We live in an age in which it is practically impossible to speak of politics without speaking also of identity. Identity provides us with a sense of who we are, where we have come from, and, more importantly, where we are going. It mediates our personal memory in terms of collective inheritance and provides the platform from which we launch ourselves on an unsuspecting world. Understood in these terms, identity offers itself, almost uniquely, as a means of ordering the chaos of our experience. It can assimilate the unlikely event, the crisis-wracked history, the piece of outrageous good fortune and...

On Thursday 2 July 1998 the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland published an open letter in Northern Ireland’s two morning newspapers:

Dear Fellow Citizens

I am sure, in common with members of the Orange Institution, you are concerned about events over the coming days in respect of traditional Orange parades. In order to assist understanding of our historic culture and noble traditions we wish to outline certain facts which are relevant to the situation.

The disputed parades occur along main arterial roads which are shared by all communities. All are traditional routes, none have been concocted or organised to cause...

Bemoaning the inability of recent films about Northern Ireland to ‘advance understanding’, John Hill, writing in 1988, ended his consideration of ‘images of violence’ in Irish cinema with the following remarks:

This is not to suggest that there is then a ‘correct’ interpretation of the conflicts which films about Ireland should be supporting. What it does imply, however, is that the ability to respond intelligently to history, and the willingness to engage with economic, political and cultural complexity, would need to be considerably greater than that which cinema has so far demonstrated.²

This perceived absence is one that Hill’s book...

Just as recent criticism about representations of Northern Ireland in cinema has often found itself caught between expectation and disappointment, between a weary recognition of what exists and a more optimistic awareness of the possibilities of what might be, so criticism of Northern Irish prose fiction has found itself similarly in limbo. Indeed, as with those readings of Northern Irish cinema that perceive it as a coherent object of study, the critical framework of response most commonly adhered to when considering Northern Irish fiction is one that identifies a previous surfeit of stereotypical (usually foreign) representations of the place and,...

As this study has been suggesting, there are limits to the identitarian project and borders that it cannot cross. As identity formations in Northern Ireland have their genesis not in the need to encounter opposition but rather in the contemplation of an absence within the subject itself, so much of what can be understood as the discourse of Northern Irish identity politics takes the form of a culturalpossibility;a strategy intended to find a voice from within (and give shape to) a contradictory ideology. It is for this reason that identity, despite the prerequisite that it should appear as...