Beyond the Irish Question
A nine-month relational journey exploring what it means to be Irish
23rd Sep 2026 - 23rd Jun 2027
What is Beyond the Irish Question?
Beyond the Irish Question is a nine-month relational journey exploring how Irish history, land, and lineage live in us today.
The themes we explore - belonging, ancestry, mythology, land, diaspora, polarisation, power - are the ground. What changes people is what happens on that ground: learning to be present, to speak from something truer than habit, to listen without defending, to stay in the room with each other's difference rather than smoothing over it. This is the work underneath the work. Because the collective can only be met honestly once we know our own footing in it - our own development, attachment, and inheritance - the early part of this journey turns there first.
None of this asks you to arrive at a fixed answer. What it means to be Irish isn't a fact to master, but a living inquiry, one that keeps forming, in you and in us, for as long as we keep turning toward it.
Grounded in trauma-informed, somatic, and ancestral practice, and held in a steady group field, the process supports you to uncover how ancestral memory and cultural patterns live in your body, your relationships, and your sense of belonging - not as ideas to understand, but as territory to inhabit.
The invitation is simple: to turn inherited fracture into belonging, resilience, and possibility - for yourself, your lineage, and the people you touch.
Inside the Exploration
Guidance & Facilitation
A journey held by Simon Courtney as lead facilitator, together with co-facilitators bringing decades of expertise, perspective, and care to each module.
Community Connection
A living field of fellow participants from Ireland and the diaspora, building resonance, belonging, and collective support across the journey.
Live Weekly Sessions
Twenty-six live, two-hour gatherings combining teaching, embodied practice, and collective dialogue in a safe, supportive field.
Triad Practice Groups (optional)
Small peer groups meeting between modules, supporting continued reflection, accountability, and relational practice.
Integration & Reflection
Dedicated integration sessions every third week with Simon: a space to pause, digest, and let what has arisen settle before moving forward.
The Craft of Presence
Irish people are gifted with language, less practised in direct communication — real listening, staying present, making room for difference. Every module builds this craft through simple, embodied practice. A central gain, not a side one.
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.
People of Irish descent, in Ireland and across the diaspora, who feel a personal pull to explore their Irishness - with pride, ambivalence, resistance, or a quiet sense of disconnection. What matters is a willingness to turn toward it honestly.
Anyone of Irish ancestry with the willingness to be present with themselves and others, to listen, and to let new understanding emerge rather than arrive pre-formed. No prior experience of trauma work, ancestral work, 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 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.
Curriculum
Across these eight modules, each theme becomes a resource, not a subject: the resource of belonging, of ancestry, of land, of language, of myth. We don't study Power and Authority, Land and Language, or Mythology and Mysticism, we ask what each one resources in us, how they live in us, and what it asks us to be more real about, both with ourselves and with one another.
Each module opens a way into your own particular relationship with being Irish, not to arrive at conclusions, but to deepen what you can access, claim, and carry forward. Throughout, one touchstone holds: deepening our belonging with one another, while being supported in our own becoming more of ourselves.
Each module blends teaching with lived practice - somatic tools, small-group dialogue, and ancestral presence - so what's offered is not just understood, but felt and inhabited.
Opening the Field
We anchor intentions, attune to one another, and open a shared relational field, beginning with our own ground.
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.
Mythology & Mysticism
Meeting the older stories and symbolic language Irish culture has used to hold what could not be said plainly.
Land & Language
Remembering the deep bond between place, word, and identity, and reweaving what was broken.
Diaspora & Displacement
Turning toward the grief, longing, and fractures of leaving, loss, and return.
Polarization
Encountering division in us and between us, opening space for coherence and integration.
Power & Authority
Exploring Ireland's tangled inheritance of hierarchy, rebellion, silence, and resilience.
Closing the Exploration
Encountering division in us and between us, opening space for coherence and integration.
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.
