations Unit of the Ofﬁce of the First Minister and Deputy First
Minister, as a response to the statutory requirement to further ‘good relations’ as speciﬁed in the 1998 Belfast
Agreement and the subsequent Northern Ireland Act (1998). This public consultation process invited
responses to a set of core principles for a plural but socially cohesive society and a series of policy options
for fostering ‘good relations’. In this paper we discuss the Shared Future process within the context of the
consociational underpinnings of the 1998 Agreement and the ways in which it foregrounds ideas of cultural
diversity and pluralism but fails to engage adequately with the temporal and spatial dimensions of identities
in Northern Ireland. Secondly, we explore both the difﬁculties of making policy that will encourage a pluralist
but cohesive polity in a context in which territoriality dominates identity at state, local and even individual
scales, and the problems of the ways the Shared Future policy seeks to replace ethnocratic or
ethno-nationalist markers with those of ‘normal’ identities in ‘normal’ capitalist material space. We conclude
with reﬂections on the limitations of consociational democratic practices in a society that has democratically
mandated political parties promoting territorially-based ethno-nationalist ideologies.
Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Keywords: Community relations; Consociation; Equity; Pluralism; Policy; Space; Territoriality
* Corresponding author. Tel.: þ44 2870 323399; fax: þ44 2870 324411.
E-mail addresses: bj.graham@ulster.ac.uk (B. Graham), c.nash@qmul.ac.uk (C. Nash).
1
Tel.: þ44 20 7882 3153; fax: þ44 20 8981 6276.
0962-6298/$ - see front matter Ó 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.polgeo.2005.12.006
Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
www.elsevier.com/locate/polgeo
Introduction
Signiﬁcant changes in governance and legislative frameworks have resulted from the implementation
of the 1998 Belfast Agreement (henceforth, Agreement) that established the basis for
a new power-sharing devolved administration for Northern Ireland. Despite the suspension of
the devolved Assembly in 2002, the re-organized government departments continue to follow
through the terms of the Agreement under direct rule. The establishment of new statutory bodies
such as the Equality Commission, the Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission, and the
production of a Programme for Government by the Northern Ireland Executive (2001) is a reﬂection
of this. Despite the impasse over the reinstatement of the Assembly, the ongoing implementation
of the Northern Ireland Act of 1998 exempliﬁes the combination of intractably
opposed political positions and the push towards alternatives that characterizes all political
and cultural debate in Northern Ireland. This paper focuses on one signiﬁcant public consultation
process that sought to elicit widespread public engagement in a debate about the principles
that should underpin a future post-conﬂict society in Northern Ireland, and the policies through
which it should be achieved. A Shared Future: Improving Relations in Northern Ireland was
launched by the Community Relations Unit of the Ofﬁce of the First Minister and Deputy First
Minister in January 2003 (henceforth, OFMDFM, 2003). Over 500 written responses from
groups and individuals were received over the following nine months (these can be accessed
at www.asharedfutureni.gov.uk/listresponses.htm). These responses, together with the proceedings
of a conference held in January 2004 to discuss them, later informed The Policy and Strategic
Framework for Good Relations in Northern Ireland made available in draft form in
December 2004 before ﬁnal revision in 2005 (henceforth, OFMDFM, 2004). The overarching
aim of this paper is to examine the tensions between this state-led policy and the reality of a divided
society that remains dominated by entrenched political positions and afﬁliations which
contest the legitimacy of the state.
The establishment of Northern Ireland in 1921 resulted from an attempt to guarantee an electoral
majority for those who wished to remain in the United Kingdom (UK) but created a (large)
minority for whom the existence of Northern Ireland violated the ‘natural’ unity of the ‘Irish
nation’. Ostensibly, this constitutional issue was resolved by the 1998 Agreement in that Northern
Ireland will remain part of UK until a majority agree otherwise, while the Republic of Ireland
subsequently repealed its constitutional claim to the six counties. Yet, while unionists/
loyalists believe that the national question is now settled, for nationalists and especially for republicans
both Northern Ireland and the Peace Process can be seen as interim arrangements on
the road to a united Ireland. In this paper we explore the contradictions of policy measures intended
to promote both pluralism and participatory democracy in this unagreed polity in which
pluralist alternatives to ethno-nationalism lack any effective democratic mandate. Instead, the
electorate has endorsed its antagonism to ideas of pluralism, hybridity and diversity. Nevertheless,
the aspirations of A Shared Future also reﬂect the broader and longer-term ‘public interest’
in creating a society that can contain ethnic conﬂict.
In Northern Ireland the classical tensions between ideals of equality and claims to difference,
and between individual liberty and collective rights, are inﬂected by conﬂicting ethnonational
perspectives on the meaning of the good, the just and the right. Identity remains vested
in traditional principles of ethno-nationalism that locate cultural belonging and citizenship in
a ‘living space’ deﬁned by clearly demarcated boundaries and zero-sum models of space and
place. Senses of belonging correspond to a geography of territoriality that is both the basis
of the most essentialized group identities and the potent focus of national mobilization
254 B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
(Yiftachel, 2002). In general terms, territoriality is put into practice through four mechanisms
that combine a mixture of consent and coercion (Agnew, 2002; Graham, 1998a): a popular acceptance
of zero-sum classiﬁcations of space that support hegemonic control over space; the
integration of past and present into narratives that create a sense of place and identity and underpin
the legitimacy of political ideologies; territorial markers and boundaries which act both
as symbols of internal cohesion and external warning; and an enforcement of control over space
by surveillance and policing which, in this context, includes the activities of paramilitary organizations.
Territoriality works at a variety of scales and policies from the workplace and home
to the world as a whole (Sack, 1986). Nationalist/republican and unionist/loyalist relationships
to place in Northern Ireland are often read simply in terms of respective narratives of native
dispossession and settler mission to civilise and stay in the face of resistance. While these narratives
may shape attitudes to the meaning of place in Northern Ireland, the microgeographies
of segregation and struggles for territorial control are between communities that are themselves
differentiated by class, lifestyle and gender and by the internal fragmentation, particularly of
unionism/loyalism, but also nationalism/republicanism.
In this paper we take up a recent call for geographical attention to democracy’s routine procedures
and policy matters, as well as the normative underpinning of processes of representation
and participation (Barnett & Lowe, 2004), by exploring governmental policy measures
designed to promote both pluralism and participatory democracy. As Barnett and Low
(2004: 8) attest, democracy invites a geographical analysis since:
the relationship between democratic participation and democratic decision making turns
on a paradox of scale e on the problem of how to institutionalize effective citizen participation
in functionally complex, socially differentiated, and spatially and numerically
extensive societies.
In Northern Ireland this usual ‘paradox of scale’ is deeply complicated by a situation in
which the usual principles of majoritarian democracy do not resolve conﬂict nor guarantee
a minimal level of acceptance of the legitimacy of the state. Here we consider a state-led policy
initiative in a context in which the state itself is the subject of fundamental dispute. If democracy
is best understood, as Barnett and Lowe (2004) suggest, as that mobile, mutating and essentially
contested political form, what counts as productive and what counts as destructive
contestation in the context of Northern Ireland? If the state can furnish a useful structure for
the democratic negotiation of competing interests, in what way can contestation be channelled
to allow the necessary degree of political stability in a context in which the state is itself the
subject of apparently irreconcilable political differences? How can effective citizen participation
be achieved in a society that is both socially differentiated and structured through political
discourses that are openly antagonistic to pluralistic ideas of hybridity and diversity?
While Northern Ireland is not a state per se but a devolved constituent region of the UK,
some of the recent literature concerning the persistence of ethno-national states or ethnocracies
provides pertinent perspectives. Yiftachel and Ghanem (2004: 651) argue that ethnocracies are
driven ‘by a concerted collective project of exerting ethno-national control over a territory perceived
as the nation’s (exclusive) homeland.’ Similarly, Paasi (1999) points to the ways in which
the interconnection of identity and territory is fundamental to dominant political orders and
their mechanisms of control, while, among others, Sibley reiterates the long-understood argument
that the nationestate is sustained by a myth of cultural homogeneity, it also being convenient
‘to have an alien other hovering on the margins’ (Sibley, 1996: 108). Although all
these writers are focusing at the scale of the state, Northern Ireland is one among a number
255B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
of territories that demonstrates the functioning of ethno-nationalism at the sub-state scale as
competing micro-ethnocracies attempt to carve out exclusive territories which essentially function
as alternative worlds, each with its own myth of homogeneity but enforced by ‘ethnic
cleansing’, alternative ‘policing’ by paramilitary organizations and demarcated by parallel cultural,
social and educational structures.
While the hegemony of ethnocratic control is complicated by class, being most starkly apparent
in working-class areas, the principal political parties in Northern Ireland, Sinn Fe´in and
the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), both espouse ethnocratic ideologies. When interpreted
through this prism of ethno-nationalism, the term ‘shared society’ is shaded by ambiguity, referring
equally to agreement on living apart as well as living together but differently.
