The historiography of the conflict in Northern Ireland and the reception of Andrew Boyd's Holy war in Belfast (1969)

Abstract

The first ‘setting’ of the Northern Ireland conflict in its historiography as a ‘problem’ was by Denis Barritt and Charles Carter in The Northern Ireland problem (Oxford, 1962). Before 1969 this description was the default setting. After 1969 it was displaced by a plethora of rival ‘resettings’ resulting in an intractable meta-conflict or ‘conflict about what the conflict is about’, which persists to the present day. Recently, it has been shown that the process of problematisation is itself problematic and that greater attention needs to be paid to the ‘genealogy’ or ‘pathways of transmission’ of ‘the Northern Ireland problem’ in order to transcend the meta-conflict. This article responds to that call by studying the reception of Barritt and Carter's setting of the problem and then, in more detail, its first resetting by Andrew Boyd in Holy war in Belfast (Tralee, 1969). Three problematic aspects of the ‘genealogy’ of Holy war are exposed: distortion of the historiography; elision of Barritt and Carter's setting; and establishing of the meta-conflict. Further work to address these problematic aspects is noted, and the position of Holy war in the historiography of the conflict is reassessed.