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 space to reclaim belonging, recover memory, and inhabit an Irishness fuller than the one most of us inherited by default.
Integration, here, doesn't mean smoothing difference into sameness. It means bringing what was split off - the fragmented past, the ancestral and the emergent, body and psyche and culture - back into relation with each other, so it can be met consciously rather than carried unconsciously.
What We Stand For
The Irish story carries both rupture and resilience. These live on in our bodies, our families, our communities, and they ask for real listening, not only remembrance.
Three things ground our work:
Integration: meeting what was split off in our history and in ourselves, and bringing it back into relation, not smoothing it into sameness.
Belonging: reconnecting with land, lineage, and community, on whatever terms actually fit your own inheritance.
Emergence: making room for what wants to be born in Irish life now, rather than repeating what came before by default.
We are distinguishing this from nostalgia, and it isn't about taking sides. It's remembering what was silenced, and carrying forward what can genuinely serve the people who come after us.
Our Vision
To go beyond is to shift from problem to possibility - to see Irish 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 wound, but alive with coherence, connection, and creativity. The Irish story carries both trauma and strength, fracture and renewal - often within the very same families, on both sides of the same histories. When we bring these into conscious relation, something new becomes possible: a culture that honours the past while opening toward the future.
Irish healing doesn't happen in isolation. The wounds of colonisation, famine, exile, and forgetting are part of a wider human story. In tending our own field, we add something to a broader movement of cultural and ancestral healing already underway elsewhere.
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 nationalism, but a lineage carried through land, language, and community.
The call isn't only to look back. It's to notice what longs to emerge through us now, as individuals, as communities, as a people.
This work is for those carrying questions like:
How do we tend the unspoken wounds of our lineage and our land?
What does it mean to be of Irish heritage, now, and into what's next?
How do we become vessels for collective healing and cultural emergence, rather than carriers of what wasn't resolved before us?
This opens the possibility of a new kind of homecoming, 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 by the experience of emigration and exposure to other cultures. This gave him a particular sensitivity to how differently Irish belonging is felt - between north and south, at home and abroad - and to the shadow dynamics that 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 rise 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 programmes, integrative trainings, and collective inquiry, the Initiative creates spaces for Irish people and those of Irish descent to come together in service of healing, remembrance, and renewal.
Our flagship programme, Beyond the Irish Question, is an eight-month journey into Irish history, ancestral pattern, and living identity, guided by trauma-informed, relational, and embodied practice.
This work is not only about turning to the past. It's about what can emerge through us now - as individuals, as communities, as a people.
Sinéad O'Connor named this directly, in her own way, in her 1994 song "Famine": that healing asks first for remembering, then grieving, and only then forgiving - that there has to be knowledge before there can be understanding. That order of operations is close to what this Initiative exists to hold.