Acts of union: youth culture and sectarianism in Northern Ireland

Over the last 20 years, a series of teenage generations have come of age in strife-torn Ulster.

Young people develop a sense of ethnic awareness - as Ulster Protestant or Irish Catholic - in a situation of political crisis and sectarian confrontation.

Using ethnographic methods, Desmond Bell explores the subcultural world of young Loyalists and examines the role of youth cultural practices in the reproduction of ethnic identity and in the reconstruction of tradition in Irish society.