BEYOND THE IRISH QUESTION
GROUP EXPLORATION FROM 29 OCT 2025 - 17 JUNE 2026
An eight-month, trauma-informed group exploration for people of Irish descent, and for therapists drawn to the Irish story.
Beyond the Irish Question invites people in Ireland and across the diaspora to explore how Irish history lives within us, not only in memory and text, but in the body: in the silence that settles around painful family events, in the shame passed down through generations, and in the resilience that enabled survival but can harden into distance or disconnection.
For psychotherapists and counsellors, this work offers more than personal reflection. It provides a unique professional resource: deeper understanding of the cultural and intergenerational dynamics that shape both therapist and client. Many clients bring struggles that are not only personal, but entwined with the legacies of migration, famine, institutional abuse, and colonialism. By engaging these themes within a safe, traumainformed community, therapists can expand their capacity to recognise when what seems individual may also be inherited or collective.
Psychiatrist Judith Herman reminds us that “remembering and telling the truth about terrible events are prerequisites… for the healing of individual victims.” Without space for compassionate witnessing, what is left unspoken continues to echo through families and communities. What is not brought into awareness does not disappear, it repeats, shaping fate in relationships, identity, and society.
This programme offers a well-held, embodied group field where silence can give way to story, shame to recognition, and isolation to belonging. It supports psychotherapists to integrate awareness of the collective and intergenerational into their clinical work, while deepening their own journey of healing and connection.
30% Discount Code available for all IAHIP members: IAHIP30
Website: https://beyondtheirishquestion.com/
Contact: contact@irishintegration.com
Info Session on 15th October: https://luma.com/hw4lv81z
Simon Courtney is a psychotherapist and facilitator working at the intersections of trauma, ancestry, and cultural identity. He leads Beyond the Irish Question, the flagship program of the Initiative for Irish Integration & Emergence, together with a team of six facilitators, creating spaces where inherited wounds can be met with care and new possibilities for connection and belonging can emerge.