Although the Shared Future process follows through the terms of the Agreement, which was
democratically endorsed both by political representatives and by referenda in Northern Ireland
and the Republic of Ireland, voting patterns since suggest an erosion of support and continued
or worsening division. In the 2003 Northern Ireland Assembly elections, Sinn Fe´in (23.5 per
cent of the vote), with its historical legacy of ‘physical-force’ republicanism, eclipsed the nationalist
Social and Democratic Labour Party (SDLP; 17 per cent) as the leading political force
in one community, while the anti-Agreement DUP with 25.6 per cent of the vote replaced the
Ulster Unionist Party (UUP; 22.7 per cent) as the dominant party in the other. In 1998, the UUP
and SDLP, the principal supporters of the Agreement, were in the ascendant. The Alliance
Party, which consciously appeals to a cross-community constituency, received only ﬁve per
cent of the vote in 2003. The same pattern of Sinn Fe´in/DUP domination was repeated in
the 2004 European Parliament elections and, although the SDLP maintained its position in
the 2005 UK General Election, the DUP eradicated the UUP which was left with only one
member of parliament.
The electoral primacy of Sinn Fe´in and the DUP can thus be read as the democratic endorsement
of a form of apartheid. The Shared Future process has to be situated in this context of
deeply rooted segregation and zero-sum ethnocratic politics. Those drafting policy are thus required
to both fulﬁl the terms of the Agreement and satisfy political leaders and their electorate,
unionists in particular, who are now less supportive of the Agreement. Thus, while a ‘divided
society’ of fear, distrust, antagonism and sectarian division, reﬂected in sub-state segregation
and territoriality, is the focus of the attempts to legislate for the development of a plural society
and ‘neutral’ public space, patterns of territoriality simultaneously challenge this process. Since
both residential segregation and the cultural marking of public space are the most overt indexes
of division in Northern Ireland, developing a policy towards residential segregation and the territorial
marking of public space are prominent aspects of the consultation and resulting strategy
documents.
Our discussion of these documents and selected responses to them is divided into four sections.
The ﬁrst outlines the development of A Shared Future within the context of the consociational
underpinnings of the 1998 Agreement and the ways in which the process
necessarily foregrounds ideas of cultural diversity and pluralism. It is argued that it does so
at the expense of a sustained engagement with the temporal and spatial dimensions of identities
in Northern Ireland. Secondly, we use the concept of territoriality to explore the difﬁculties of
fostering a pluralist but cohesive society in a context in which territoriality dominates identity
at state, local and even individual scales. Thirdly, the paper considers the ways in which A
Shared Future seeks to replace ethnocratic or ethno-nationalist markers of identity with those
of ‘normal’ capitalist material space, before concluding with an assessment of the limitations of
256 B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
consociational democratic practices in a society that has democratically mandated political
parties which espouse ethno-nationalist ideologies vested in territoriality.
Towards a shared future
The 1998 Agreement
The origins of the Shared Future consultation lie in the extended history of political negotiation
based on the principle of consociation, a form of government that seeks to hold together
divided societies by accommodation at the elite level (Tonge, 2005), that underpin both the
1998 Agreement and subsequent Northern Ireland Act. As O’Leary (1999) argues, the Agreement
meets all four of Lijphart’s (1977) criteria on a consociational agreement:
 cross-community collective power-sharing;
 proportionality rules throughout the governmental and public sectors;
 community self-government and equality in cultural life; and
 veto rights for minorities.
In general, consociational agreements are ‘often the equilibrium outcomes of bargains or
pacts between the political leaders of ethnic or religious communities’ (O’Leary, 1999: 68).
In the present context, the third criterion is of particular signiﬁcance in that ‘consociational
agreements avoid the compulsory integration of peoples: instead they seek to manage differences
equally and justly’ (O’Leary, 1999: 76). To this end, bi-nationalism lies at the core of
the Agreement, a characteristic which means, however, that it can be held to institutionalise
and freeze national and sectarian identities. As critics have argued, parity of esteem could cement
the existing blocs and thus become a charter for apartheid rather than transition. O’Leary
(1999: 78) admits to the merit of this criticism:
Utopianism is evident in the axiom that identities as historically developed as those in
Northern Ireland can be rapidly channelled into more desirable individualist or class
identities.
Nevertheless he contends that:
consociational settlements can, and indeed should, be transitional e by protecting and
making secure the most presently dominant identities they may assist in diminishing their
public salience, and permitting a deeper pluralism to ﬂourish (O’Leary, 1999: 78).
While there were always obvious caveats to the Agreement e decommissioning of paramilitary
organizations and their weapons; demilitarization; police reform; and prisoner release e
O’Leary’s optimism can be tempered by four further factors which are relevant to this analysis
of A Shared Future. These centre on the wider dilemma that political processes e and, as Marston
(2004) has agued, also political geography e often fail to engage with cultural questions in
theorising the state. As Painter (1995) has observed, state processes are symbolic as well as
material, as much about invocations of meaning and performance as policy and legislation.
First, issues concerning responsibility for the past were subordinated in the Agreement to the
forging of a consociational political consensus. Van Dusen (2004: 29) argues that ‘culture acts
without regard to rights, and the state acts to mediate cultural conﬂicts, in terms of rights’. Although
this comment is not applicable to ethnocracies where the state and culture are ostensibly
257B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
as one, the mediating role of the state can also be undermined by sub-state ethno-nationalism.
As Bell (2003: 1144) contends, the inherently elitist consociational ‘Agreement was fashioned
so as to avoid the need for a societal narrative’. It contains ‘no mechanism for dealing with past
abuses, or ‘‘truth-telling’’’ (Bell, 2003: 1097). Simultaneously, however, the Agreement exacerbated
other problematic elements of Northern Irish politics, most notably the reiﬁcation of the
hegemonic status of the ‘two traditions’ paradigm through using the legacy of the past to make
what could be seen as an ‘exemption for one group . into a universal right that applied to all’.
The obvious example is the right to communicate in a language other than English, equal status
being given to Irish and Ulster-Scots so that there were ‘alternative languages for everyone’
(Little, 2004: 81).
Secondly, a signiﬁcant if unforeseen result of the Agreement has been a ‘depoliticalization
of society’ matched by an escalating stress on identity and culture:
at the expense of the old contesting politics of national sovereignty, self-determination
and independence. As the constitutional question arising from these contests has diminished,
the focus has shifted to the problem of sectarianism (Tonge, 2005: 7).
Although the ‘politics of national sovereignty’ are obviously about competing models of cultural
nationalism and their expression through the nation-state, presenting the problem of
Northern Ireland as sectarianism rather than the legitimacy of the state, reductively locates
the source of conﬂict in religious differences alone. Sectarianism, which can be deﬁned as ‘religious
bigotry, the promotion of one’s religion or religious background at the expense of the
alternative’ (Tonge, 2005: 192), is a common deﬁning characteristic of the ethnocratic state.
Nevertheless, religion, while marginalized in other contexts, remains ‘an accepted and sometimes
overpowering agent’ (Little, 2004: 76) in Northern Ireland, yet it has always overlapped
with secular forms of conﬂict more accurately deﬁned as ethnic or nationalist (Coulter, 1999) to
encourage ‘separatism, intolerance and chauvinism, patriarchalism and authoritarianism’
(Fraser, 2000: 108). In Northern Ireland, the attempt to deal with sub-state patterns of ethnosectarian
antagonism though principles of parity of cultural respect and esteem has inadvertently
created a legitimating vocabulary of ‘culture’ and ‘cultural rights’ for antagonistic expressions
of separatist difference. In this context, an attentiveness to the cultural in political
geography entails exploring the effects of a pervasive but differently inﬂected discourse of politics
as culture.
Thirdly, while the Agreement addresses the political geography of Northern Ireland in terms
of state jurisdiction, it fails to address the territoriality embedded in Northern Ireland politics
and society and the ways in which identities remain ﬁrmly vested in ethnically-deﬁned and often
very local places (Graham, 1998b). The social construction of scale by the actions of groups
and individuals has been explored by Flint (2004) through the terminology of ‘spaces of hate’
which seems appropriate to the ethno-nationalist politics of Northern Ireland. Drawing upon
Sack (1986), he observes the continuing importance of territoriality for ‘hate groups’, which
delimit and assert control over geographic areas and support ideas of enclosed or sealed places.
Thus border construction and maintenance are important to this pursuit of territorially deﬁned
politics, which is ‘a feature of politics within places rather than the preserve of international
affairs’ (Flint, 2004: 8). Gallaher’s (2004) comment regarding the US Militia Movement that
the ‘last line of defence’ is the scale of the local has also distinct resonances with territoriality
in Northern Ireland which is concerned as much with internal control of ethnic territories as
with their bounded delineation. As Paasi (2003) observes, identities and differences are actualized
in many ways on several spatial scales and localized identities, especially when conﬁgured
258 B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
through ideas of race, gender, religious or class difference (Harvey, 1993), and ‘are among the
most dynamic bases for both progressive political mobilization and reactionary, exclusive politics’
(Paasi, 2003: 476).
