Chapter 5: Not Knowing Our Place: Social Class, Structural Division and Hegemonic Control in Northern Ireland

The idea of being working class never really animated me much when I was growing up in Rathcoole and Carnmoney, two predominantly Protestant working-class areas on the outskirts of North Belfast in the 1980s and 1990s. Everyone around me looked the same, sounded the same and worked similar jobs, or didn’t work at all. Much was made of how skilled trades in the Harland and Wolff shipyard, the Shorts aircraft manufacturers or the British armed forces were to be prized above all others. The idea of ‘going up’ to the University of Ulster or Queen’s University Belfast was an alien concept to be treated with scepticism, not only by people around me but also by those in positions of authority. As McManus argues, the idea of working-class people accessing tertiary education was always greeted by a ‘fear that it could contribute to the lower orders challenging the political establishment’, which helped create a cultural outlook ‘based around the principle that education was for some and not for others’. This chapter explores my life experience as a case study in how cultural norms disrupted by agency are ultimately limited by a profound lack of will in the political structures. By applying an autoethnographic methodology, it also considers the inherent tensions between class and other cross-cutting factors, such as ethnicity, religion and nationalism, in Northern Ireland.