Analyzes the relationship betwen religion & identity in Northern Ireland, drawing on census & polling data & 1992/93 personal experience on the Opsahl Commission, an independent inquiry into ways forward in Northern Ireland. It is shown that the violence since the 1970s has polarized people to a greater extent than ever before. Much of this division is structured in terms of the Protestant & Catholic religions, which provide identity anchors for this conflict. However, it is also found that, in the recent period, polarized identities produced on the basis of religion may be eroding, particularly in the Protestant community. It is suggested that at the bottom of these developments lays the realization that the problems in Northern Ireland can only be resolved from the bottom up by individuals who learn to live & work together. 1 Table, 1 Appendix. D. M. Smith
The history of Irish republicanism has always suffered from an excessive concentration on its later phases. But much light can be thrown on its essential characteristics by a closer examination of its origins. A full understanding of such a contradictory movement would require an investigation of the mutations in public consciousness during the last three centuries. But most historians agree in tracing its origins to the United Irish Society of the 1790's, when the attitudes and conditions which were to dictate the future course of republicanism and loyalism were crystallised. In the light of recent events in Ireland interest in the United Irishmen has revived. However, even recent research has failed to explain satisfactorily the swift transformation of the United Irishmen's secular republicanism by the traditional fears and aspirations of the Catholic population. Nor has anyone attempted to answer the very basic question of how large sections of a non-political and essentially loyal peasantry could in the short period of the 1790's have acquired many of the fundamental traits of later separatist movements. Already by the turn of the century popular oral culture, latterly dominated by themes taken from Gaelic mythology, speaks instead of dead rebel heroes, of the English oppressor and the Protestant enemy. This new anti-English flavour in popular culture is particularly significant; English rule in Ireland had not been seriously questioned since the twelfth century, and the failure of the Bruce invasion in the fourteenth century was an indication of general Irish indifference to the nature of central government, provided life's daily routine remained undisturbed. This attitude characterised Irish thinking for the next four centuries, and like peasant communities elsewhere, the Irish remained essentially apolitical and parochial in outlook. They were scarcely the material from which a movement of national liberation could be fashioned.