Finally, the concept of equality between the ‘two traditions’ embodied in the Agreement is
undermined by the inability of fragmented unionism and loyalism to match the ideological certainties
espoused by republicanism and particularly by Sinn Fe´in. While the history of republicanism
does not necessarily conform to the smooth, linear narrative often claimed by the
movement, it clearly is characterised by a more centrally controlled ideology and coherent infrastructure
than is loyalism. Arguably, these different mindsets are reﬂected in the varying capacities
of loyalist and republican politicians to control their communities, a factor quite crucial
in the realisation of the goals of A Shared Future.
Community relations policy in a consociational context
In line with its consociational principles, the Agreement and subsequent legislation has established
statutory responsibilities to address issues of equality and ‘good relations’ and to implement
the terms of the Act through new government department structures, legislation and
policy. Building upon existing community relations policy and practice whose original framework
had been developed in the late 1980s, inter-communal division has been addressed
through the funding, policy-making and advisory functions of the Central Community Relations
Unit (CCRU), Community Relations Council (CRC) and District Councils Community
Relations Programme. In addition, educational policy initiatives include the cross-community
contact schemes for schools and sports, youth, community groups, support for integrated education
and curriculum attention to education for mutual understanding and cultural heritage
(Nash, 2005a). The Harbison Review of Community Relations Policy (Harbison, 2002)
concluded, however, that, despite limited achievements, community relations policies have
not resulted in any lessening of division as measured by greater integration of housing and
education.
A Shared Future (OFMDFM, 2003) is clearly informed by this conclusion. It opens by advancing
a vision of Northern Ireland as a ‘peaceful society in which everyone can freely and
fully participate, achieve their full potential, and live free from poverty’ with ‘a fair and effective
system of government, underpinned by rights that are guaranteed for all, and responsibilities that
all must share’. It emphasizes government support for ‘dialogue’ and desire to ‘foster mutual
understanding and respect for diversity’ (OFMDFM, 2003: np). However, this positive vision
of Northern Ireland is followed immediately by a stark summary of present patterns of deep division,
including: segregation in housing, work, leisure and schooling; new patterns of racism; as
well as intra- and inter-communal antagonism and violence at interfaces between deprived communities.
Yet, this explicit admission can serve different sorts of political arguments about the
nature and cause of division. While presented as evidence of the need to address separation,
the conclusions pointing to the limited achievements of community relations policy were welcomed
e albeit from different perspectives e in the subsequent responses of both Sinn Fe´in
and the UUP. For the former, it conﬁrms their traditional antipathies to the CRC which they
see as misdirecting attention away from the role of the illegitimate state in creating division.
Moreover, republicans accuse the CRC of perpetuating the idea that the conﬂict was between
‘two traditions’ whereas the British state was a full party to the ‘war’ and remains committed
to attacking republicanism by other means including the ‘active reproduction of sectarianism’
259B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
(Sinn Fe´in, 2003: np). The UUP is critical of the CRC for funding groups antagonistic to the state
and in particular to what they take as the tenet of CRC policy which supports republican claims
for ‘equality’. This critique is expressed, however, in terms of the language of pluralism that,
superﬁcially at least, mirrors the language of consociational consensus:
Community relations policy has been based on the wrong premise . that . being an
undeﬁned notion of ‘‘equality’’ in the sense of a policy designed to achieve ‘‘neutrality’’
as opposed to one of tolerance and mutual respect in a truly pluralist society (UUP, 2003:
np).
Tensions between respect for collective identities, freedom of expression, social cohesion,
cultural difference, collective rights, individualism and equality are threaded through A Shared
Future and foregrounded in many responses to it. The original consultation document was
structured by a series of statements of aims, objectives and principles. Respondents were invited
to engage with these statements and comment on a range of choices for reorganizing local,
regional and central government policy, support and measures addressing division, all
within the context of one overarching objective:
Our strong belief is that Northern Ireland must become a society where there is equality,
respect for diversity and a recognition that we are interdependent on each other. We believe
the aim of policy must, therefore, be to develop a more shared and pluralist society
(OFMDFM, 2003: np).
This statement was framed by a choice between accepting, stabilizing and managing division
or promoting rapid progress towards ‘a more integrated and shared society’. Thus A Shared
Future posed the question of the nature of a desired future and also the appropriate temporality
of change.
A series of speciﬁc policy aims were proposed for consideration which were intended:
to support the development of integrated/shared communities where people wish to learn,
live, work and play together; to encourage communication, tolerance and trust in areas
where communities are living apart; to promote respect, encouragement and celebration
of different cultures, faiths and traditions; to eliminate sectarianism and racism and to enable
individuals to live and work without fear or intimidation; to reduce tension and conﬂict
at interface areas; and to shape polices, practices and institutions to enable trust and
good relations to grow (OFMDFM, 2003: np).
Respondents were similarly invited to consider a set of proposed principles on which the
promotion of good relations in Northern Ireland could be based. Drawing on the recommendations
of the Harbison Review, these were:
 the need to acknowledge the prevalence and problem of division ‘between and within
communities’;
 the need for leadership;
 the need for ‘long-term, cross Government and co-ordinated action’;
 ‘widespread ownership and engagement’;
 the importance of local action;
 targeted support on areas with ‘a high incidence or history of poor relations and conﬂict and
deprivation’ as well as young people and support to communities that ‘have developed .
good practice’;
260 B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
and strongly reﬂecting the terms of the Agreement;
 the need to situate community relations throughout Northern Ireland within ‘a broader complex
of relationships, cross-border, NortheSouth and EasteWest’.
A constructive ambiguity?
The nature of the document and the responses to it, points to the particular difﬁculties of
establishing democratic forms of governance in post-conﬂict contexts, and wider debates about
adjudicating between competing claims within and about the nature of a pluralist ‘shared society’
and ‘shared space’. Such tensions frame the aspirational nature of A Shared Future, a document
criticized as being ‘high in pious sentiments’ and ‘vague statements of goodwill’ (ICTU,
2003: 2), but lacking e perhaps intentionally e any working deﬁnitions of key terms. Prominent
among these are: sectarianism; racism; conﬂict; reconciliation; criminality; integration;
and sharing. With one or two notable exceptions (for example, Alliance Party, Northern Ireland
Women’s Coalition), this same deﬁnitional elusiveness is mirrored in the submissions. In contrast,
the Alliance Party’s approach is to deﬁne sectarianism as an essentialist understanding of
identity, in which the individual is deﬁned by the community into which she/he is born. In
Northern Ireland, this is most likely to be a religious community which, as we have seen, overlaps
with secular ethnic markers more often deﬁned as ethnic or nationalist (Coulter, 1999).
This attempt to deﬁne the central terms is lacking in A Shared Future which also does not distinguish
between conﬂict management, conﬂict transformation and conﬂict resolution. It addresses
only the former (Ultach Trust, 2003) whereas conﬂict transformation refers literally
to methods that alter the nature of the conﬂict from violence to some other means (Lederach,
1997). In helping transform the relationships, interests and discourses which support the continuation
of violent conﬂict, these methods operate at a number of levels from the individual to
the state and can involve structural change addressing injustice and inequality in the social
structure as a whole. Conﬂict transformation is not synonymous with conﬂict resolution, which,
logically, is an unattainable goal in these circumstances as the outcome would be to make
Northern Ireland either entirely British or entirely Irish.
Rather, A Shared Future envisages a future Northern Ireland in which conﬂict is replaced by
pluralism (deﬁned by the Alliance Party, 2003 as being the state in which difference is no longer
a major issue), even if this future can only be fostered rather than enforced (CRC, 2003). In
trying to implement the statutory responsibility to address ‘good relations’ as set out in Section
75 of the Agreement and produce public policy in a context in which there is profound disagreement
over the nature of the state, the document necessarily de-emphasises the fundamentally
opposed political positions which such integration might replace. A Shared Future thus
follows the ‘constructive ambiguity’ of the ‘key documents of the peace process’ which ‘could
be interpreted in various ways to suit the receiving audience’ (Dixon, 2002: 736). This constructive
ambiguity may, however, have equally uncertain outcomes. In remaining conceptually
superﬁcial and keeping to the relatively safe language of pluralism in order to avoid alienating
any one group, it could prompt an engagement that ultimately leads to progressive change, or it
may allow resistance to change to be expressed through a legitimized language of pluralism.
The difﬁculty for the civil servants drafting policy that can meet the approval of elected political
leaders from opposed positions, is how to ‘keep groups on board’ through constructive ambiguity
while, simultaneously, clearly elucidating the focus, objectives, principles and strategies
261B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
of an effective ‘good relations’ policy. The responses to A Shared Future indicate what is at
stake in achieving consensus in a contested state and divided society.
A shared space?
In extending the debate on a shared but plural society, but one viewed through the countervailing
prism of territoriality, this third section of the paper focuses on the impediments to the
ways in which such a vision could be translated into new geographies of identity, residence and
social life within Northern Ireland at state, local and even individual scales.
From ‘divided society’ to’ shared society’?
A central aim of the consultation process summarised in the Draft Strategy Document
(OFMDFM, 2004) was to seek agreement on policies and perspectives that could effectively
address the geographical segregation and division that characterize society in Northern Ireland.
