07.09.2026
Exploring Identity and Otherness in Search for Social Cohesion
Archbishop of Dublin’s sermon at British Irish Association.
Concepts of identity and otherness and their impact on social cohesion were the focus of Archbishop Michael Jackson’s sermon to members of the British Irish Association yesterday morning (Sunday September 7).
The service in Pembroke College Chapel in Oxford was part of the annual conference of the British Irish Association (BIA) which took place in Oxford over the weekend. The BIA annual conference brings together a wide range of people – senior politicians and government officials, businessmen and women, academics, faith leaders, writers, former paramilitaries and community workers – to discuss matters of mutual concern.
The Archbishop noted that there is a “density of Irish difference” as illustrated by the famous blackboard in hit television show Derry Girls which details numerous ‘differences’ between Protestants and Catholics.
Bringing in the broad theme of the 2026 BIA meeting, identity and otherness, he said that knowing who we are and having a confident sense of our identity is what those with children hope to instil in them.
Otherness, he explained, can range from a straightforward fact to a fascination with understanding those who are different from us and we from them. This can extend further to excessive Othering of human beings, he added.
“Such Othering rapidly de–humanizes the other person and shatters the first–second person relationship which might otherwise flourish,” Archbishop Jackson suggested.
He said that while individual identity is a vital component in self–understanding, it needs to move towards relationship, community and social sacrifice.
“Sooner or later, we are all going to be faced with the question: What will I sacrifice (not accumulate) in order to grasp and to hold the greater prize of social cohesion? It is an understanding of the need for social cohesion that forces us to realize that, when even two people are together, there is not a new 200% of social or spiritual space but a newly configured, freshly negotiated new and other 100%.
“This is where Otherness is a true positive. This is what we all are seeking to do – through the work to which each of us is committed, many of us over a lifetime of service and sacrifice – as we grapple with what I am calling a crumbling world in our local contexts and in its local manifestations,” he stated.
The Gospel reading for the day [St Matthew 18: 15–20 outlining Jesus’s process for resolving conflict escalating from private conversation to small group intervention to church involvement] connects directly with a new paradigm for mutual coexistence and social cohesion, he said.
‘We need to work energetically for values in a time of fundamentalism; and for ethics in a time of irreligion in the Northern Hemisphere,” he said adding that for those who devise and nurture systems, there has to be a value in the small scale and the small step outlined in the Gospel. He suggested that escalating external engagement could be a real help and the value of such a contract across the policing system and civic society in both parts of Ireland would revitalize tired communities.
You can read the Archbishop’s sermon in full here.