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the Catholic Ballymurphy side of the peace line provides a stark view of
this change, as both the soldiers and the communities they were sent in
to protect became targets in a protracted and biter conlict.
Conclusions
This chapter has given an overview of the “Troubled Geographies” proj-
ect and the light it has been shedding on Ireland's religious geographies
at a variety of scales. Elsewhere, conflict in modern Ireland has some-
times been portrayed simplistically as a religious war between Catholics
and Protestants. In contrast, the project has shown that changing spatial
relationships have also been a key part of this difference, contributing
to and manifest in the crisis in Northern Ireland in the later part of the
twentieth century.
42
This chapter has focused on the spatial dimensions of religious dif-
ference over two centuries. Yet, looking ahead, we should not lose sight
of the common experience that has been forged by these differences.
W hile the island of Ireland is still characterized by a historic religio-
spatial polarity between a nominally Catholic south and a supposed Prot-
estant north, we need to acknowledge that the social meaning of such
descriptors has completely changed over the past 150 years and that now
more emblematic of both jurisdictions is a growing unwillingness among
citizens to be categorized in religious terms. Furthermore, the ancient
north-south divide is increasingly being supplanted by a wider dichot-
omy between an undeveloped western hinterland and a bloated metro-
politan east, the product of transnational forces of industrialization and
urbanization and, laterly, deindustrialization and suburbanization that
have transformed the island uterly, transcending any parochial border.
Acknowledgments
Work on this essay was funded by the
AHRC/ESRC's “Religion and Society”
program under Large Grant AH/F008929,
“Troubled Geographies: Two Centuries
of Religious Division in Ireland”
(principal investigator, Professor Ian
Gregory, Lancaster University). The proj-
ect collaborators are also grateful to
Dr. Martin Melaugh (University of
Ulster) for making the Suton database
available to us. Thanks are also due to the
CSO and NISRA for the modern census
data that made much of this analysis
possible.
