ABSTRACT
Designations such as the North of the island of Ireland or the Six Counties may be used to refer to the same geographical location as Northern Ireland, but from different political and ideological perspectives. In the bipolar model of ethnicity which has habitually been used to explain the conflict in Northern Ireland, aboriginal Catholic Gaelic-speaking Celts are pitted against planted Protestant Anglophone Anglo-Saxons. In Ptolemy's Geographia, a distillation of the cartographical information of his day, the second-century Greek scholar placed the island he called Ivernia on the extreme north-western periphery of the known world. By the end of the seventeenth century, the cultural and religious dynamics of Ulster were firmly established. What remained of the Catholic Irish aristocracy was largely dispossessed of its land, its ancient legal system was swept away and its religion, language and culture repressed. Popular culture has played, and continues to play a prominent role in the construction of personal and group identity in the region.
