This study examines the evolution of the political process in the Ulster county of Monaghan during the period 1868-1883. Considerable attention has been given to the social, economic and geographic features from the end of the sixteenth century. In addition, a survey of the parliamentary representation of Monaghan from the Act of Union to the general election of 1865 has been undertaken. This extended treatment of the socioeconomic and political background is regarded as essential to a clear appreciation of political behaviour at constituency level in the later nineteenth century. The period 1865-1883 saw a most significant change in the parliamentary representation of the county. Monaghan had always been regarded as a stronghold of Irish Conservatism, albeit with occasional Whig interludes. In 1865 one of the seats was captured from the Tories by a member of the local Liberal ascendancy. Our period, then, opened with the representation of Monaghan split between the two major British parties. The 'Disestablishment Election' of 1868 saw the Conservatives regain control of the county's second seat. Thereafter that party's hegemony was threatened first by the conservative constitutional nationalism of the Home Government Association and later, in 1880, by the Ulster Liberals. Advocating strong tenant right principles, the Liberal party nominees defeated both Conservative members. The result appeared to be a vindication of non-sectarian class politics. The key to victory had been held by a relatively small number of Liberal Presbyterian tenant farmers. In 1883 one of the M. Ps. resigned, and the ensuing byelection pitted a local Liberal Presbyterian against a Conservative and Tim Healy, the nominee of Charles Stewart Parnell and the Irish National Party. The result saw a narrow victory for the Nationalist candidate over his Conservative counterpart with the Liberal receiving an embarrassingly small vote. The massive decline in the Liberal vote between the contests of 1880 and 1883 looks anomalous. However, it is argued here that the 1880 result reflected an anti-Conservative rather than a pro-Liberal vote on the part of the Catholics. In other words, the sectarian nature of politics in Monaghan which had been such a prominent feature of the county had not been interrupted. The thesis narrates the story of Irish politics during this most formative period, and relates it to a local study. By so doing it illustrates the strongly sectarian dimension to Irish politics. In the late nineteenth century few, if any, public issues could be fully divorced from the religious factor. The rhetorical expression of political ideals might appear nonsectarian at Westminster, but in the Monaghan region their true nature was indicated by the manner in which the population reacted to them. Thus the real significance of the political activities of the representatives of the two traditions can often by more fully appreciated when related to constituency level. Monaghan occupied a peripheral position on the borders of Ulster. Its population was around 75% Catholic during the second half of the nineteenth century. This means that Monaghan offers an illuminating example of the interaction of Protestant Ulster and Catholic Ireland. The activities of the county's Protestant and Catholic populations, its Orangemen and its Fenians, its various groups of clergy, its Protestant landlords and its Catholic Bishop, all constituted the political life of 'the county of the little hills'. Today Monaghan's geographic position places it in the front line of an assault upon Northern Ireland. Once again the people of the county are strategically placed in relation to national and sectarian confrontations on the island - plus ca change plus la reste meme.

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Each year, Protestant organizations in Northern Ireland perform over 2,500 ritual parades to celebrate and commemorate their culture. Many Catholics, however, see parades as triumphalist and hateful. As a result, parades undermine the political peace process and grassroots peace-building by raising interethnic tension and precipitating riots, including significant violence in recent years. This dissertation asks: Why do people participate in these parades? To answer this question, I consider loyalist parading as an example of contentious ritual--symbolic action that makes contested political claims. To understand these parades as ritual actions, I build on two central insights from religious studies, sociology, and anthropology. First, as meaningful and shared practices, rituals provide participants with benefits that are intrinsic to participating in the act itself and do not depend on the achievement of some external outcome. Second, rituals are multi-vocal, meaning that interpretations of the action can vary across actors. Participants need not share the interpretation of their actions held by organizers, rivals, or outside observers. Participants, therefore, may not see the ritual as provocative, aggressive, or even contentious. These arguments stand in contrast to traditional explanations for collective action and ethnic conflict that theorize participation in ethnically polarizing events in terms of the achievement of concrete outcomes, such as selective material benefits, provoking the out-group into overreacting, or intimidating them into quiescence. To test my argument, I conducted fieldwork in Belfast, Northern Ireland. I developed and implemented a household survey to measure mass-level opinion, designed and ran an online survey of all Protestant clergy and elected officials in Northern Ireland to measure elite-level opinion, conducted over 80 semi-structured interviews with parade participants and nonparticipants, and observed dozens of hours of parades and related events. I demonstrate that, as expected by my argument, people approach participation in ritual parades as an end in and of itself. The evidence demonstrates that participants do not view parades instrumentally. This means that people make decisions to participate in contentious behavior without consideration of their actions' profoundly political consequences. The ritual nature of parades severs the expected connection between means (participation) and ends (political consequences), thus creating the environment for sustained conflict. Furthermore, the predictions of influential theories of ethnic conflict--extreme in-group identification or out-group antipathy--and collective action--selective material benefits or sanctions--are not supported by the data.

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This thesis examines Protestant unionist commemorations of the Battle of the Somme in Northern Ireland during a phase in which they exhibited marked popularity and politicization. Filling a gap in the scholarship and building upon it, this thesis pays closer attention to the historical context and development of these commemorations and takes into account a broader swath of forms and locations of commemoration. It argues that, in the face of the perceived threat of Irish unification posed by the Anglo-Irish Agreement in 1985, unionists employed the memory of the Somme as a political tool on two different but overlapping fronts. On one front, they used it against their collective opponents, who supported or supposedly supported Irish unification. On a second front, conflicting groups within the unionist community, namely unionist politicians, Orangemen, Protestant youths, and loyalist paramilitaries, interpreted the Somme differently to satisfy their partisan agendas. Analyzing Somme commemoration at the Belfast cenotaph, in parades, and in murals, this thesis provides explanations for why the Somme was remembered differently in various mediums and locales of commemoration, with particular attention to the differing degrees and manners in which Protestant commemorators recognized the Catholic contribution in the Somme campaign. / Department of History