Our whack of the woods: Young people, public space, and IRA authority in a Belfast housing estate.

This dissertation addresses the everyday practices and discourses of young people in the ostensibly apolitical public spaces of a Catholic working class housing estate in the years immediately following the 1998 Northern Ireland peace agreement. In particular, it focuses on the relationships between young Catholics and the Irish Republican Army (IRA). During the Troubles, when hostility between segregated Catholic communities and the Royal Ulster Constabulary was at its worst, the IRA began to act as an informal police force within those communities. Their methods of disciplining individuals involved in criminal and anti-social activities included warnings, beatings, shootings, expulsions, and executions. Although these actions have long been a subject of controversy within Catholic areas, the peace process has recently drawn greater attention to the issue of violent punishments and has prompted a reevaluation of the need for IRA policing. Often the targets of such punishments, young people offered especially pointed critiques of IRA authority, both by speaking out against punishment beatings and shootings in public forums, and, more frequently, through their spatial practices. By writing anti-IRA and other graffiti, joyriding in stolen cars, or even simply socializing outside at night, young people temporarily challenged the IRA's ability to control movement through and use of public spaces. Yet while these individuals often opposed republican policing, their practices and discourses also reflected a pervasive idealization of IRA knowledge and power. Thus, even when they engaged in spectacular acts of resistance, young Catholics often, in the end, reinforced and substantiated republican authority. This dissertation is based on twenty-two months of fieldwork between May 1998 and December 2001. Although I recorded over forty interviews with young people, youth organization employees, and community leaders, most of my research consisted of participant observation within youth organizations and with young people in public, outdoor spaces. While acknowledging the fluidity and social constructedness of the category youth, for practical purposes I defined the parameters of my research as roughly eleven to twenty years of age. In doing so, I drew on the ways in which age groups were delineated in schools, youth organizations, and social gatherings.PhDCultural anthropologySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125037/2/3186591.pd