Interpreting Northern Ireland

by John Henry Whyte

Since 1968 when the current troubles began in Northern Ireland, hundreds of books and thousands of articles have been published on the subject. This book provides a guide to the mass of research that has accumulated. Whyte first surveys the research on the nature and extent of the community divide and then discusses various ideological interpretations, including unionist, nationalist, and Marxist. He assesses the various solutions that have been proposed and critically examines what the research has achieved.

Genres: Ireland

324 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

John Whyte was born in 1928 into a well-known Co. Down family. Educated at Ampleforth and Oriel College Oxford, he graduated in Modern History in 1949 and two years later was awarded a BLitt for the research which formed the basis of his first book The Independent Irish Party 1850-9. (OUP 1958). After national service and a spell as history master at his old school he was appointed lecturer in Modern History in Makerere University, Uganda. In 1962 he was appointed as the first lecturer in empirical Politics at University College Dublin . In 1966, he married Dr. Jean Murray, then lecturer in Italian at UCD, and moved to Queen's University Belfast where he spent seventeen years as lecturer and reader, and in 1982 was awarded a personal chair as Professor of Irish Politics.

During this period he did much to bring together political scientists from the Republic and the North, his patience and general popularity contributing much to the development of an all-Ireland academic community in political science which had not previously existed. In 1975 he was invited to convene the Conflict sub-committee of the Committee for Social Science Research in Ireland and he was responsible for developing a programme of research into the Northern Ireland conflict with a varied team of collaborators. He was also research fellow at the Center for International Affairs at Harvard (1973-74) and research fellow at the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Studies (1979-80). He was elected member of the Royal Irish Academy in 1977 and served on a number of its committees as well as being Vice-President in 1989-90.

While at Queen's he wrote two major books: the pioneering Church and State in Modern Ireland (Gill & Macmillan 1971, 2nd Ed. 1980)) and Catholics in Western Democracies (Gill & Macmillan, 1981) which was described at the time as ‘one of the outstanding academic books of 1982’. In 1984 he returned to University College Dublin as Professor of Government and Politics and Head of Department. He piloted the department through a troubled period of financial cuts and supervised successfully the general reorganisation of the undergraduate curriculum. He succeeded in completing a major work - Interpreting Northern Ireland (OUP 1990) and had finished correcting the proofs and compiling the index a week before his death.

Source: The Dr John Henry Wright Trust Fund: https://www.ucd.ie/t4cms/John%20Whyte...

Reviews

[Eddie Matthew Pagtakhan]

read this book for uni. great broad analysis of the issues surrounding northern ireland. he applies an extensive knowledge on the topic quite adequately. it suffers due to this since it does not allow for striking takes, but also it meanders amongst different interpretations in order to give the reader a good idea of the nature of the conflict.