Building Inclusive, Diverse and Reconciling Community

by Dr Johnston McMaster

In August 2026 Belfast experienced Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann. The city had eight days of cultural and musical festival. Nothing like it had happened in Belfast before. The Belfast Harp Festival of July 11-14, 1792, a three-day cultural event that brought together ten elderly and blind harpers and one Welsh harper, giving new life to a dying harping tradition, was landmark. But eight days from 2-9 August 2026 was landmark and off the planet! Belfast had never experienced anything like this before. It was estimated that the Fleadh would bring 800k into Belfast but in the end 1.65 million people came into the city for this cultural fest. Streets were pedestrianised, pop up platforms for musicians and dancers were on streets and street corners. I know one young person with two friends, one a vocalist and the other two on guitars occupied one of those platforms for an hour and played and sang to a street audience of around 1,000 people. For a week that was going on all over the city centre. It was a logistical challenge and some things went wrong. Translink put on extra busses and trains. Special trains left Belfast at midnight for various destinations. One midnight train was for Newry arriving in Newry at 1.20am. The problem was the station staff were either not told there was a late train or they forgot. Some 40-50 people were stuck on the platform and couldn't get out of the station. Some staff member was woken up to go open the station and let Flaedh 'prisoners' out and collect their cars from the car park. There are lots of stories about the Fleadh. Irish dancers on the street performing in a Protestant/Loyalist heartland. I saw large lines of people on the Saturday afternoon at bus stops in Protestant East Belfast going into the city for the Fleadh. The next bus probably didn't stop. Bus full! That happened often during the week. This was the greatest and biggest week in Belfast's history. The population of Northern Ireland is 1.9 million. The 1,65 million who came into Belfast came from much further afield.

There were people from Kerry, Galway, Meath and possibly every one of the twenty-six counties, most had never been in the North before. And there were Canadians, Americans, Australians and Germans, French and Dutch. And Belfast threw open its doors wide with a huge Cead Mile Failte, even though many Belfast people would not have had enough Irish to use those words.

The Fleadh was inclusive, not only of what we call traditional Irish music, it included the music and culture of what is known as the Ulster Scots tradition, marching bands, Highland dancing, and the music and culture of south-east Asia. It was all part of the Fleadh. 

The Fleadh challenged stereotypes, dispelled prejudices and built bridges. It was one great festival of inclusion and diversity. An organisational takeaway was that the planning was inclusive of Irish, Ulster Scots and Asian. They were all involved in the planning from the beginning and everybody owned the festival. If you want to pull something off in your community, organise an event, go for inclusive planning. Don't exclude. 

This was an Irish cultural fest in Belfast which challenged a stereotypical, narrow view of Irishness. Irishness was now the fiddle, harp, flute, pipes and drums. Irishness was now what we call traditional Irish and Ulster Scots and south-east Asian, all of which have been around for quite a while. Whatever we mean by Irishness was not diluted by such inclusion but enriched. We were reminded that tradition is not static, frozen in past time. We need to talk and think of traditioning, something which is always evolving, developing, expanding, growing, and always more to come. Traditioning is a growing, ever-expanding phenomenon.

There was also the reminder that this Ulster Scots tradition, which has a tendency to siege mentality and even victimhood; it reached adulthood and maturity in the Fleadh and with the reminder that the Ulster Scots tradition is part of the Irishness of this island, and it is also a Gaelic tradition. Place names in Scotland and railway stations are all dual language, English and Gaelic, and it is the same Gaelic as spoken in Ireland. It was Columba or Colmcille, the great Celtic or Irish missionary and migrant who took the Gaelic to Scotland, and whatever our critical understanding of the seventeenth century Plantation of Ulster, the Scots who came brought their Gaelic prayer books and liturgies with them as Gaelic speaking Presbyterians. Right up until late in the nineteenth century the only church in Ireland to require Gaelic speaking as a condition of training for ministry was the Presbyterian Church. The revival of the Irish/Gaelic language in Belfast in the nineteenth century was Presbyterian-led, the descendants of the Scots who came to the north-east of Ireland in the seventeenth century. There has been the politicisation of Irish and Ulster Scots in the North but let's get history right, the Ulster Scots tradition is also a Gaelic tradition, one with the Irish/Gaelic tradition. The Fleadh was a reminder of that. The Fleadh will return to Belfast next year and one would not be surprised if the 1.65 million people who came into the city centre this year is far exceeded next year. It was the biggest Fleadh ever and in a lot of ways was the biggest and most significant thing that has ever happened in Belfast. Dare we say it was a transformative and reconciling event.

