Queen's University Belfast - Centenary Conversations

In this episode, Ryan Mallon is joined by Professor Marie Coleman, Dr Margaret O'Callaghan and Professor Dominic Bryan, all of QUB, to discuss the significance of commemoration on the island of Ireland and how looking back on a historical event can sometimes tell us more about our society today.

Northern Ireland is often described as having ‘two communities’. With sectarian divisions dominating Irish society at the time of partition, the experiences of the new state’s immigrant population can easily be forgotten. In this episode, Ryan Mallon is joined by Dr Jack Crangle of the University of Manchester to discuss the lives, politics, and experiences of Northern Ireland’s Jewish and Italian communities after 1921.

Katie Tate, a postgraduate researcher at QUB, joins Ryan Mallon to discuss her work on the wives of the Governors of Northern Ireland. Despite being constrained by their gender and the turbulent politics of post-partition Northern Ireland, these women used their privileged position to exercise ‘soft power’ over the new state’s society.

Ryan Mallon is joined by Dr Andrew Holmes of QUB to discuss religiosity after 1921, focusing on the career of W. P. Nicholson, a Presbyterian preacher who led an evangelist campaign in the early 1920s and who was credited by his supporters for preventing civil war in Northern Ireland.

What did people in the new state of Northern Ireland get up to in their spare time? Dr Sam Manning of QUB and Dr Lucy Wray of QUB join Ryan Mallon to discuss the daily lives and habits of Northern Ireland’s inhabitants, from housing conditions and striving for respectability to nights out at the picture house.

In this episode, Ryan Mallon and historian Cormac Moore reflect on how sport has divided and unified us over the past 100 years, and its complicated relationship with the partition of the island of Ireland.