ABSTRACT
It is a universal truism that when politicians fail to agree and division becomes manifest that the eects of such discord are witnessed across civic society and impact upon the everyday lives of its citizens. Nowhere is this truer than in Northern Ireland, a country synonymous with internal conict, violence and mistrust between its two major ethnic groupings, Irish nationalists and Ulster unionists (McEvoy 2008). The country is one part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland but its positioning, adjacent to the Republic of Ireland, oers a clue as to the social, political and cultural issues at the heart of a longstanding dispute, underwritten in many cases by thinly veiled sectarianism (at other times this is tragically manifest), that led to a violent guerrilla-style conict between Irish republican paramilitaries, loyalist factions (Unionist paramilitaries) and functionaries of the British state, specically the locally based police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), which began in the late 1960s (Bew 2007).
