Staff

Niall Ó Dochartaigh

Lecturer

PhD (Politics) Queen’s University Belfast.
MA (History) University College Galway
BA (History; Sociology and Political Science) University College Galway

Office: 318 Aras Moyola
Telephone: 353 (0)91 493594
Email: niall.odochartaighnuigalway.ie

Member of the Power, Conflict and Ideologies Research Cluster

Profile

I started out as a historian, spending a year in Derry in 1987 doing research for an MA in history on Derry 'before the Troubles' under the supervision of Gearóid Ó Tuathaigh in Galway. The thesis looked at the origins of the civil rights movement and the conflict in the 1950s and 60s.

After spending a year in Berlin I started a PhD in politics at Queen's University Belfast with Paul Bew in 1990, looking at the escalation of conflict in the early 1970s. The thesis was publiched as the book 'From Civil rights to Armalites'. After a number of years when I was concerned primarily with the online world (establishing the University of Ulster's 'Conflict Data Service' and writing two textbooks on Internet research) I have returned in the past few years to research on conflict. My principal current interests are in conflict and territoriality, conflict and new technologies and attempts to moderate or resolve conflict. I am convener of the Political Studies Association of Ireland Specialist Group on Peace and Conflict and I organised conferences around the theme of peace and conflict in Galway in 2008 and in Dublin in 2009.

Teaching

1BA SP128 Introduction to Politics and Society
2BA SP234 International relations
3BA SP448 Ethnic Conflict and Territory
3BA SP479 Politics and the Internet
3BA SP621 Tuaisceart Éireann: Polaitíocht na Coinbhleachta
Northern Ireland: the politics of conflict (through the medium of Irish)
Certificate in Postgraduate Development (Arts) PG103 Internet Research Skills

Research Interests

I work on the politics of conflict in Northern Ireland, on the use of new technologies in conflict situations and on the politics of nationalism and territoriality. I am currently working on conflict resolution in Northern Ireland, carrying out interviews, doing archival research and working on the papers of Brendan Duddy who acted as intermediary between the IRA and the British government over a period of twenty years. I am also writing up research on Bloody Sunday, on territoriality and political mobilisation in Northern Ireland and on policing and territoriality.

Selected Publications

(2012) Ó Dochartaigh, Niall (2012) Republicanism Domesticated? All-Ireland Politics in an Age of Austerity. Political Quarterly, 83 (2) pp.256­264. For more details, click here.

(2012) Internet Research Skills. 3rd ed. Sage. (A Chinese translation of the 2nd edition of Internet Research Skills has recently been published as well.)

(2011) Ó Dochartaigh, Niall (2011) 'Together in the middle: Back-Channel Negotiation in the Irish Peace Process¹. Journal of Peace Research 48 (6). (Accepted for publication)

(2011) 'Territoriality and Order in the North of Ireland'. Irish Political Studies (accepted for publication)

(2011) 'IRA Ceasefire 1975: a missed opportunity for peace?' Field Day Review 7. South Bend IN: University of Notre Dame Press (accepted for publication).

(2011) 'The Exit Option: Mediation and the Termination of Negotiations in the Northern Ireland Conflict'. International Journal of Conflict Management. (with Isak Svensson) (Accepted for publication)

(2011) ’Secession and Political Violence’. In Sasa Pavkovic and Peter Radan (eds.) Research Companion on Secession. Ashgate. With Siniša Maleševic (accepted for publication).

(2010) 'Territoriality and Mobilization: the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland'. Mobilization 15 (4), 405-424. With Lorenzo Bosi.

(2010) 'Bloody Sunday: cock-up or conspiracy? History Ireland 18 (5), pp.40-43.

(2010) ’Northern Ireland’. In The Encyclopedia of Political Science, Washington, D.C.: CQ Press. (In press)

(2010) ’Bloody Sunday: Error or Design?’ Contemporary British History 24 (1) 89-108.

(2010) ’Nation and Neighbourhood: Nationalist Mobilisation and Local Solidarities in the North of Ireland’. In Adrian Guelke (ed.) The Challenges of Ethno-Nationalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

(2009) ’Conflict, Territory and online Boundaries: Drawing wider Lessons from a Belfast Case Study’. In Juergen Barkhoff and Helmut Eberhart eds. Networking across borders and frontiers. Grazer Beiträge zur Europäischen Ethnologie 14. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 195-214.

(2009) ’Reframing Online: Ulster Loyalists Imagine an American Audience’. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, 16 (1), 102-127.

This article examines one initiative aimed at taking advantage of new technologies to build new transnational connections between a political movement in the “homeland” and a diaspora population in the United States. It analyzes an initiative by Ulster loyalists in Northern Ireland to mobilize Americans of Ulster Protestant descent in support of their cause, while simultaneously attempting to undermine the American support base of their Irish nationalist opponents. By contrast with Irish nationalists, Ulster loyalists have never had significant support networks in the United States. This attempt to mobilize a distant diaspora has met with little success. This article argues that loyalist understandings of their imagined audience in the United States are built on a misleading caricature of Irish-American support networks for Irish republicans. These misunderstandings direct loyalists towards a strategy that places undue weight on the role of homeland propaganda in converting shared ancestry into political support for ethnic compatriots in the “homeland” to the neglect of more fundamental factors in the mobilization of transnational support networks. The article argues that new technologies are of minimal significance for the mobilization of transnational support networks on the basis of shared ancestry in the absence of other fundamental conditions for mobilization. However, the new technologies allow movements to learn more about distant and little-understood support pools. The reflexive character of online interaction is illustrated by the way in which at least some loyalists have begun to explore other bases for transnational co-operation.