Alternative spatialities to deeply divided and antagonistic senses of identity and territorial geographies
of belonging are being explored, for example, in local history projects (Nash, 2005b)
feminist visual art and other cultural forms and social movements (Reid, 2004, 2005). Nevertheless,
segregation, the territorial nature of community identity at the local level and the ethnonationalist
and sectarian cultural marking of public space are likely to persist for some time in
Northern Ireland. This makes it extremely difﬁcult to envisage how an effective vision of pluralism
and diversity might inform and reﬁgure the everyday geographies of human life.
In the post-Agreement era, the conﬂict in Northern Ireland remains inherently territorial and
the ‘ground’ a key political resource. Territoriality reﬂects the continuing importance of place
to social networks and mental and emotional bindings while control of space is still regarded as
being crucial to identity, power and politics. It also remains a key factor in the conﬂict in general,
‘a symbol of political domination and political practice’ (Shirlow, 2001: 69), being most
acutely experienced at interfaces and through the ‘chill factors’ which they both help symbolize
and deﬁne, but also through the minutiae of daily routine, travel patterns and social networks
(Shirlow, Mesev, & McMullan, 1999). Identities in Northern Ireland remain constructed around
territoriality which essentially replicates nationalist ideologies at the local scale. The republican
metanarrative is ostensibly much stronger than that of fragmented loyalism, which is seen by
the Progressive Unionist Party (PUP: the political wing of the Ulster Volunteer Force, 2003)
as one repercussion of a British government programme to ‘demonise/criminalise all loyalists’
and so protect the UUP. While the Shared Future and Draft Strategy documents address residential
segregation and the public marking of identity and territory in their focus on social policy,
institutional structures and monitoring, the key question remains: how can a cultural policy
advocating pluralism and diversity be implemented when territoriality deﬁnes the dominant set
of values within the divided communities and marks their irreconcilable or, at best, intractable
differences?
Few responses raised the issue of dealing with representations of the past and their role in
legitimating territorial myths. Since 1998, the rival territorial ideologies have imposed their
own narratives of time and place onto the cultural landscapes of Northern Ireland. These processes
have become institutionalized as inadvertent outcomes of ‘single identity work’ and
funding for ‘community building capital’, policies which have been premised on the idea
that meaningful alternatives to division depend on ﬁrstly building up community conﬁdence
and self-understanding (Nash, 2005a). Nevertheless, A Shared Future (OFMDFM, 2003)
262 B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
does not raise the question of historical understanding and it is thus unsurprising that the responses
and subsequent Draft Strategy Document (OFMDFM, 2004) also have little to say concerning
the signiﬁcance of the interconnection of territoriality and representations of the past to
‘good’ (and poor) relations. The Presbyterian Church submission provides a rare exception in
arguing that we have to deal with the past not in the sense of being trapped in it but moving on:
‘We do not, however, believe that the past can be left to deal with itself’ (Presbyterian Church,
2003: np). The PUP links the past with class betrayal, arguing that nationalists:
seek to ghettoize society by labelling the history and culture of another community as
illegitimate. The [unionist] middle classes that have sought to distance themselves
from their own history ably support them (PUP, 2003: np).
While neglecting the deep relationships between historical memory, territorialized space and
community identity, the consultation and strategy documents embody the idea that ‘a shared
society’ stands as an alternative to a divided society. A Shared Future argues that:
We should aim for: a shared society in which people are encouraged to make choices in
their lives that are not bound by historical divisions and are free to do so; and a pluralist
society, with respect and tolerance for cultural diversity, where people are free to assert
their identity (OFMDFM, 2003: np) [emphasis in original].
A ‘shared society’ is ﬁgured here in terms of choice and freedom from the constraints that
are the product of ‘historical division’ and, by implication, of territoriality, and of a pluralism
that accommodates the freedom of people to express their identity as individuals, and implicitly
but importantly, as groups. This represents an attempt to negotiate the tensions between individualism
and communal identities, ﬁdelity to cultural particularity and freedom of expression.
Yet, the assurances that follow this statement suggest the ways in which arguments about diversity
and pluralism can be interpreted through a model of the social based either on separatist
difference or the assimilation of difference. The authors acknowledge this and attempt to allay
anxiety about the basis of a new and shared society:
No one is arguing for an artiﬁcially homogenous Northern Ireland, and no one will be
asked to give up or suppress his or her chosen identity. We recognise the views of those
who do not wish to have closer integration of communities. However, we believe that
a shared and pluralist society should be encouraged, and people who want to live in
such a society should have that choice e a choice that is currently limited (OFMDFM,
2003: np).
This reassurance that arguments for pluralism do not stand for an idea of an ‘artiﬁcially homogeneous
Northern Ireland’ and that pluralism does not entail anyone giving up or suppressing
their ‘chosen identity’ are directed to the widespread and differently inﬂected concerns
about the costs of any accommodation of difference. In a zero-sum model of pluralism in which
the recognition of the value of another tradition is read as undermining the value of one’s own,
achieving a shared set of social values will inevitably mean loss of respect, recognition or status
for one group and gain for another. The solution to division can only be assimilation, separatism
or minimalist consociation. Behind this paragraph with its telling foregrounding of the problems
of recognizing separatist positions that reject pluralism and closer integration in favour
of culturalist difference within a plural society, are years of political negotiation between
two broad constituencies both opposed to their ‘assimilation’ as subordinate minorities into
a majority culture of the British or Irish state. This is illustrated, perhaps unintentionally, by
263B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
A Shared Future’s visual motif e a photograph of Maurice Harron’s statue, ‘Hands across the
divide’, sited at the western end of the Craigavon Bridge which connects Londonderry’s Protestant
Waterside to Derry’s almost entirely Catholic Cityside. This dramatic depiction of two
ﬁgures almost but not quite touching outwardly stretched hands sums up the ambiguity of division
in Northern Ireland. Conventionally, the artwork is interpreted as an optimistic if guarded
step towards reconciliation by the people of this divided city. Equally, though, it can be read as
saying, ‘this far and no further’, by people who regard their differences as irreconcilable but are
agreed on seeking a means at state, sub-state and individual scales of living together but apart
that eschews the violence of the Troubles.
The contested state: sharing and pluralism
Although there was widespread general acceptance of the need to address division and work
towards a shared society in responses to the consultation document, the divergence of views on
what sharing and pluralism might mean and how they could be achieved reﬂects wider political
perspectives. As Darby and Knox (2004) observe, this is a major issue as different people and
groups are using the language of a shared future in different ways. Some republican critiques of
multiculturalism, especially when framed by civic unionist claims about the tradition of tolerance
of difference in the British state, argue that the language of tolerance and diversity is used
to encourage Northern Irish Catholics to accept the political legitimacy of Northern Ireland. For
the republican former prisoner umbrella group, Coiste Na n-larchimı´ (Coiste), community relations
are part of a British government and Northern Ireland Ofﬁce (1998) strategy to try to
delegitimate republicanism by criminalizing it (Coiste, 2003). Republicans contend that
community relations policy has ﬁgured conﬂict in Northern Ireland as the product of internal
division and so absolved the state’s responsibility for colonialism, imperialism, partition and
post-partition discrimination, and repression under unionist leadership and under direct rule.
In turn, arguments for the recognition of diversity and espousal of pluralism can be read as
attempts to encourage Protestants to feel included in, and thus support, the ideal of a plural
but united Ireland.
For some, A Shared Future espoused pluralism but failed to set out the plural and conﬂicting
patterns of political and cultural identiﬁcation, and so effectively failed to acknowledge them.
Its attempt to create a set of shared values in a context of conﬂict and division by avoiding the
territorial question was read as support for the current condition of devolution which nationalists
regard as an interim arrangement. Sinn Fe´in’s response to A Shared Future is strongly critical
of its explicit failure to acknowledge nationalist perspectives. The party advocates
amending the overall aim of policy on good relations ‘to promote equality, value diversity
and to recognise inter-dependence of all individuals and communities across the island of Ireland.’
Sinn Fe´in argues that unionists ‘would ﬁnd nothing inimical in the consultation paper’,
whereas the absence of reference to nationalist aspiration, the Irish government and the Irish
language imposes a model of ‘homogenization’, here understood as the neutralization and assimilation
of nationalist identities into a majority unionist culture, in place of the ‘consociationalism
that is at the heart of the Good Friday Agreement’; ‘[t]he fact that nearly half the
population do not have a vision for ‘‘Northern Ireland’’ beyond a new constitutional island
wide settlement is not mentioned.’ (Sinn Fe´in, 2003: np).
