Beyond the Irish Question
A nine-month relational journey exploring what it means to be Irish
23rd Sep 2026 - 23rd Jun 2027
A Personal Invitation
For many years, I've found myself returning to a simple question: What does it mean to be Irish today?
That question has taken me into conversations with historians, psychotherapists, artists, spiritual teachers, and people from Ireland and across the diaspora.
Again and again, I've discovered that our relationship with Ireland cannot be understood through history alone. It also lives in our bodies, our families, our relationships, and the stories we inherit across generations.
I created Beyond the Irish Question because I believe Ireland is living through an important moment. Alongside extraordinary resilience, creativity, and generosity, we also carry the unfinished legacies of colonisation, famine, migration, religious division, conflict, and silence. My hope is that by creating a space where these histories can be explored with curiosity, honesty, and compassion, something new can emerge, not by leaving the past behind, but by relating to it differently.
This Exploration isn't about arriving at the right answers. It's about creating the conditions for meaningful conversation, understanding, deep listening, and shared exploration.
Together, we'll ask what it means to belong, to ourselves, to one another, and to the unfolding story of our lives.
If something in you has been quietly asking these questions too, we'd be honoured to welcome you into the journey.
What is Beyond the Irish Question?
Beyond the Irish Question is a nine-month journey into the living story of Ireland—its history, identity, ancestry, and collective life.
Together, we explore how the legacies of colonisation, famine, migration, mythology, language, spirituality, land, and belonging continue to shape who we are today. Through history, dialogue, embodied practice, and collective inquiry, we create a space where personal experience and cultural memory meet.
What it means to be Irish isn't a fact to master, but a living inquiry, one that continues to unfold as we explore it together.
The invitation is simple: to turn inherited fracture into belonging, resilience, and possibility, for yourself, your lineage, and the people around you.
What You'll Experience
Over nine months, you'll become part of a committed learning community where Ireland's history is explored not only through the mind, but through relationship, dialogue, and embodied experience. Together with participants from Ireland and the diaspora, you'll journey through live teaching, reflection, conversation, and shared practice, allowing learning to unfold over time.
Throughout the journey, you will:
Join 26 live online sessions combining teaching, dialogue, and embodied practice.
Learn from an experienced faculty of historians, therapists, storytellers, artists, and spiritual practitioners.
Explore Ireland's history through the lenses of collective trauma, ancestry, identity, and belonging.
Engage in reflective and somatic practices that support deeper integration.
Connect with a thoughtful community from Ireland and the diaspora.
Pause every third week for integration and reflection.
Access recordings and programme resources throughout and after the journey.
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Twenty-six live online gatherings where history, psychology, and lived experience come together through teaching, conversation, and collective inquiry.
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Gentle somatic practices that help bring learning out of the intellect and into the body, supporting deeper integration and presence.
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Dedicated integration sessions every third week, creating space to pause, reflect, and allow insights to settle before moving forward.
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Engaging themes of ancestry, land, language, diaspora, power, and identity through inquiry, ritual, and shared presence.
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A living field of fellow participants from Ireland and the diaspora, building resonance, belonging, and collective support across the journey.
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Small peer groups meeting between modules, supporting continued reflection, accountability, and relational practice.
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Learn alongside an exceptional group of historians, therapists, storytellers, spiritual practitioners, and community leaders, each bringing a unique perspective to the journey.
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Full access to session recordings and curated resources to deepen your exploration between and after sessions.
What You'll Experience
A learning journey held in relationship, curiosity, and shared inquiry.
Live Teaching & Dialogue
Twenty-six live online gatherings where history, psychology, and lived experience come together through teaching, conversation, and collective inquiry.
Community Connection
A living field of fellow participants from Ireland and the diaspora, building resonance, belonging, and collective support across the journey.
Embodied Practice
Gentle somatic practices that help bring learning out of the intellect and into the body, supporting deeper integration and presence.
