Catholic Grievances in Northern Ireland: Appraisal and Judgment

From 1981 until 1985 the British Journal of Sociology published a debate on the significance of Catholic grievances in Northern Ireland. Consisting of a series of five articles from Christopher Hewitt and Denis O'Hearn, this exchange considered the importance of those grievances as a causal factor of the violence that took place in Northern Ireland between 1968 and 1971. This essay is designed to estimate the quality of that debate and make a judgment about its conclusions. The conclusion is that the debate failed in four distinct areas: (1) in some instances a direct clash of ideas did not take place; (2) when a direct clash of ideas did take place, inadequate evidence made a rational conclusion unlikely; (3) in other instances, when clash and evidence were present, inadequate reasoning made logical judgment difiicult; (4) in some instances both a failure of evidence and of reasoning prevented a reasonable