Political Science and Sociology Research Seminars: “More smoke, admittedly, than flame’? Ireland-Wales relations after Brexit”

This paper is a political-sociological exploration of the forms of connection and rupture, collaboration and conflict that define relationships across the Irish Sea at a time of constitutional and political change on ‘these islands’. The aim is to examine the history and consequences of Ireland-Wales relations, their contemporary tensions and ongoing attempts to renew and recast them. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with those involved in contemporary nationalist politics in Wales and Ireland, the paper will explore, in particular, whether and in what ways the projects of Irish (re)unification and constitutional change in Wales overlap, and with what implications. The paper will thus provide a case study in changing transnationalist politics in post-Brexit, post-Covid Europe.

Jonathan Evershed is the Newman Fellow in Constitutional Futures at the Institute for British-Irish Studies (IBIS) and School of Politics and International Relations (SPIRe), University College Dublin (UCD). His work engages questions of postcolonial identity and constitutionalism in post-Brexit British and Irish politics. He is the author of Ghosts of the Somme: Commemoration and Culture War in Northern Ireland (University of Notre Dame Press, 2018) and co-author (with Mary C. Murphy, UCC) of A Troubled Constitutional Future: Northern Ireland after Brexit (Agenda Publishing, 2022).