The politics of legitimacy : struggles in a Belfast community

The Politics of Legitimacy. Belfast was a community at war. Much has been written about the contemporary troubles in Northern Ireland, but this book is unusual in that it is the first study of a community in Belfast to take an ethnographic approach. The author s principal concern is to explain the existence of IRA ideology and politics in terms of the socio-historical conditions of the Northern Irish society.Starting from an empirical investigation in the sociology of knowledge, Frank Burton analyses politicised violence in generahand one aspect of the conflict in Northern Ireland in particular. He roots his analysis both in an ethnographic study of a working-class Belfast community and in the theoretical traditions that deal with the study of social consciousness. His central thesis is that the particular ideology of the Provisional IRA presents a political articulation of the dominant categories of the Northern Irish Catholic total ideology. This total ideology is presented in terms of three interconnected parts communalism, sectarianism, republicanism while IRA ideology is portrayed as a politics of national liberation expressed through a rhetoric of civil rights. The virulence of the Six County War is partially explained by demonstrating that the IRA s political and military struggle is a practice that represents the major ideological formations evident within the Catholic community.In the final chapter the author compares his own account with explanations of the situation which have appeared in press coverage of Northern Ireland, and with certain other political analyses of the troubles .