Protestant Ideology and Politics in Ulster

In a deeply divided society such as Northern Ireland, where two religious communities coexist in relative physical and spiritual isolation from one another: yet where both communities are highly preoccupied with the presence of each other, one community's ‘knowledge’ of the other is comprised very largely of indirect experience and socialized teachings, rather than of first hand experience. The ideologies of one community are therefore relatively ‘autonomous’, in the sense that they are partially immune to empirical tests in day to day life. Ideology tends to structure experience rather than the other way round.