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The ethnic strife in Northern Ireland is more than a repetition of ancient native-Catholic/Protestant-settler conflicts. One of the major contemporary issues, partition, dates back to 1921 and is the basis of the declaration of war by the Irish Republican Army on Great Britain. The other conflict is of more recent origin and involves the inclusion of the Catholic third of the population in the government and an end to institutionalized discrimination against the minority. Protestants have uniformly opposed any unification with the Irish Republic, but intense internal disagreements characterize the Protestant reaction to the other conflict. Moderate Protestant elites have been unable to bind their loyalist constituents to a compromise with the Catholic politicians, but neither Protestant nor Catholic paramilitary groups have been able to impose a military solution on the province. The roots of the first conflict are traced primarily to the historical ethnic cleavage separat ing the two communities while the second conflict is best explained by the volatile mixture of ethnicity and the strains of modernization. Any solution to the current troubles will have to be addressed to the nature and causes of each conflict.

Two major schools of thought within Marxist analyses of Northern Ireland are identified: the 'anti-imperialist', which argues that imperialism is responsible for sectarian division and conflict in Northern Ireland, and thus sees national independence as a necessary precondition for socialism; and the 'revisionist', which emphasizes internal factors in the development of the 'Northern Ireland problem' and views imperialism and the British presence as largely progressive. The relative strengths and weaknesses of these two approaches are assessed. It is argued that in spite of several serious shortcomings, the 'anti-imperialist' approach is the more satisfactory of the two, in that, by directly challenging existing social relations in Northern Ireland it proposes a meaningful strategy for the advancement of socialism in Ireland.

Conflict in Northern Ireland in August 1969 is seen as a consequence of the type and patterning of social relationships in that society. Social relations are personal and patterned primarily by the categories of Protestant and Catholic which are ascribed at birth. This patterning results in communities of Catholics and communities of Protestants. These communities form `congregations' in the `churches' of Republicanism and Loyalism respectively. Conflict between communities has two effects. First, it serves to clearly delineate the physical, social, and symbolic boundaries between communities. Second, it creates conditions conducive to the growth of `political sects' based on the `congregations' which may conflict with each other, sometimes violently, even though they belong to the same `church'.