Acts of Union: Youth Sub-Culture and Ethnic Identity amongst Protestants in Northern Ireland

Abstract

In Northern Ireland (hereafter called NI), as we all know, the sphere of cultural and political identities is a fiercely contested one. Young people in NI develop a sense of ethnic awareness in an ongoing situation of political mobilization and sectarian confrontation. Historically conditioned cultural divisions are reproduced in and through the education system. Increasing levels of segregation combined with the isolating effect of mass unemployment have led to further ghettoization of young people within their confessional communities. This paper examines the symbiotic relation between the dynamics of urban working-class youth culture and the ethnic boundary maintenance practices of adult life in NI. For working-class youth, as for their parents, the defence of the territorial and symbolic boundaries of their confessional communities are central concerns. We suggest that young people in NI are more than passive initiates into the Loyalist and Republican political and cultural traditions. In their youth-cultural practices they play an active part in the reproduction of'sectarian' ideology. In the research reported here we explore the specific relationship of Protestant youth to a parental culture of Loyalism a culture subject to acute tensions in the current situation of mass unemployment and felt political insecurity in NI. We argue that the cultural practices of Protestant youth their bands, parades, kerb and wall markings, bonfires are an attempt to address, at the level of the symbolic, the focal concerns of a Loyalist parental political culture and the material and ideological contradictions which beset this. But young people themselves are experiencing a specific material situation. This is the generation whose birth coincided with the onset of the 'troubles'. The ghettoization of-residential life since then has affected them perhaps more than any other age group. Their physical mobility is restricted as are their opportunities for recreation and even employment. Their adolescence is occurring in a period within capitalist society of general marginalization of young workers from