Culture, music, arts have the capacity to enable reconciling communities. The practice of inclusion and diversity becomes a powerful reconciling dynamic. I said earlier that the Fleadh challenged us to get our history right. That is an imperative in relation to the reconciling process. The Fleadh brought us back to that landmark Harp Festival in Belfast in 1792. It brought us back earlier to the beginning of the seventeenth century and the Plantation of Ulster and the large influx of Scottish Presbyterians with their Gaelic prayer books and liturgies.

We were confronted by history with the Fleadh in Belfast. It was the reminder that the processes of reconciliation in Ireland, as we have begun to engage, increasingly engage, discourse about the future of Ireland, of the need to confront history. To critically understand the past, where we have come from, how we are where we are, how history has shaped us and made us and why at this point in our history we may face constitutional change. History like tradition does not stand still but is always in motion, always being made. History isn't over. We are part of it and are history makers.

History is not just remembered still less disremembered.  History is not a storybook version, or fantasy or mythologised history. Nor is it an ideological version of history often written by politicians. It is hard evidence- based history to be confronted, critically examined and owned. There is no new Ireland and no reconciling Ireland (whatever that means) without confronting our history, which is both Irish and British history.

Confronting our history is the task of all of us with all our diverse origins. In all our diversity we are part of the history. Confronting our history means confronting our colonial history. There is no partitioned history of Ireland, as if we can talk of a history of Northern Ireland and a history of the Republic of Ireland. There is a history of Ireland and from the early sixteenth century it is colonial history, which is why it is Irish and British history, and needs to be confronted in Britain as well as Ireland as we face the growing possibility of constitutional change.

We are the products of colonial experience. Our past included the political reality of the Tudors in Ireland, the Plantation of Ulster, of Protestant Ascendency, the momentous experience of liberation through Catholic Emancipation, the Act of Union, the Home Rule crisis, the arrival and integration of migrants.

We all live with the Partition of Ireland and its consequences for the whole of Ireland and for all of us. We are shaped by sectarian pasts and legacies of hurt, pain and destroyed lives and communities. In Northern Ireland we have not dealt with our most recent past, the history of what is euphemistically called ‘The Troubles’. The proposed revised history curriculum for schools in Northern Ireland fails to adequately address the most recent history of conflict in Northern Ireland. Another generation of young people are not being helped to deal with the past, or the causes of that violent conflict as part of their history. Confronting history includes dealing with the contestedness of history in all its complexity.  Now we have racism and racial hate, and femicide. What is the meaning of all this past and related present and how has the past shaped the present and how will the past shape the future? Unless in some way there is liberation from the past and mindsets and memories shaped and often dominated by the past, reconciliation will be a struggle and a flourishing future and common good will be prevented. We are at a point in our Irish and British history, our shared history, when we need to confront it, understand it, own it and acknowledge it, and experience a liberated imagination to imagine a new future. 

Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann in Belfast woke us out of our amnesia and denials, opened us up to history, the past, present and future, a vision and possibility of something new, an inclusive and diverse community, a reconciling community and a common good. All of that will need the foundation of four core and indispensable values; justice, truth, peace, compassion or tenacious and social solidarity. 

See you in Belfast in 2027 at Fleadh Cheoil na hEireann.

Dr Johnston McMaster

August 2026