ABSTRACT
In examining the depiction of Belfast in the Troubles' thriller, this chapter shall also address the problematics of representing the city for the dominant ideologies in Ireland more generally. Urban space threatens the social cartographies and spatial visions of Irish Nationalism and Unionism, both of which I shall deem rusticative ideologies: which is to say, ideologies entrapped in a mythic orientation towards a rural idealism.1 By this I mean that Irish Nationalism and Unionism literally ground themselves on a pastoral conservatism which has profound implications for the representation of place and social relations in Irish culture. Filiation bases its continuity on the organic and essentialist as a means of seamless naturalization. For instance, Seamus Heaney's parish is structured around the father, as a readily politicized terrain often standing metonymically for the nation, in which language, self and place mythically cohere beyond the requisitions of History.
