Social Structure and Religious Division: Comparing the Form of Religious Distinction in the Two Irish States

Abstract

By setting the Irish religious conflict in a wide comparative perspective, this book offers fresh insights into the causes of religious conflicts, and potential means of resolving them. The collection mounts a challenge to widely held views of 'Irish exceptionalism' and points to significant historical and contemporary commonalities across the Western European and North Atlantic worlds. In so doing it enriches understanding not only of the cultural and political legacies of Christendom's internal divisions, but also of the factors currently hampering the peaceful assimilation of Muslims in Western societies. The 'on the ground' experience detailed in several of the chapters shows, however, that religion can be part of the 'solution' as well as part of the 'problem', and the book develops conclusions and implications that are important for practitioners and policy-makers as well as for academics.