(2009) ’The Contact: understanding a communication channel between the British government and the IRA’. In Track Two to Peace? Public Diplomacy, Cultural Interventions & the Peace Process in Northern Ireland. Los Angeles: USC Center for Public Diplomacy, 1-15.

(2008) 'Northern Ireland'. In Martin Klimke and Joachim Scharloth, eds, 1968 in Europe: A History of Protest and Activism, 1956-77, pp.181-203. New York; London: Palgrave.

(2007) ’Conflict, territory and new technologies: Online interaction at a Belfast interface’. Political Geography, 26 (4) 474-91.

This article examines the relationship between new information and communication technologies and territorial boundaries through an analysis of online interaction oriented around a sectarian interface in north Belfast. It is widely argued that new information and communication technologies are contributing to fundamental changes in the nature of territory and boundaries, with many arguing that they contribute to a deterritorialisation of social interaction. This article argues that new technologies neither transcend nor obliterate territorial boundaries but in certain senses reinforce and extend the role of physical boundaries as orienting locations for hostile interaction. Focusing on the interlinked territorial strategies of penetration and surveillance it argues that online interaction facilitates the extension and elaboration of territorial strategies oriented around physical lines of confrontation and the associated development of new material practices oriented around the physical boundary.

(2007) Internet Research Skills. London; Los Angeles; New Delhi: Sage.

(2005) From Civil Rights to Armalites: Derry and the Birth of the Irish Troubles, expanded 2nd edn. Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

(2002) The Internet Research Handbook: a practical guide for students and researchers in the Social Sciences. London; Thousand Oaks; New Delhi: Sage.

(1999) ’The Politics of Housing; Social Change and Collective Action in Derry in the 1960s’ in Derry and Londonderry: History and Society. Dublin: Geography Publications, 625-646.

(1998) ’The Role of Government’. In Robinson, G., Gray, A. & Heenan, D. (eds) Social Attitudes in Northern Ireland: The Seventh Report. Aldershot: Ashgate, 57-74.

(1997) From Civil Rights to Armalites: Derry and the Birth of the Irish Troubles, 1st edn. Cork: Cork University Press.

(1995) “ ’Sure it’s hard to keep up with the splits here’: Irish-American responses to the outbreak of conflict in Northern Ireland, 1968-1974”. Irish Political Studies, 10, 138-60. 

Supervision of Research

Postdoctoral

Mentor to Dr. Niall O Murchu, Western Washington University, Government of Ireland Post-doctoral research fellow: Sept. 2005- Sept. 2006.

Ph.D.

Completed

Deirdre McHugh (2011) Framing Political Violence: The Northern Ireland 'Troubles' in Irish television, 1968-72 (funded by a Government of Ireland doctoral fellowship)

Elizabeth Ball (2010) Truth, Power and Bloody Sunday: A study of the complementary and competing representations of the day in Paul Greengrass's Bloody Sunday, Jimmy McGovern's Sunday and the Saville Inquiry (funded by an Arts faculty fellowship)

Paul Murray (2003) Contested Borders and Minority Rights: The Partition of Ireland in Comparative Perspective (funded by a Government of Ireland doctoral fellowship)

Current

Jenny Molloy (2009-current) Northern Ireland and Israel Palestine: A Comparative Analysis of the Zero-Sum Political Game (funded by a Galway Fellowship).

Glen Truax (2010-current) Disintegration of Ideology: The Rise and Fall of the INLA (funded by a Galway fellowship)

I also serve as a member of the PhD committees for Arben Qirezi, for two PhD students in the Global Women¹s Studies Program, Marja Almqvist and Cliodhna O¹Keefe and for Hugh Rowland in Scoil na Gaeilge.

MA in Irish Studies minor thesis

Megan Ryan (2008) New media, new audience: Global distribution of Northern Ireland murals.

Aoife Farrell (2005) An Uneasy Alliance; Republicans and Moderates in the Northern Ireland civil rights campaign.

Róisín Corry (2002) Tensions between Irish and Irish-American identity.

Christopher Colbert (2002) No Cops or Soldiers need apply: the GAA and Rule 21.

MA in Community Development minor thesis

Nigel Connor (2007) The effect of service-learning on Occupational Therapy students in NUI, Galway.

Honor Sheridan (2006) The meaning of the digital divide for young people in County Mayo.

Mary Kate Candon (2004) ’Democracy in the City’: Democratic participation and the use of ICT in comparative perspective.

Alison O’Neill (2001) Traveller Participation in Mainstream Post-Primary Education.

Padraigín Ní Ghráinne (2001) An analysis of the capacity of the Integrated Grassroots Community Development Approach to Improve Community Relations in North Belfast.

Sinéad Hardiman (1998) Widening the Web: Community Development in the Information Society.

Jeremy Leonard (1998) Adaptation of a Community Development model for the integration of the Bosnian community in Ireland.

Masters in Family Support minor thesis

Fionnuala Foley (2005) Diversity in Preschool Settings: An exploration of the supports provided by community preschool services for immigrant families in Galway.

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