Reconstituting Irish Families Network: RIFNET

RIFNET will alter the conversation around the Irish family. For too long, understandings of the family have been constrained by an over-emphasis on the 'traditional' unit. Comprised of a heterosexual married couple and their offspring within one household, this understanding is, and has always been, but one expression of the family. In the Republic of Ireland, the family is defined by the constitution in Article 41. This article has been a 'contentious' issue in the Irish State (Visser, 2018), and one which is to be subject to a nationwide conversation in the form of a citizen's assembly, and ultimately a referendum. As senior parliamentary researcher Anna Visser noted in 2018, 'there is a dominant view amongst policy-makers and commentators that it is desirable to amend or repeal Article 41.2.' On both sides of the border, important legal changes have been made in recent years in regards to family and reproductive law (Marriage Equality, ROI 2015, NI 2019), while other changes are still being worked through or demanded (for example, the recent extension to the Commission on Mother and Baby Homes (2019), and renewed attention on the 27th constitutional amendment (2004) which denied citizenship rights to children born in Ireland to non-Irish or British parents).

Working in different fields, scholars of the Irish family have long pointed out the conceptual problems of the 'traditional' Irish family. Nuclear, white, Catholic, settled, and heterosexual, this idea of the 'traditional' Irish family does not, and has never, matched the messy reality. Indeed, the problem is not just conceptual. This view of the family has long been used as the basis of family regulation in Ireland for centuries to the detriment of women, men and children. Generations of Irish families have deviated from the traditional model. Yet, their stories have been overlooked, overshadowed and omitted from the narrative. Historians, sociologists and legal scholars have all captured the lives of historical and contemporary communities of Irish women and men whose family experiences sit outside the assumed norm. While each of these fields have developed a rich disciplinary body of literature, these perspectives have not yet been considered together. RIFNET sits at this nexus and makes an important intervention in scholarship and society to provide academic scholarship and resources. In bringing to the fore marginalised stories and side-lined experiences, this research network provides a powerful challenge to dominant narratives of the family. RIFNET will engage with the latest international research on the concept of family (Finch, 2007;Morgan, 2020), and in turn, will provide a model for analysing the family within a supposed homogeneous society which will be internationally significant. We aim to push the boundaries of existing knowledge to create a new model that captures the broad diversity and messy realities of Irish family life.

Through a series of workshops and impact activities, RIFNET brings together scholars, policy-makers and the general public to engage in critical discussions about the Irish family, both past and present. The work is divided across five work packages, from which the following outputs will flow:
* An embedded research network.
* 2xECR Research seminar presentations.
* Archival research on the family.
* A primary source collection of oral histories and images for future analysis and research.
* A methodological model for accessing, preserving and disseminating diverse family experiences in Ireland. RIFNET members may present findings on The Conversation or Radio Teilifis Éireann (RTÉ)'s 'Brainstorm' or through partner networks.
* Academic workshop facilitating wider networking.
* Special issue of high-impact journal.
* Online exhibition of audio-visual sources on the Irish family.
* A searchable and interdisciplinary academic database of researchers and research on the Irish family.
*Biographies of RIFNET members.