Northern Ireland: The Choice

by Kevin Boyle, Tom Hadden

The book shows with stark clarity the extent to which Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland tend to live, to study, to work and to play apart. But it also shows that many parents want their children to go to shared schools, despite some church opposition, and that opinion polls indicate a higher level of willingness to compromise than is shown by elected political leaders. Should the British and Irish governments commit themselves to encouraging greater contact between the communities and seek to build a settlement on the middle ground? Or should they reluctantly accept a policy of communal separation and provide structures that allow Catholics and Protestants to govern themselves with minimal need for contact and co-operation?

Genres: Ireland, History, Politics

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1975

Reviews

[James Empson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well past the time when this was a top news story but the underlying difficulty of reconciling divided communities remains topical. The authors do a good job of recognizing theoretical and historical structures that separate and integrate societies and attempt to put them into the context of the situation in Northern Ireland as things stood in 1993. At the risk of imposing hindsight, my biggest takeaway was that for most, the cost of empathy for the other side was rarely sufficient to move away from entrenched positions that had little practical bearing on any potential solution. Finally, the open question for me is whether or not Eire and the UK’s joining the EU, effectively made all arguments over sovereignty, the economic advantage of one community over another, religious division etc., simply irrelevant?