ABSTRACT
Since the 1960s, the United Kingdom has seen a number of social and political developments that have challenged and changed the meanings of the terms ‘Britain’ and ‘British’. These include resurgent national consciousness in Scotland and Wales, the new cultures of black and Asian Britishness, and a continuing discussion of the place of Britain in Europe. In Ireland, by contrast, the question of what constitutes the United Kingdom and who counts as British is by no means new. It is instead an issue over which a long series of low-intensity wars have been fought, with the most recent thirty years of hostilities beginning in reaction to the Northern Irish movement for civil rights in the late 1960s. The fact that the relationship between Britain and Ireland has long been problematic does not mean that the question of Northern Ireland is unaffected by the new stresses on the concept ‘British’. Yet Ulster still seems to test the British ability to think national questions. In what follows, I will take this contradiction as the starting-point for an analysis of some British films about Northern Ireland.
