The Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing (1991) is a three-volume, 4044 page collection of Irish literary, political, religious, philosophical and cultural texts, spanning the period of 550 AD to 1990. Its publisher, the Field Day Theatre and Publishing Company, stresses the need for an interventionist theatre and critical discourse, which has the aim of representing and interrogating the current condition of Ireland, particularly that of the North of Ireland. Basing its analyses of the Irish/British situation on a belief that it is a colonial problem, Field Day, throughout the 1980s and into the early 1990s, produced plays and published pamphlets in which various aspects of Ireland's colonial experience were interrogated. The idea of an anthology was raised formally in 1984 as a way of constructing a narrative out of the cultural production of the various groups and sects that have inhabited the island. Such a collection would be a syncretic statement of Irish written culture and could contribute towards debates on the questions of identity and cultural/religious/national affiliation facing the people(s) of Ireland. The Field Day Anthology's publication in November 1991 was greeted by the type of criticism rarely encountered by any text. The loudest voices of opposition came from critics angry at both the text's sins of omissions and its perceived ideological baggage and agenda. The text was characterized as a nationalist narrative, as antagonistic towards or ignorant of the particular circumstances and traditions of the North, and as a monocular colonially-obsessed production. Foremost among the criticisms was the perception that the text did not adequately represent women's writing. Following the storm of protest, Field Day announced that a volume devoted to women's writing would be produced. At the time of writing, this volume has yet to appear. While I am sympathetic of many of the criticisms, I also believe that the production was attacked for reasons other than its own particular merits or demerits. I argue in Chapter 4 that it is essential to retain a view of the anthology as a multiple and complex production, rather than as a wholly coordinated programme. While I am interested in the institutional background of the anthology, and in the controversies it provoked (I devote Chapter 2 to these issues), my chief concern is to analyze the anthology as a text that engenders questions on, for example, on the nature of the canon (Chapter 3), on questions of post-colonial agency (Chapter 6), and on writing's relationship to Irish history and historical revisionism (Chapter 5).

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The thesis considers the politics and ideology of Belfast's Protestant working class (PKC). It is also conceived as a contribution to discussions concerning the nature and theory of 'ideology' within the Marxist tradition. Traditional Irish Marxism has been dismissive of the PWC reducing their politics to the protection of marginal privelege sustained by Britain's Imperialist presence. This thesis argues that such a perspective is inadequate. It is essential to move away from the concept of loyalist ideology as a systematised form of false consciousness, rather it is necessary to look at the ideology of Protestant workers at the level of day to day experiences and practices. Such collectively lived experiences give the-alternative sets of practices embodied in working class culture. It is therefore important to draw on the sociological tradition of the community study. To fully understand PWC images of society it is necessary to construct the relationship between, local ideologies and the theoretically developed ideologies, generated by national institutions. In order to do this the thesis looks at the social structure and politics of a particular PWC commmity in Belfast. The thesis then outlines by way of case study how the PWC have reacted to the contemporary political and social situation in Northern Ireland. The thesis draws on interviews with residents, political activists and paramilitary members. In particular it identifies the politics and ideology of those active in the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) and the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). In overall terms it highlights the ideology by which Protestant workers make sense of, and give meaning to, their social and political worlds.

This study derives from the interest of recent years in the Irish during the late Victorian period in the smaller towns of Britain. Much work has been done on the Irish in the larger conurbations of industrial England and Scotland, particularly in the 1830s and 1840s - work that has overshadowed the experience of the Irish elsewhere, skewing the historiography and locking the migrants into a huddled mass in a northern city. However, the 'Wild Milesians' of Thomas Carlyle, living cheek-by-jowl with Engels's pig in the slums of Liverpool and Manchester, have come to be seen as less than typical of the Irish, especially the second and third generations of the migrants living in provincial towns. Furthermore, the representation of the Irish as uniformly poor, wretched and Catholic has been revised. Again, the phenomenon of 'ethnic fade' was assumed to have occurred as the nineteenth century progressed, so that after the initial troubled years, the Irish merged with the 'host' population. However, differing rates and degrees of assimilation have been revealed; indeed, religious and political differences among the Irish themselves, frequently violent in their expression, were often defining characteristics of Irishness. Following in the footsteps of micro - studies of the Irish in the regions and smaller towns, this study aims to examine the experience of the Irish in the later nineteenth century in an area hitherto neglected in the historiography, namely, North-East Wales, with particular reference to the towns of Wrexham, Mold, Holywell and Flint.

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