In this article, I defend the view that the Northern Ireland Troubles can usefully be described as an ethnic conflict. I critically examine two manifestos on this subject, those by Richard Bourke and Simon Prince respectively, which rest on misrepresentations of the scholarship on Northern Ireland. The issues raised by these historians are relevant to the historiography of nationalism and the study of civil war. I focus on the coincidence of religious affiliation and political allegiance in Ulster and the mechanisms by which patterns of conflict have been reproduced over time, suggesting several reasons why historians and political scientists have turned to the notion of ethnicity to describe the persistence of antagonism in the North of Ireland. In the final section, focusing on the loyalist agitator John McKeague, I argue that the literature on ethnicity helps historians to understand the outbreak of the Northern Ireland conflict better than does the singular concentration on democratic ideas recommended by Bourke and Prince.

在本文中，我捍卫以下观点：北爱尔兰问题可以有效地描述为种族冲突。我批判性地审视了关于这个主题的两份宣言，分别是理查德·伯克和西蒙·普林斯的宣言，它们的基础是对北爱尔兰学术的歪曲。这些历史学家提出的问题与民族主义史学和内战研究相关。我重点关注阿尔斯特省宗教信仰和政治效忠的一致性，以及随着时间的推移冲突模式再现的机制，这提出了历史学家和政治学家转向种族概念来描述阿尔斯特地区持续存在的对抗的几个原因。爱尔兰北部。在最后一部分，重点关注忠诚的鼓动者约翰·麦基格（John McKeague），