In contrast, the Alliance Party challenges the ‘benign Apartheid’ of this consociation of ‘separate
but equal communities’ (Alliance Party, 2003: 6), questioning not only the understanding
264 B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
of Northern Irish society in terms of ‘two communities’ because of the way it elides crosscommunity
commonalities and misrepresents the complexities of identiﬁcation, but also arguing
for the ‘creation of some overarching loyalties’ (Alliance Party, 2003: 27). Whereas the
consultation document avoids the idea of shared identity, using instead the potentially less potent
term, ‘shared society’, the Alliance Party posits two models of shared identity. One is
a minimalist approach, characterized by a mosaic of groups in a multicultural society with ‘little
sense of common interest’. Conversely, the ‘maximalist approach’ envisages a ‘common,
umbrella identity for the people of Northern Ireland [.] civic in nature’; ‘consistent with
the ideals of equal citizenship and universalism, in that identity would be essentially privatized,
with the group dynamic removed’ (Alliance Party, 2003: 27). Promoting Northern Ireland as ‘a
distinct region within a decentralizing British Isles and emerging Europe of the regions’ (Alliance
Party, 2003: 28) would, the party argues, provide the basis for a level of shared identiﬁcation
that might accommodate a range of other loyalties and identities. This could avoid both
the ideal of the (impossible) neutrality of the public sphere, and the absolute privatization of
cultural identity. The Alliance Party alone acknowledges that achieving a shared society based
on a shared identity and shared civic values would involve some revision or relinquishing of
established patterns of identiﬁcation.
Finding meaningful, effective and acceptable alternatives to territorial versions of collective
identity is fundamental to any realization of the society envisaged in the consultation document
in which cultural identity and attitudes to citizenship and civil rights, both group and individual,
are no longer interlinked in zero-sum, ethno-nationalist discourses. Conﬂict transformation depends
on effecting changes in the nature of socio-spatial relationships between loyalists and republicans,
unionists and nationalists. Republicanism, however, locates all its aspirations in
a pan-Ireland state. While Sinn Fe´in is a traditional ethno-nationalist organization, the party
is correct in claiming that the nationalist aspiration is omitted from A Shared Future which focuses
exclusively on Northern Ireland and does not address the role and agency of the British
state within the conﬂict. Thus the party proposes a Forum for National Reconciliation to be undertaken
‘through a participative process of political and civil engagement’ in order to ‘build
good relations across the island’. It advocates a Commission on National Reconciliation that
would examine and identify barriers to a wide set of relations: ‘between the communities of
people on the island of Ireland’; ‘within those communities in the border communities where
relations have been fractured by partition’; ‘between communities within the north of Ireland’;
‘within communities throughout the north of Ireland’; ‘with communities abroad which have
experience of political conﬂict’; and ‘most importantly at this juncture relations between the
institutions of the state and those communities which have been alienated and marginalized
from those institutions’ (Sinn Fe´in, 2003: np).
Given, however, that these proposals are clearly intended to alienate unionists, it is impossible
not to read Sinn Fe´in’s vision of a shared future as agreement on living apart until changing
demographics allows majoritarian democracy to deliver a united Ireland. Sinn Fe´in’s linking
of citizenship and cultural identity in an all-Ireland state is matched by unionist and loyalist
ideologies that locate both in the UK or Northern Ireland:
Yes . we can’t live apart because it isn’t feasible. However Republicans don’t want us to
have a choice, they have promoted and encouraged polarization (Castlereagh Borough
Council, 2003: np).
This statement, taken from the submission of a DUP-controlled local council, is, of course, actually
an argument for living apart but blaming the (culpable) other. Of the two principal
265B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
unionist parties, the DUP did not respond to the consultation process, which might be taken as
an indication of its attitudes to community relations and their cognate institutional structures,
while the UUP submitted a fairly perfunctory document that makes a commitment to a more
shared society but does not explore how this might be attained. It does acknowledge that
due to the legacy of violence and political uncertainty:
there are many within our society unable at this point to endorse . [the] aspiration [of
a shared society] . These views are legitimate and must be respected but equally these
must not constrain others who are willing and able to develop a more shared society
(UUP, 2003: np).
This is scarcely a ringing endorsement of a shared future and given the disinterest or partiality
of the other principal political parties, the question is stark: where is the democratic mandate
for living together? As we have argued, in voting for Sinn Fe´in and the DUP, the Northern
Ireland electorate has mandated political parties that espouse ethno-nationalist ideologies at
the expense of both the more pluralist SDLP and UUP. This raises profoundly difﬁcult but
important questions as to the ‘democratic deﬁcit’ implied in promoting diversity and
pluralism in a society which, explicitly, has rejected those concepts in successive democratic
forums.
Furthermore, while the Draft Strategy Document (OFMDFM, 2004) also reﬂects input from
those responses that argued for the need to consider the signiﬁcance of young people and
women in relation to questions of conﬂict, equality and reconciliation, it also reveals the limits
of its approach to diversity. In responding to the need to consider racism, the document argues
strongly for the economic and cultural value of diversity. However, in prefacing a section on
the value of new migrant workers and the need to address racism with the statement that:
‘Northern Ireland is no longer a bipolar society e it is enriched because it is becoming
more culturally diverse’ (OFMDFM, 2004: 18), the document reinforces the ‘two communities’
of the ‘biopolar’ model of difference that it is trying to undermine elsewhere and effectively
racializes diversity. A Shared Future conﬂates sectarianism and racism, the latter being
seen as little more than an adjunct to the former. Thus for minority ethnic groups, ‘it’s as if we
don’t exist’ (Bangladeshi Welfare Association, 2003: np). In its contribution to the consultation
process, the Ultach Trust, which promotes Irish language learning, argues that a conﬂictual
model of culture runs through the documents. Despite references to diversity, there is limited
understanding of ‘the complexities surrounding the issue of multiple, overlapping and shared
identities’, and ‘the potential healing power of a cultural diversity approach which transcends
zero-sum-game simplicities.’ This is evident in the inclusion of ‘a concern to maintain cultural
identity’ among the ﬁve cited reasons why ‘Northern Ireland remains a deeply segregated society
with little indication of progress towards becoming more tolerant or inclusive’ (Ultach
Trust, 2003: 1, 2). In response to criticisms that the terms, ‘community relations’ and ‘good
relations’, were ill-deﬁned in A Shared Future, the strategy document introduces a further
distinction:
‘‘Community relations’’ refers speciﬁcally to division between the Protestant and Catholic
communities in Northern Ireland. ‘‘Good relations’’ refers to Section 75 (2) of the
Northern Ireland Act 1998 which includes persons of different religious belief, political
opinion or racial group (OFMDFM, 2004: 5).
The document thus holds the ‘two communities’ model in place at the same time it introduces
a wider sense of ‘good relations’.
266 B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
Relationships between communities: localism and the territorial imperative
Although the referenda in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland that followed
the Agreement endorsed the ethos of equality and diversity, subsequent voting patterns, as we
have observed, suggest diminished support for such principles. A majority of the electorate has
voted to live apart, supporting political ideologies that entwine citizenship, civil rights and cultural
identity within micro-nationalist ‘what we have, we hold’ territories. Their monoculturalism
is ‘protected’ through attacks on ethnic minorities as well as the binary other. As one
submission observes:
We currently have apartheid and it is far from being benign. It is real. Protestant people in
North Belfast cannot have a vision . We are too busy struggling to hold on to what little
we have left without losing any more (North Belfast Community Empowerment Group,
2003: np).
This fearful reiteration of the importance of territorial hegemony obviously reﬂects the importance
of safety and security issues in interface areas. But, more widely, territorial hegemony
is also fundamental to the republican rejection of the British state and the creation of a parallel
or alternative universe from which state agencies are excluded unless, like social security services,
they are seen as conferring particular beneﬁts to communities. For loyalists, territoriality
can be a process of internalization, both against each other and also against republicanism in
a situation in which they feel disenfranchised by politics and politicians and lack of conﬁdence
in their own fragmented and unagreed identity (Graham, 2004).
This dual if disconnected sense of republican and loyalist identities being vested in local territories
is compounded by the legacy of the Troubles and the clear sense of class exploitation
that still exists. One response to the consultation argued that:
Middle class people in middle class jobs in middle class areas don’t know the reality of
working class people and don’t know what it’s like to live in areas of high conﬂict (North
Belfast Community Empowerment Group, 2003: np).
In loyalist areas, such alienation is compounded by a sense of fear of what is seen as the unitary
ideology of Sinn Fe´in and its perceived capacity to impose its will:
What passes for normal is horrendous. We feel powerless, unwanted, ‘‘nobody loves us’’.
Sinn Fe´in has a huge agenda e to get Protestants out and create electoral territory (North
Belfast Community Empowerment Group, 2003: np).
Such responses by a loyalist community group located in the ultra-ethno-sectarian space of
North Belfast could be seen as a reiteration of A Shared Future’s stereotypical depiction of sectarianism.
