The Initiative of Irish Integration and Emergence
Opening spaces for Irish people and the diaspora to remember, reconcile, and renew.
Who We Are
The Initiative for Irish Integration and Emergence is a home for remembering, healing, and reimagining what it means to be Irish, on the island and across the global diaspora. Founded by Simon Courtney, a psychotherapist, group facilitator, and practitioner in the field of collective and ancestral trauma, the Initiative opens spaces to reclaim belonging, recover memory, and nurture cultural renewal.
At its heart, the Initiative is about integration:
Integration of the fragmented past
Integration of the ancestral with the emergent
Integration of body, psyche, and culture
What We Stand For
The Irish story has been marked by rupture and resilience. These legacies live in our bodies, families, and communities, and they call for deeper listening.
Our work rests on three pillars:
Integration — bringing the broken past into relation
Belonging — reconnecting with land, lineage, and community
Emergence — opening space for what wants to be born in Irish life today
This is not about nostalgia or division. It is about remembering what was silenced and carrying forward what can serve future generations.
Our Vision
To go beyond is to shift from problem to possibility, to see identity not as a question imposed from outside, but as a living inquiry carried from within.
We hold a vision of an Ireland, and an Irish diaspora, no longer bound by silence and inherited wounds, but alive with coherence, connection, and creativity. The Irish story carries both trauma and strength, fracture and renewal. When we bring these into conscious relation, something new becomes possible: a culture that honours the past while opening to the future.
Irish healing does not happen in isolation. The wounds of colonisation, famine, exile, and forgetting are part of a wider human story. By tending to the Irish field, we also contribute to a global movement of cultural and ancestral healing.
The Deeper Story
The Initiative offers a path of return: to ancestral memory, to the heart of our relational being, and to a living sense of Irish identity, not as nationalism, but as a lineage carried through land, language, and community.
The call is not only to look back, but to notice what longs to emerge through us now, as individuals, as communities, and as a people.
The Initiative is for those who carry questions like:
How do we tend to the unspoken wounds of our lineage and land?
What does it mean to be Irish, now, and into the future?
How can we become vessels for collective healing and cultural emergence?
This work opens the possibility of a new kind of homecoming, and a threshold we can walk together.
Simon Courtney is a trauma-informed psychotherapist, group facilitator, and practitioner in the field of collective trauma. His work bridges ancestral repair, spiritual inquiry, and the reclamation of Irish identity, inviting people to explore what lives in the body and nervous system as much as in history and culture.
Born in Australia to Irish parents from both the north and south, Simon grew up with a sense of Irishness shaped not only by family and heritage, but also by the experience of emigration and by exposure to other cultures. This perspective gave him a particular sensitivity to the many ways Irish belonging is experienced - between north and south, at home and abroad - and to the shadow dynamics that can arise from Ireland’s divided histories.
Simon’s work grows from a practice of integration: meeting trauma, healing, and development as interwoven aspects of both individual and collective life. His offerings, including Beyond the Irish Question, are grounded in years of psychotherapeutic practice, group facilitation, and mentorship in the field of collective trauma through his training and work with Thomas Hübl and the Pocket Project.
This vision gave birth to the Initiative for Irish Integration & Emergence: a space where inherited wounds can be met with presence, and where new possibilities for belonging and wholeness can emerge.
In 2024, a year-long Pocket Project Lab brought together 54 participants 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 lives on in our bodies, families, and culture.
Together we explored themes of fragmentation, absence, resilience, and how Irishness is shaped differently at home and abroad. Art, song, poetry, and the Irish language opened doorways into what words alone could not express. By remembering together, participants began to integrate what ancestors could not, releasing the past into 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 with journalist Matthew Green, Simon Courtney shares insights from the year-long Pocket Project Lab on the Irish Famine (An Gorta Mór). The Lab invited people of Irish descent to explore how the trauma of famine, colonisation, and mass emigration still lives in us today. Simon speaks about the importance of collective spaces to digest what our ancestors could not and to reconnect across histories of rupture. The conversation opens a window into how remembrance and healing can create new possibilities for Irish identity and belonging.
Our Work
Through immersive programs, integrative trainings, and collective inquiry, the Institute creates spaces for Irish people and those of Irish descent to come together in service of healing, remembrance, and renewal.
Our flagship program, Beyond the Irish Question, is an eight-month journey into Irish history, ancestral patterns, and living identity, guided by trauma-informed, relational, and embodied practice.
This work is not only about turning to the past, but about what can emerge through us now, as individuals, as communities, and as a people.
“We (Irish) lost our history, and are still hurting. We’re like a child that’s been battered; we feel all the painful feelings but have lost contact with the memory... There has to be healing through remembering, grieving, and forgiving through knowledge and understanding.”
~ Sinéad O’Connor