Challenges to belonging in a changing Northern Ireland

Challenges to belonging in a changing Northern Ireland
by Allan LEONARD
14 October 2026

A public lecture held at Ulster University’s Coleraine campus during Good Relations Week brought a social psychologist’s lens to some of Northern Ireland’s most persistent divisions. The event, titled “Finding Your Place: Belonging in a Changing Northern Ireland”, was introduced by Damian McIlduff and delivered by Dr Bethany Corbett, a lecturer in developmental and educational psychology at Ulster University.

A profound human need

Dr Corbett opened by reframing what belonging actually means. Far from being a pleasant social comfort, she argued, decades of research identify it as something closer to a biological imperative. “Belonging is much closer to a need than a nice-to-have,” she said, noting its links to depression, self-esteem, compassion, and academic performance. To underline the point, she described studies in which participants who were told they faced a future of social isolation showed reduced sensitivity to physical pain — a numbing response she described as a protective mechanism. Neuroimaging research reinforces the connection: the brain regions that process social rejection and physical pain substantially overlap. Exclusion, in other words, genuinely hurts.

Why Northern Ireland presents particular challenges

In-group bias — the tendency to extend more trust, generosity, and help to those perceived as sharing one’s group — intensifies under three conditions: (1) highly visible group boundaries; (2) competition or conflict between groups; and (3) separation or low contact. Northern Ireland, Dr Corbett argued, scores highly on all three. Symbols, flags and murals communicate group membership with unusual clarity; a zero-sum political system frames gains for one community as losses for another; and more than 90% of children attend schools separated along religious lines, with only around 8% in schools with an explicitly integrated ethos.

She highlighted a significant and shifting pattern in PSNI data: sectarian incidents have been declining, while racially motivated hate crimes are rising. The underlying narrative — perceived threat, blame directed at an ‘other’, the impulse to defend one’s group — persists even as the group being targeted changes. A We Rise Together mapping project, she noted, overlays race-motivated incidents with area deprivation data, revealing a clear correlation: the communities most affected by socioeconomic disadvantage are often those most susceptible to these dynamics.

What children notice and internalise

A substantial part of Dr Corbett’s lecture drew on research into how children engage with these divisions. From as young as five, children in Northern Ireland can accurately identify which symbols are associated with which community, and show a preference for symbols associated with their own. In sticker-donation tasks, stronger identification with one’s own group was associated with less willingness to share with a child from the other community. The effect was greatest among children in interface neighbourhoods — areas historically separated by peace walls — compared with those in more mixed settings.

The education system can compound these divisions. Dr Corbett pointed to research demonstrating that majority-Catholic schools almost exclusively teach the Troubles period in local history, while majority-Protestant schools more often focus on the events surrounding Partition and the Second World War era. Young people from each tradition are, she concluded, “systematically exposed to different accounts of the past” — a division that complicates any prospect of genuine shared dialogue about the future.

Pathways to more inclusive belonging

Dr Corbett outlined three evidence-based approaches. This first was “contact theory”, which is the proposition that meaningful interaction across group lines increases empathy and trust. This was tested in Northern Ireland through the Peace4Youth programme, which brought 14-to-24-year-olds together over six to nine months of cross-community activity built around a shared collaborative goal. Participants showed more positive attitudes toward the other community, greater desire for future contact, and personal benefits, including improved self-esteem and motivation to contribute to their communities. The second approach explained was the common in-group identity model, which seeks to recategorise separate groups under a larger shared identity. For example, in a Portuguese classroom intervention, Black and white children who completed a collaborative task — building a shared ‘island’ under a shared group name — showed more positive views of the other group than children who completed equivalent tasks separately. The European Union, she observed, represents the same logic at scale. A third approach, integrated education, offers young people an explicit institutional ethos of valuing difference. Evidence suggests its effects extend beyond Catholic-Protestant relations to include more positive attitudes toward immigration.

The salience of multiple identities

From my own research interests, I asked whether a common professional identity and/or shared goal exercises can retain saliency once participants return to environments where the original ethnic group identity dynamics persist. As an illustration, I cited research on Black American police officers: despite sharing an ethnic background with the communities they police, they show no greater sympathy toward those communities, suggesting that someone from an out-group now in an in-group professional identity can carry higher salience than ethnic or racial identity.

“How much could the role of salience of multiple identities be key here?” was the question put to Dr Corbett. She responded by describing a Venn diagram approach used in some studies, in which participants represent their identities — Irish, Northern Irish, European — as overlapping circles. Some people draw the circles as almost entirely overlapping; others place one within another; others see them as wholly separate. Which identity becomes salient in any given context, and under what conditions a superordinate identity can durably override an ethnic one, she acknowledged, remains an open and genuinely important question for her research.

As she concluded, Dr Corbett was careful to note that individual-level interventions, however well-evidenced, cannot address what are in many respects structural problems. Sectarianism and anti-migration attitudes are both associated with economic deprivation, unemployment, and anxiety about public services. Addressing those conditions through policy, she suggested, may be as important as any amount of contact programming. The lecture offered both the weight of the evidence and, tentatively, the outline of a path forward — not only for Northern Ireland, but for any divided society wrestling with the politics of belonging.