ABSTRACT
The only undeniable blessing to evolve from the recent troubles in Northern Ireland has been miniboom in the publishing industry. Traditionally, contemporary modern Ireland has attracted the occasional coffee-table volume or the nearly annual The Irish, potted "sociology". Most of the material—stuff—included in the first wave of works on Northern Ireland has been snatched from secondary works, often of doubtful merit, and arranged often with a fair mind if a heavy hand. Andrew Boyd in the Holy War in Belfast outlines episodically the chronicle of sectarian violence of nineteenth-century Belfast—long before the pressures of partition and the establishment of the Republic. Perhaps serious academic investigation can reveal the basic common ground available in Northern Ireland on which those long forgotton bridges might be built. Perhaps such investigation might reveal no such ground, not all human problems have human solutions and not all problems are amenable to compromise or even conciliation.
