This paper examines the changing attitudes towards the Protestant "other" in two Northern Irish writers of Nationalist background born a generation apart: Seamus Heaney and Robert McLiam Wilson.

In a BBC talk (1978), Heaney tells us that the rural area where he grew up in County Derry may have been "the country of community", but, because of ethnic/religious difference, it was also "the realm of division" (Preoccupations, p.20). Heaney's response to that dilemma is one of tolerant separatism, as is evident in "The Other Side" (Wintering Out, 1972). The Protestant neighbour clearly inhabits a different culture, with a language charged with Biblical reference; yet he is still a welcome visitor in the Catholic household once the family rosary has been said (in a "litany" of words that is equally alien to him). Heaney's poem is obviously influenced by Robert Frost's "Mending Wall", the concluding line of which is: "Good fences make good neighbours." Heaney's world remains a strictly divided one.

Contrastingly, Robert McLiam Wilson in his novel Eureka Street (1996) undertakes, as part of a "democratic unideological" agenda (p.214), to deconstruct such ethnic differences. The major critical task will be to examine and evaluate the strategies employed in this undertaking: anti-stereotypical characterisation (Chuckie as an ecumenical Protestant who is photographed with the Pope); the wilful collapse of the distinctions between both sides; linguistic (sometimes macaronic) confusion; and, most riskily of all for the book's success, the constant subordination of the political to the personal.