Leading academics explore the causes and consequences of the Partition of Ireland in a series of authored talks, developed by Queen’s University Belfast with support from the BBC.
Leading academics explore the causes and consequences of the Partition of Ireland in a series of authored talks, developed by Queen’s University Belfast with support from the BBC.
Contributor:
Professor Henry Patterson
Talk title:
Social Class: A Family’s Story
Talk Synopsis:
This talk explores the central role of social class in determining people’s life chances and experiences in Northern Ireland in the pre-Troubles period. It draws on the story of Henry Patterson’s own family and describes how it was affected by social and economic change, community divisions and world affairs. It also looks at the effect of WW2 on his father’s political outlook and how ‘like many servicemen’ he had ‘his horizons widened and his politics radicalised’; the ‘great social reforms introduced by the Labour government after 1945’; his father’s involvement in trade unionism and labour politics; class tensions in Bangor; and the role played by ‘the labourist tradition’ of his father’s generation in erecting what Frank Wright has described as ‘barriers of restraint against the real possibilities of madness’.
Short Biography:
Henry Patterson is Emeritus Professor of Irish Politics at Ulster University.
Further Reading:
A History of the Northern Ireland Labour Party – Aaron Edwards Labour and Partition: The Belfast Working Class 1905-23 – Austen Morgan 'An Age of Conservative Modernity' – Sean O'Connell, in Belfast 400 People, Place and History – S.J. Connolly (ed.) Northern Ireland in the Second World War – Philip Ollerenshaw Class Conflict and Sectarianism – Henry Patterson Ireland since 1939 The Persistence of Conflict – Henry Patterson Inventing the Myth: Political Passions and the Ulster Protestant Imagination – Connall Parr