The consultation document is underpinned by class assumptions, linking sectarianism
to interfaces between loyalist and republican working-class communities (Northern
Ireland Women’s Coalition, 2003) rather than to the way in which it penetrates all elements
of society (ICTU, 2003). Yet, it does not acknowledge that the actual war was an intraworking-class
conﬂict largely fought in working-class areas, not least because of a deliberate
British policy of spatial containment, matched elsewhere by the embourgeoisment of a substantial
Catholic middle class (Graham & Shirlow, 1998). While support for ethno-nationalism is
strongest among the working classes and the stark communal divide remains ‘despite the
existence of two solidly working class parties [Sinn Fe´in and the DUP]’ (Tonge, 2005: 200),
territoriality is a more profound and extensive process. Although unacknowledged in A Shared
267B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
Future, it also encompasses and deﬁnes middle-class areas. In Derry/Londonderry, for example,
a detailed analysis of the 2001 Census of Population and survey evidence suggests that both
Protestants and Catholics are living in increasingly segregated residential areas (Shirlow et
al., 2005). Again, the stereotypical focus on urban interfaces obscures the issue that rural communities
are also markedly segregated. As the response from the Rural Community Network
made clear:
With no peace-walls sectarian interfaces in many rural areas are simply marked out by
ﬂags or often hidden, fuelled by family and community history, personal experience,
land ownership, shopping patterns and business habits (Rural Community Network
(NI), 2003: np).
Further, territorial hegemony is central to a raft of interconnected issues surrounding the
reproduction of sectarianism which is crucial to the maintenance of ethnic voting blocs and
sustaining resistance to pluralist politics and hybrid identities; Darby and Knox (2004) calculate
that 40 per cent of respondents to A Shared Future expressed such attitudes. Sectarianism
is reproduced through segregated social networks and representations/perceptions of
places and also by the focus on the primacy of group rather than the individual. Moreover,
control of territory is important to the ‘ceaseﬁre soldiers’ of the various paramilitary organizations
who fund their respective causes by racketeering and drug dealing and ‘maintain
order’ through punishment beatings and shootings. Conﬂict transformation can be about
these internal community issues which have little to do with living together but focus, instead
on restorative justice and the social problems of deprivation, exclusion and criminality
within.
Contested versions of ‘equality’ and ‘rights’
In A Shared Future, the costs of division are presented in liberal terms through the curtailment
of the freedom of the individual and lack of choice. This follows from the governing
ideology of economic individualism, but it can also be read as a way of appealing to a set
of shared social values (of economic betterment and freedom of choice) that override political
and cultural divisions. In this context, the language of personal choice and the appeal to the
individual and ideal of individual freedom is used to avoid divisive ‘group labels’ and the
much more problematic issue of group freedoms, rights and choices. It also reﬂects the framing
of political and social justice in Northern Ireland through the discourse of human rights. This
has been a signiﬁcant dimension of the Peace Process and the post-conﬂict politics of competitive
redress as well as progressive legislation.
Yet, as with the issue of cultural recognition, there is concern that claims made in the name
of human rights are being used to beneﬁt one group over another. Sinn Fe´in challenges the view
that ‘nationalists have made ‘gains’ through their emphasis on rights and equality and at the
expense of the unionist community’ and that measures to achieve equality have undermined
community relations. They accuse the authors of A Shared Future of neglecting the ﬁnding
of the Harbison Report that ‘the achievement of equality should be the sine qua non of any
community relations policy’. The party’s approach to equality stresses the distribution of resources
on the basis of need rather than absolute equity of treatment of ‘both communities’
(Sinn Fe´in, 2003: np). Although both policy documents foreground the inseparability of the issues
of equality and good relations, the idea of fair treatment is problematic for those concerned
268 B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
with the inequity of fair treatment in a structurally unequal society. While the Alliance Party’s
response posits the individual citizen as the ‘foundation stone of society’, it recognizes difference
in arguing that ‘when equality ignores difference, uniformity of treatment leads to injustice
and inequality’ (Alliance Party, 2003: 12). This tension between the ideas of equality and
human rights and recognition of the special needs of particular groups is complicated further by
the political connotations of ‘communities’. Like the support of ‘single identity’ cultural activities
in the hope that increased ‘community building capital’ may lead to greater ‘bridging capital’
(fostering better community relations through community development), the policy of
directing ﬁnancial support towards the most deprived areas has been criticized for rewarding
violence with funding and thus for perpetuating the problems it is designed to solve. So while
many responses to the consultation documents insist on the twinning of equity and ‘good relations’,
a shared language of equity and human rights can be differently used and differently
interpreted.
The emphasis on the individual within the Shared Future documents is also problematic
since it can be construed as locating the sources of division in Northern Ireland through misunderstanding,
fear and distrust at the level of the individual, and thus failing to address
structural sources of division. Consequently, Sinn Fe´in argues that locating sectarianism
within the attitudes and actions of individuals and groups neglects the structural causes of
inequalities in Northern Ireland inherent within the actions of the state since its inception.
Thus, advocating ‘sharing’ and ‘understanding’ as solutions to division neglects issues of
equality and the state’s own role in creating division. The principle of recognizing division
as espoused by policy-makers must, therefore, include an acknowledgement of the British
state’s role in ‘the instigation and reproduction of division on the island’ (Sinn Fe´in, 2003:
np). For the PUP (2003), division results from the combined economic, social and cultural
marginalization of working-class Protestant loyalist communities and an education system
that perpetuates patterns of economic and cultural advantage and disadvantage. The Ulster
People’s College (2003), an anti-sectarian and socialist educational organisation, stresses
the contradictions between the political rhetoric of mutual understanding and the effective
disregard for those who cannot compete in a highly selective and discriminatory education
system. So while education is mainly addressed in relation to the question of the denominational
organization of schools in Northern Ireland, from their particular positions both the
PUP and the Ulster People’s College foreground questions of structural inequality in education
and in society more widely. This echoes Little’s (2004) argument that identity politics
have to be coupled with an analysis of the socio-economic conditions that prevail in Northern
Ireland.
It is clear that the Draft Strategy Document (OFMDFM, 2004) has been written with these
criticisms in mind, since it raises the relationship between deprivation and sectarian division
and also tries to avoid locating sectarianism in individual or interface areas, rather than the
structure of society as whole:
Ultimately sustained and deeper progress depends on political stability. Whilst actions to
promote good relations will be driven forward by Government it is clear that improving
relations in the long-run will require leadership at political, civic and community level
(OFMDFM, 2004: 11, italics in original).
If ‘Government’ here means civil service policy-makers and ‘political’ here implies
mainstream politics, then this policy statement, which is being offered to political parties for
ratiﬁcation, implicitly criticizes their sectarian nature and role in perpetuating division.
269B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
Nevertheless, as these responses also suggest, the entwining of rights, equity and good relations
within policy is designed to achieve shared commitment to a working capitalist democracy under
the neo-liberal ideals of equality of opportunity and freedom of choice.
A normal society?
We now turn to the Shared Future’s vision of ‘neutral’ public space and its commitment to
what might be termed as ‘normalization’. What is meant by ‘neutral’ public space and what
version of ‘normal’ society is proffered in the policy documents?
Towards ‘neutral’ space
Addressing culture and diversity in relation to collective or group identity in ways which
acknowledge traditional ethno-political ‘blocs’, while simultaneously trying to move beyond
them to some sort of shared and more plural society, is a familiar challenge in Northern Ireland
and one that clearly frames these policy initiatives. The recourse to ideas of choice, economic
costs and beneﬁts, and cultural capital is more novel. The largely superﬁcial and often contradictory
treatment of issues of division, diversity and pluralism in the Draft Strategy Document
suggests a hesitancy about foregrounding the degree of disagreement at the political level that
the policy is trying to address ‘on the ground’. In contrast, there is little sense of caution in the
document’s presentation of the ﬁscal costs of conﬂict, the economic beneﬁts of peaceful pluralism
and the language of individual choice. Both A Shared Future and the Draft Strategy Document
espouse and assume widespread support for a neo-liberal discourse of freedom and
individualism. They stress the economic costs of the duplication of services and other diseconomies
that result from patterns of residential segregation and the potential economic beneﬁts of
savings in public expenditure and increased private investment:
Separate but not equal is not an option. Parallel living and the provision of parallel services
are unsustainable morally and economically (OFMDFM, 2004: 17).
While it is indisputable that sectarian division has reduced the cost effectiveness of public
service provision, ‘normalization’ invokes another but more acceptable socio-economic form
of inequality and social inclusion/exclusion. Thus, the Ulster People’s College (2003) highlights
the degree to which class division is implicitly normalized or remains unproblematized
while other forms of division are addressed as fundamental social problems. A Shared Future
embodies a bourgeois vision of a future society in Northern Ireland in which ‘deviant’ sectarian
division is replaced by the ‘normality’ of economic individualism, choice, competition and
class-based social differentiation. In this respect it replicates the Agreement which, for the
leftist PUP is a ‘middle class agreement for middle class people’ (PUP, 2003: np). The economic
and social inequalities of the neo-liberal state are elided in favour of aspirations of parity
of esteem, celebration of diversity, and the rhetoric of equity. A Shared Future assumes that
socio-economic class divisions characterise the ‘normality’ to which Northern Ireland should
aspire and thus its moral judgement is that the values of the bourgeois state are more progressive
than those of the sectarian state.