Triad Practice Groups (optional)
Small peer groups meeting between modules, supporting continued reflection, accountability, and relational practice.
Reflection & Integration
Dedicated integration sessions every third week, creating space to pause, reflect, and allow insights to settle before moving forward.
Guest Teachers
Learn alongside an exceptional group of historians, therapists, storytellers, spiritual practitioners, and community leaders, each bringing a unique perspective to the journey.
Ancestral & Cultural Exploration
Engaging 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 between and after sessions.
Inside the Exploration
Over nine months, we'll travel through nine interconnected explorations, each opening a different doorway into Ireland's story and our relationship with it.
Opening the Field
We begin by arriving together, grounding ourselves, and opening a shared relational field.
Belonging & Becoming
Exploring the tension between rootedness and growth, and what it means to belong.
Ancestry
Turning toward ancestral memory to uncover inherited burdens, resources, and wisdom.
Mythology & Mysticism
Meeting the older stories and symbolic language Irish culture has used to hold what could not be said plainly.
Land & Language
Rediscovering the deep relationship between place, language, identity, and belonging.
Diaspora & Displacement
Turning toward migration, loss, longing, and the search for home across generations.
Polarization
Encountering division in us and between us, opening space for coherence and integration.
Power & Authority
Examining Ireland's inheritance of power, leadership, silence, and resilience.
Closing the Exploration
Reflecting on our journey together and carrying its insights into the future.
This journey may be for you if you:
Feel a genuine curiosity about Ireland's history, identity, and living inheritance.
Have Irish roots, whether you live in Ireland or anywhere across the diaspora.
Are willing to stay present with complexity rather than searching for simple answers.
Value dialogue, reflection, and relationship over debate or certainty.
Want to explore how history lives in the body, in families, and in culture.
Feel called toward belonging—to yourself, to others, and to Ireland's unfolding story.
No previous experience with trauma work, somatics, or Irish history is required.
Some of us arrive having already done deep spiritual or therapeutic work, often in international settings, among people with no particular stake in Irishness. Others arrive with none of that background. Either way, doing this work amongst our own is different: it means bumping into exactly how we categorise, judge, and hold distance from each other as Irish people - the subtler resistances and loyalties that don't surface the same way anywhere else. That friction is not a flaw in the process. It's where the process does its work.
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 primarily for an academic course rather than an experiential journey.
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.
Step into this shared Exploration
We are not meant to carry this alone. But before we can meet what is collective, we first have to know our own ground - our relationship to being Irish, our own development, attachment, and family inheritance. The clearer that ground becomes in us, the more clearly we can meet what belongs to all of us.
Beyond the Irish Question invites you into a first-of-its-kind journey with others from Ireland and the wider diaspora: to listen, reflect, and discover what lives in us and between us, in our histories, our relationships, our culture.
Committing to this journey is an act of care, for yourself, your lineage, and the generations still to come.
Why Beyond the Irish Question?
For over a century, Ireland was framed by British politics as "the Irish Question" - a problem to be managed, a population to be solved. 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.
That history rarely divided as cleanly as the phrase suggests. Many of us carry both lines in our own lineage - those who were dispossessed, and those who held the pen, the land, or the office that did the dispossessing, sometimes only a generation or two apart. Whichever inheritance runs through us, it asks to be met honestly, not resolved into a single story.
But the real question was never only political. It's personal, ancestral, relational.
Many of us carry a quiet ache:
a heaviness we can't quite explain
a longing to feel at home in our own Irishness
a sense of rupture between past and present, here and there, self and story
These aren't only echoes of the past. They are living imprints, shaping how we belong, how we love, and how we see ourselves now.
To go beyond the Irish Question is to shift from problem to possibility, from fragmentation to coherence, from forgetting to remembering, and from repetition to something more emergent. It is to reclaim what was silenced or shamed, and 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 we are more than our trauma, that we also carry resilience, song, kinship, humour, and a deep bond with 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. It's about opening space for it to keep becoming, in us, and between us.
