Beyond the Irish Question
An 8-month process of integration, embodiment and collective healing
Oct 2025 - Jun 2026
What is Beyond the Irish Question?
Beyond the Irish Question is an eight-month relational journey exploring how Irish history, land, and lineage live in us today, and how turning toward them can bring healing, coherence, and renewal.
This a guided space of presence and care. Grounded in trauma-informed, somatic, and ancestral practices, it supports you to uncover how ancestral memory and cultural patterns shape your body, relationships, and sense of belonging.
Through seven core themes, you will experience teaching, embodied practice, and collective inquiry in a supportive group field.
The invitation is simple: to transform inherited fractures into belonging, resilience, and possibility, for yourself, your lineage, and the communities you touch.
The group will be limited to a maximum of 36 participants.
Inside the Exploration
Guidance & Facilitation
A transformative journey held by Simon Courtney as lead facilitator, together with Co Facilitators, who bring decades of expertise, perspective, and care.
Community Connection
A living field of fellow participants from Ireland and the diaspora, creating resonance, belonging, and collective support throughout the journey.
Live Weekly Sessions
Twenty-two live, two-hour gatherings that combine teaching, embodied practice, and collective dialogue in a safe, supportive field.
Triad Practice Groups (optional)
Small peer groups to meet between modules, supporting continued reflection, accountability, and relational practice.
Integration & Reflection
Dedicated integration sessions every third week with Simon and Elaine, a space to pause, process, and integrate what has arisen before moving forward.
Inner Development
Deepen your intuitive capacities by engaging with the Irish psyche in relation, with simple somatic and relational tools to support regulation, presence, and coherence in daily life.
Ancestral & Cultural Exploration
Opportunities to engage with themes of ancestry, land, language, diaspora, power, and identity through inquiry, ritual, and shared presence.
Replays & Resources
Full access to session recordings and curated resources to deepen your exploration.
People of Irish descent, both in Ireland and across the diaspora, who feel a personal longing to explore their Irishness. Whether we relate to being Irish with pride, joy, resistance, ambivalence or a deep sense of disconnection, what matters is a desire to turn toward it with honesty and curiosity.
Those whose lives and work are rooted in relationship: therapists, coaches, teachers, nurses, doctors, carers, artists, mediators, activists, clergy, small business owners, leaders, and people in community, organisational, or public service roles.
Anyone of Irish ancestry with the willingness to be present with yourself and others, to listen, learn, and allow new insights to emerge. (No prior experience of trauma work, ancestral work, or Irish history is required).
Who is Beyond the Irish Question for…
Who is Beyond the Irish Question not for…
This journey may not be a fit if you are:
Looking for a purely academic or mental study of Irish identity without personal or emotional engagement
Seeking debate, ideological arguments, or discussions about “right vs. wrong”
Oriented toward quick answers rather than a reflective, personal process
Hoping the group will be a primary support in a time of acute crisis or mental health struggle. This process will touch tender places, but it is not a substitute for therapy.
This is a space for shared inquiry, presence, and relational exploration, not for proving points, winning arguments, or avoiding the deeper work.
A UNIQUE JOURNEY INTO MEMORY AND BELONGING
Beyond the Irish Question opens space to explore how Irish history, ancestry, and identity live within us today.
Through shared practice and reflection, you’ll be invited into experiences that bring the past into dialogue with the present, opening new pathways of connection and meaning.
Committing to this journey is an act of care, for yourself, your lineage, and the generations to come.
Registration closes Monday, October 27th.
We invite you to join us before then — spaces are limited, and we begin soon.
Curriculum
Beyond the Irish Question is not just about what happens in you individually. The group itself becomes a living mirror, revealing patterns, opening insights, and creating possibilities that could never arise alone.
Practices You’ll Experience
Each module blends teaching with lived practice, somatic tools, small-group dialogue, and ancestral presence, so the work is not just understood, but embodied.
Opening the Field
We anchor intentions, attune together, and open a shared relational field.
Belonging & Becoming
Working with the tension between rootedness and growth, finding home in who we are.
Ancestry
Turning to ancestral memory to uncover burdens, resources, and intergenerational wisdom.
Diaspora & Exile
Turning toward the grief, longing, and fractures of leaving, loss, and return.
Land & Language
Remembering the deep bond between place, word, and identity, and reweaving what was broken.
Power & Authority
Exploring Ireland’s tangled inheritance of hierarchy, rebellion, silence, and resilience.
Polarization
Encountering division in us and between us, opening space for coherence and integration.
Closing Session
We gather threads, honour journeys, and envision what may now emerge.
Schedule
Step into this shared Exploration
We are not meant to work alone on these cultural processes. Collective trauma can never be carried or healed in isolation.
Beyond the Irish Question invites you into a first-of-its-kind journey with others from Ireland and the wider diaspora. Together we will listen, reflect, and discover what lives in us and between us, in our histories, our relationships, and our culture.
You are warmly invited to step into this collective exploration, to bring your presence, and to be part of something greater: a living process of change that can touch your life, those around you, and the generations to come.
Why Beyond the Irish Question?
For over 200 years, Ireland was treated as “the Irish Question” - a problem to be solved by colonizers and politicians. The phrase carried domination and dismissal, justifying policies that stripped land, language, culture, and dignity, leaving fractures that still ripple through families and collective memory.
But the real question isn’t political. It’s personal. Ancestral. Relational.
Many of us carry a quiet ache:
a heaviness we can’t explain
a longing to feel at home in our sense of Irishness
a sense of rupture between past and present, here and there, self and story
These are not just echoes of the past. They are living imprints shaping how we belong, how we love, and how we see ourselves today.
To go beyond the Irish Question is to shift from problem to possibility, from fragmentation to coherence, from forgetting to remembering. It is to reclaim what was silenced or shamed, and to begin the slow, essential work of cultural and ancestral integration.
In 2024, a year-long Pocket Project Lab brought together 54 people from Ireland and the diaspora to explore the legacy of the Great Famine (An Gorta Mór). Rather than focusing on history, the Lab created space to feel how famine still lives in our bodies, families, and culture.
Through remembrance, art, and language, participants began to integrate what ancestors could not — opening new possibilities for belonging.
As featured on BBC World Service Sun 3 Aug 2025
What is Collective Healing? podcast hosted by Matthew Green, produced by J'aime Rothbard.
In this episode, Simon Courtney shares insights from the Pocket Project Lab on the Irish Famine (An Gorta Mór). He speaks about how famine, colonisation, and migration still live in us today, and the importance of collective spaces to digest what ancestors could not. The conversation opens a window into how remembrance and healing can shape new possibilities for Irish identity and belonging.
The Vision
“To tell our island’s history as a migrant story reveals how the definition of Irish identity is always in process, never completed.”
~ Maurice J. Casey
To go beyond is to imagine what else is possible.
To remember that we are more than our trauma, that we also carry resilience, song, kinship, humour, and a deep connection to land.
Beyond the Irish Question is a space to reimagine Irishness, not only as history or bloodline, but as a living culture of coherence, presence, and care.
By gathering across lines of difference, from Ireland and across the diaspora, we remember something older than the wound: the possibility of belonging, together.
This journey is not about fixing Irish identity in place, but opening space for it to evolve, in us and between us.
