Initiative for Irish Integration & Emergence
Current Offering:
Beyond the Irish Question
A relational process for Irish people and the diaspora to explore ancestry and collective trauma, and to renew belonging in themselves and their story.
Welcome to the Initiative for Irish Integration and Emergence
The Initiative opens a space for Irish people and the diaspora to address the legacies of intergenerational and collective trauma. Our aim is to presence what has shaped us, the wounds we inherit, the silences we carry, and the resilience we embody, so that a deeper sense of Irishness can emerge, rooted in coherence and belonging.
This is not about bypassing the past, but digesting and reconciling it so that new futures can emerge. We create spaces where buried stories and inheritances can be presenced, digested, and honoured, not to remain bound by the past, but to free its energy for new life, new possibilities, and new movements.
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Beyond the Irish Question is the first program of the Initiative - a living inquiry into who we are now as Irish people and diaspora.
“Irish? In truth I would not want to be anything else.
It is a state of mind as well as an actual country.
It is being at odds with other nationalities, having quite different philosophy about pleasure, about punishment, about life, and about death. At least it does not leave one pusillanimous.”
~ Edna O’Brien
To be Irish is to carry a history that is anything but timid.
It is marked by courage, resilience, wit, and defiance, a way of being in the world that refuses to shrink, even under centuries of hardship and loss.
This spirit lives in us, whether we feel rooted in our Irishness, or estranged from it. Whether we were raised on Irish soil, or carry its memory in our blood and bones.
In Beyond the Irish Question, we gather not to polish a single story, but to stand in the complexity of who we are - resilient, creative, fragmented, longing, courageous - and to ask, together:
Who are we now?
Meet the Founder
Simon Courtney is a psychotherapist and facilitator whose work focuses on the intersections of trauma, ancestry, and cultural identity. Living between cultures has given him a lived awareness of the complexities of Irish belonging across borders and histories.
His approach is integrative, combining developmental insight, embodied practice, and collective trauma principles to support individual and communal healing. Through the Initiative for Irish Integration & Emergence, and its flagship program Beyond the Irish Question, Simon creates spaces where inherited wounds can be worked through and new possibilities for connection and belonging can emerge.
What Lives Beneath the Question