The focus on segregation and the public manifestations of division in the Shared Future documents
are not theorized through the profound and deeply embedded socio-political processes
related to territoriality. Nevertheless, a series of policy objectives are offered for review. First is
the reduction of tension at interfaces between loyalist and republican areas which, it is
270 B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
advocated, must go beyond the ‘band-aid’ approach to individual outbreaks of violence in favour
of an integrated local planning framework (CRC, 2004). Jarman (2004) identiﬁes three
speciﬁc types of interfaces: enclave (a minority area surrounded by a majority area); split
(two adjacent communities separated by peacewalls); and a buffer zone separating two communities,
which can often be a private-sector development such as a shopping centre. These areas
have been e and remain e the focus of conﬂict but also sometimes provide good examples of
conﬂict transformation expressed, for example, through: dialogue between former combatants;
attempts at understanding each other’s perceptions and histories; practical forms of interaction
such as mobile telephone networks to reduce conﬂict; and even political tourism.
Secondly, A Shared Future identiﬁes the issue of symbolic marking of space through murals,
ﬂags and painted kerbstones which can be seen, rightly, as visible manifestations of sectarianism
and racism if they are intended to threaten or intimidate members of the other community,
‘or which could reasonably be interpreted by members of the other community as intimidating
or threatening’ (SDLP, 2003: 13). Oddly, perhaps, given this concern with what are effectively
transient markers of territory, A Shared Future does not identify the far more profoundly and
often overtly sectarian landscape of commemoration of the Troubles and its permanent memorials
which serve to integrate the recent dead into linear narratives of republican resistance or
loyalist fealty to Britain. Both sets of iconography are marked by a strong sense of competition
for hegemony over victimhood (Graham & Shirlow, 2002). It is also assumed that spatial symbolism
is directed at the external world whereas, on the ground, it has a dialectical quality being
also aimed inwards at the communities it deﬁnes.
Finally, A Shared Future refers to the neutrality of town centres and the need to develop
these as safe and welcoming places for all communities. This focus on neutral spaces extends
the community relations policy of encouraging those promoting cross-community or inclusive
events to consider the ways in which their choice of venue could intimidate potential participants
from a different background. While Jarman (cited in CRC, 2004) argues that shared
spaces need positive and sustained actions to remain shared and used, neither the Draft Strategy
Document nor the responses to the consultation make much of this issue. A Shared Future does
not deﬁne clearly what is meant by ‘neutral’ space in the divided society of Northern Ireland
although it can be assumed that this refers to areas that are not marked as belonging to one
‘community’ or the other. However, this ‘neutrality’ stands for a set of values that are inevitably
partial and situated. For Sinn Fe´in, the spaces of urban civic culture lack neutrality as they represent
British civic culture that should be replaced by the culture of ‘National Reconciliation’.
They argue that:
old hegemonies should not be confused with legitimate traditions, and the civic spaces
and civic buildings shared by people from different communities should be modiﬁed to
reﬂect and afﬁrm a new hegemony of National Reconciliation (Sinn Fe´in, 2003: np).
This, however, is a profoundly alienating reshaping of space that would simply replace one axis
of contestation e a hegemonic British and unionist landscape e with another republican alternative.
As Nagel (2002) remarks of the post-Civil War reconstruction of the Lebanon, any recasting
of urban structure involves selective amnesia while the city remains a site of struggle
over the meanings of identity and nation-hood.
Moreover, ‘neutral’ space will clearly be marked in other ways. A Shared Future’s conceptualization
of a ‘normal’ society equates ‘neutral space’ to ‘capitalist’ space which is equally
inscribed by markers of inclusion and exclusion and differently conﬁgured social groups but
not by symbols of sectarianism. The ‘normal’ neutral living environment evoked in the policy
271B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
documents would be one in which paramilitary threats expressed through ﬂags and grafﬁti are
excised, living space is demilitarized and town or city centres become shared space (presumably
policed by the state, even though republicans do not accept the legitimacy of the Police
Service of Northern Ireland). Thus space would become conﬁgured as ‘normal’ capitalist space
with ‘acceptable’ axes of differentiation such as class, income and lifestyle and a neo-liberal
accent on personal choice for those possessing the resources to exercise their choice. Unspoken
if implicit within the reasoning of A Shared Future lies the assumption that consumerism and
a buoyant economy would deconstruct sectarianism, racism and hate.
If the town and city centres of Northern Ireland can be potentially ‘neutral’, the focus on
residential segregation in public housing in the Shared Future documents effectively locates
sectarianism within the domain of the working classes. Integrated estates form less than 10
per cent of public-sector social housing, while in excess of 70 per cent of Northern Ireland
Housing Executive (NIHE) estates are more than 90 per cent Catholic or Protestant (OFMDFM,
2003). The NIHE does not advocate enforced integration but does hold that sectarian segregation
is unacceptable in democratic society; class segregation, conversely, is tolerable. Given the
approach of A Shared Future, it is unsurprising that the responses have little to say on housing
segregation or any other spatial issues. One exception, which raises issues of real importance, is
the submission by Groundwork Northern Ireland, an environmental regeneration voluntary organization.
Their response argues that:
Policy makers cannot separate the inter-community tensions of the last 30 years from the
physical and economic environment in which these social problems are most prevalent.
Communities must be empowered to take responsibility for shaping their own futures including
the local environment (Groundwork, 2003: 9).
Rather than seeing the poor environmental conditions of deprived urban interface areas as simply
a symptom of the combination of poverty and violence, Groundwork recognizes the
potential of environmental concerns to ‘motivate people to come together’ in practical action
that ‘nurture[s] voluntary co-operation, compromise and respect’, thereby ‘creating common
ground’ (the title of the policy framework they have developed with the CRC). The inﬂuence
of their submission is reﬂected in the Draft Strategy Document’s statement that while legislation
may help, the:
removal of inappropriate and aggressive displays of ﬂags, murals, painted kerbstones is
best undertaken as a common project with agencies working collaboratively with the police,
elected representatives and local communities as part of environmental improvements
with a view to enhancing the areas economically and building trust (OFMDFM, 2004: 21).
The incorporation of Groundwork’s approach to collective environmental improvement
is indicative of the ways in which policy for improving relations frequently endorses local initiatives,
even if widespread territoriality prevails.
The enduring strength of ethno-nationalist geographies
Although the Shared Future documents make a stronger economic than moral case for addressing
segregation, they are trenchantly opposed to social and spatial division:
Separate but equal is not an option. Parallel living and the provision of parallel services
are unsustainable, morally and economically. Good relations must build on the signiﬁcant
272 B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
progress that has been made on the equality agenda. No one is arguing for an artiﬁcially
homogeneous Northern Ireland and no one will be asked to suppress or give up their chosen
identity. However, the costs of a divided society e whilst recognising, of course, the
very real fears of people around safety and security considerations e are abundantly
clear: segregated housing and education; security costs, less than efﬁcient public service
provision, and deep rooted intolerance that has too often been used to justify violent sectarianism
and racism. Policy that simply adapts to, but does not alter these challenges,
results in inefﬁcient resource allocations. These are not sustainable in the medium to
long term (OFMDFM, 2004: 17 [emphasis in original]).
Yet, as implied in many responses to A Shared Future, interfaces, sectarian markers and segregated
spaces are manifestations of a more profound and deeply rooted territoriality centred on
the hegemonic control of zero-sum space, which remains the key factor deﬁning space and place
in Northern Ireland. The electoral mandate is for ‘parallel living’. Even though many of the respondents
to A Shared Future make ostensibly progressive noises and question the binary deﬁnition
of the ‘two traditions’, there is a resistance to pluralism and reconciliation and an insistence
on difference, expressed primarily through a territoriality deﬁned by symbolic representations
and material practices that are grounded in possession/hegemony over space and place. This
also involves an interplay of public and private space in that the markers and inscriptions of territoriality
occur at a variety of scales from the home to the city to the state. Public-sector agencies
and the private sector both ‘respect’ sectarian divisions in planning and development and thus
capitalist space is integrated within sectarian space. This monocultural space, as in West Belfast
or Derry’s Cityside, can be marked by the full array of ‘normal’ indices of residential segregation.
These ‘states within states’ include: social housing; middle-class housing; shopping, leisure and
sport facilities; and places of employment (although there are mixed work places). They are alternative
universes, policed from within, but arguably also a democratically endorsed reﬂection
of the desire to live apart as manifested in the mandates of the two largest ethno-nationalist and
inherently sectarian political parties. At root, both Sinn Fe´in and the DUP espouse anti-pluralist
ideologies in the context of a shared future and lack any cross-community support. The postconﬂict
social geography of Northern Ireland is predominately conceived in terms, not of a radical
departure from segregation but of: ‘interconnected separation’; ‘benign apartheid’; ‘separate but
equal’; containing conﬂict by working together to live apart; or even ‘malign apartheid’. For
many, therefore, ‘good relations’ means agreement on living apart. Despite the apparent stubborn
resistance to pluralism, these terms still reﬂect attempts to grapple with questions that are fundamental
to the social geography of multicultural democracies. This is evident in the response of the
Catholic Bishops which suggested that even if:
separate development or mere co-existence are not viable options for promoting a shared
future in Northern Ireland, the right to be different and distinct remains at the heart of
a more shared and pluralist society . there are legitimate boundaries between belonging
to a particular group and sharing space with others (Catholic Bishops, 2003: 8).
