ABSTRACT
The ‘war on terror’ has revived international interest in the conflict in Northern Ireland (Campbell and Connolly 2003).1 In the aftermath of 9/11 Prime Minister Blair quickly claimed that the British government’s expertise in handling ‘terrorism’ in Northern Ireland would be made available to the Bush administration (ibid). Discussions of the London bombing (7 July 2005) frequently included comparisons with Irish Republican Army (IRA) bombing campaigns in Britain, with contributions invited from ‘experts’ on the basis of their experience of ‘terrorism’ and the Northern Irish conflict. This conflict which was often characterized in the latter part of the twentieth century as a nineteenth century anachronism in the modern world (Deane 1999), at the start of the twenty-first century is considered by some as a ‘model’ of how democratic states might manage ‘terrorist’ threat. A key element in the management of the Northern Ireland conflict discourse is a state-sponsored community relations narrative that centres on dysfunctional sectarian opposition primarily between working class Catholic and Protestant men (Rooney 2006a). Women rarely feature whilst the gendered and social class dimensions of these ‘identities’ are also invisible and largely unexamined in mainstream academic research. In this essay intersectionality is discussed as a beneficial form of analysis for bringing women and social class into view and for enabling us to see how women’s invisibility in conflict discourses operates to the disadvantage of the most marginalized Catholic and Protestant women in this context. Intersectional analysis further helps to illuminate critical questions of recognition and redistribution in post-conflict transitions such as that in Northern Ireland.
