Citation

Ruane J, Butler D. Nations Nationalism 2007; 13(4): 619-635.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2007, John Wiley and Sons)

DOI

10.1111/j.1469-8129.2007.00304.x

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

The study of minorities is central to research in ethnicity and nationalism. But there are cases where the precise nature of the minority is not easy to determine. One view of Southern Irish Protestants is that in the decades after independence they transformed themselves (or were transformed) from British nationals to Irish nationals or, alternatively, from a British ethnic to an Irish religious minority. This paper argues that treating the (past) British dimension of Irish Protestant identity as ethnic or national misconceives it and overlooks the historically deep Irish context of Protestant identity. One consequence of this is the neglect of the specifically Irish roots of residual tensions in Catholic–Protestant relationships. The themes of the paper are exemplified with case material drawn from research on Protestants and Catholics in rural West Cork.