Conclusions
The Draft Strategy Document (OFMDFM, 2004) put forward to the political parties for
agreement before ﬁnal revision in 2005 contains a series of policy measures for promoting
good relations. It proposes the establishment of a central government cross-departmental
273B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
Good Relations Panel that will develop, implement and review triennial action plans for public
authorities e not just in the areas of ‘education, housing, culture, sports, arts, neighbourhood
and rural renewal and community development’, but in:
spatial or regional planning, sub-regional planning, including local statutory planning,
transportation and investment and support for the economy (OFMDFM, 2004: 18).
The promotion of good relations thus becomes central to public policy and, in leading by example,
civil society. An enhanced CRC will continue to function independent of Government to
promote, support and guide good relations policy and practice and monitor progress, including
the proposed new District Council Good Relations Challenge Programme for local good relations
policy. Despite our critical engagement with this policy development, we do not claim to
be able to offer a resolution to the tensions within community relation policy-making in Northern
Ireland. Instead we foreground the complex ways in which ideas of pluralism and equality
are deployed both by policy-makers and those who experience and espouse ethnonationalist
political positions in a context of entrenched territoriality and division. We have
tried to attend to the limits of legislating for pluralism as well as the possibilities of progressive
change.
This policy development can be interpreted in very different ways. Despite some criticisms,
it could be read as a constructive attempt to foster participatory democracy through an extended
public consultation process and make ideas of pluralism and diversity central to the selfunderstanding
of a post-conﬂict society. Alternatively, it can be interpreted as symptomatic
of a situation in which apparent support for diversity and pluralism masks business as usual
for anti-pluralist political parties that depend on an electorate adhering to the security of
ethno-national collective allegiances. Policy-making continues in blithe indifference to political
realities. Little (2004: 196) believes that Northern Ireland is an example of what he calls
‘conﬂictual consensus’, a society that embodies a basic level of agreement but in which the
‘political’ remains a sphere of conﬂict and disagreement. ‘Conﬂictual consensus’ does involve,
however, an acceptance of the legitimacy of opponents and an understanding as to how their
perspectives embrace a different way of thinking to one’s own. Even agreement on living apart,
the de facto reality of life in Northern Ireland, represents a huge incremental advance on the
violence of the period prior to the paramilitary ceaseﬁres in 1994 and also a progressive step
towards the aspirations of A Shared Future.
This recognition of the perspectives of opponents is also central to an understanding of
reconciliation as a long-term process that is characterized by paradox and contradiction, in
which the meaning of reconciliation is itself contested, but involving some kind of common
vision as to how pluralism and equality can co-exist with political difference (Kelly & Hamber,
2004). A Shared Future and the broader process of which it is a part, can be seen as
contributions to this extended and inevitably contradictory process. In Northern Ireland the
paradoxes and contradictions of reconciliation include the coexistence of overt support for
and resistance to reconciliation itself. In one intensive study, Porter (2003) identiﬁes a continuum
of attitudes to reconciliation, the concept ranging from being ‘beyond reach’ through
‘weak’ to ‘strong’ as envisaged in the Agreement. He concludes, however, that: ‘Resistance
to reconciliation, weak or strong, is enormous, despite much talk to the contrary’ (Porter,
2003: 267).
The Shared Future process thus presents a speciﬁc example of the contestation and messy
contradictions that characterize all democratic processes which, as Barnett and Lowe (2004)
suggest, are always about ongoing argument, appraisal, anticipation, aspirations, appeals to
274 B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
conﬂicting interests and tensions between ideas of freedom and responsibility, equality and difference.
For them:
the value of democracy inheres in the quality of relations between different imperatives,
interests and identities e that is, it lies in the degree of openness to contestation of
deﬁnitionsoftheproperbalance betweenimperativesofcollective actionandindividualfreedom,
between conﬂicting interests and between multiple and ﬂuid identities (Barnett &
Lowe, 2004: 16).
In Northern Ireland the ‘democratic deﬁcit’ e the absence of a working forum for formal politics
and participatory democracy e means that the processes of contestation are particularly
explicit. Yet here the obviousness of contestation is accompanied by the pragmatic ambiguity
of the peace process and subsequent policy-making in which clear statements of action follow
only weakly elaborated or poorly conceived approaches to pluralism or equality. Policy-making
on ‘good relations’ is thus simultaneously a matter of promise and risk (Nash, 2005a).
The risks are two-fold. First, by adopting a model of individual freedom of choice, equality
of opportunity and economic beneﬁt as an alternative to deterministic versions of communitarian
identity, the most intransigent versions of identitarian politics, and the costs of division, the
Shared Future process could naturalize a model of society in Northern Ireland where ‘normal’
class stratiﬁcation replaces the current intersections of class and ethno-nationalism. ‘Neutral’
space replaces ethno-nationalist territorial space. The Agreement and the Shared Future
process can both be seen as part of an incremental process towards the evolution of a classbased
politics in Northern Ireland which, eventually, might subsume territoriality and ethnonationalism.
However, as several responses argued, the society envisaged in the Shared Future
documents is not one that in which fundamental patterns of disadvantage are addressed. It is
worth reiterating, nevertheless, that segregation and geographies of inclusion and exclusion
deﬁne all western societies, the issue here being one of replacing one set of segregation criteria
deemed undesirable (ethno-nationalist and/or sectarian) with other more ‘acceptable’ neoliberal
indices of separation. The messy compromises of the process may, eventually, culminate
in some kind of peaceful pluralism but one marked by new patterns of exclusion.
Secondly, the attempt to address patterns of division through ideas of diversity, equality and
human rights, without alienating political parties and groups so much that no agreement can be
reached is a pragmatic strategy but one that may result in implicit support for separatist ideas of
difference. The Shared Future process is clearly inﬂuenced by relatively established, if disputed,
approaches to concepts of diversity, culture and identity in Northern Ireland. The attempt
to address division by emphasising patterns of diversity that cut across the model of the ‘two
communities’ is a longstanding tool of cultural and community relations policy. Yet in ﬁguring
cultural identities is oppositional terms, A Shared Future both reproduces the approaches to culture
within the Agreement and reﬂects the problematic ways in which culture and identity have
come to dominate political discourse in Northern Ireland. Critics have argued that the ideals of
parity of esteem and mutual respect in the Agreement have effectively reinforced the hegemony
of the ‘two traditions’ model. Thus while the emphasis on the cultural rights and parity of recognition
for the two hegemonic ethno-nationalist identities may ultimately lead to their reconstruction,
in the short term, ideas of ‘culture’ ‘heritage’ and ‘identity’ have provided a lexicon
for legitimating separatist and competitive ideas of difference and rights. In avoiding the idea of
culture as constituting the exclusive property of one group, the Shared Future process adopts an
economistic logic which substitutes for a more sustained engagement with issues of cultural
diversity and cultural identity.
275B. Graham, C. Nash / Political Geography 25 (2006) 253e278
A Shared Future is a state-led and elitist initiative towards a pluralist society that stems from
a political process that, inadvertently, has concretized ethno-national allegiances. Critics argue
that the privileging of universal group rights in the Agreement has resulted in attributes of individual
identity such as culture, nationality and religion, that are understood to be matter of
choice in pluralist societies, being reinforced as determining public identiﬁers in Northern Ireland.
The constructive ambiguity of A Shared Future may succeed in achieving a minimalist
level of support across the political spectrum for principles that, potentially, can be deployed
to serve quite different political strategies. Its call for public debate and development of public
policy measures could prompt an engagement that eventually leads to progressive change or it
may mask resistance to change with the language of pluralism. While most contributions to the
consultation suggested that the short-term outcomes are probably limited, the long-term results
are more difﬁcult to predict. Despite the difﬁculties of producing policies for pluralism that will
meet the approval of anti-pluralistic political parties, the implementation of agreed legislation
continues as part of a slow, necessarily limited, and uncertain working through of the consociation
of the Agreement. Most optimistically, A Shared Future is part of an incremental, ﬂawed,
fragile and deeply contested process of transition and conﬂict transformation.
At the same time and more conclusively, the Shared Future process demonstrates the continued
signiﬁcance of ethno-nationalist versions of society and space and the ways that these
are all pervasive at a variety of scales within as well as between societies. Consociational agreements
can work only through an elite consensus which is not open to contestation from within
the respective communal blocs. In Northern Ireland, however, the leading political parties continue
to play a double game. Sinn Fe´in has acquiesced to consociation but its own ideology depends
on the ethnocratic principle of controlling territory. It is this very process that gives the
party its political strength in comparison to the SDLP and the more fragmented unionist parties
among whom, in any case, the DUP rejects the consociational consensus. Northern Ireland remains
an arena of conﬂict not only between identities but also between the formal procedures of
consociational democracy and the persistence of the interconnection of ethnicity, territoriality
and political process. While the Belfast Agreement reﬂects the consociational concern with the
scale of the state, it is the failure to formulate ways of addressing the continued potency of these
forces at the sub-state scale that, at present, undermines this policy for a ‘shared future’.
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