#post-gfa

Major Character Death Warning

There is a similar challenge in relation to the characterisation of sectarianism. The Northern Ireland state was established as a sectarian entity and preserved through sectarian policies and institutions. The civil rights campaign of the late 1960s was a popular challenge to that sectarianism. But, as one reading of the history has it, the intervention of the British state from 1969 onwards was the beginning of the death knell for the sectarian state. The British succeeded in reforming the worst aspects of institutionalised sectarianism, not least in relation to employment practices. That they did not progress further, it could be argued, was not just because of unionist resistance to reform but the major diversionary task of combating republican terrorism. In this reading, the GFA represents the final chapter of that reform programme begun over three decades earlier. The sectarian state is now in terminal mode. Even the upsurge of sectarianism in everyday practice and attitudes since the GFA does not undermine the optimism of this conclusion; this is just a final kick of a dying phenomenon. A more complex explanation of sectarianism is possible, one which views it as integral to both the process of British colonialism in Ireland and the existence of the state in Northern Ireland. This approach begins with the premise that the state’s role in the reproduction of sectarianism has mutated a number of times in history, before and during the existence of the Northern Ireland state. The ultimate purpose of this article is to examine how this mutation has occurred to accommodate the fact that the post-GFA state is currently emerging from an accentuated reform mode. It seeks to discover whether sectarianism is indeed in terminal mode or has merely been reconstituted to fit the new times.