ABSTRACT
This chapter looks at an arena of social conflict in early twenty-first-century Ireland that straddles the boundaries between religion and politics, and four performances that seek to address that conflict in one way or another. In so doing, it tries to examine questions of the limits of political legitimacy and how performance can help in its assertion. With this case study, I want to suggest that it is not just in its claims to represent the public or its will that political assertions share grammatical links with performance. These links also appear when the question of authority’s legitimacy is raised. Traditionally in Ireland, religion has had an important role in the performative assertion of legitimate authority, even (or especially) when that legitimacy is not linked to a democratic mandate. But can this practice continue to function in the contemporary post-secular world? When religion’s own authority is undermined, who or what can step in to reassert it? The grammar of this balancing act between religion and political authority is not so much dialectical as performative. This case study will help us better understand the workings of that performative grammar and, in particular, the agonistic relationship between church and state that has traditionally been central to it. That agonism can change and develop, but its ongoing presence, I argue, does much of the social work of asserting solidarity.
