For thirty years, Irish republicans, Ulster loyalists, and British state forces fought for control over the six counties of Northern Ireland during a period euphemistically referred to as the Troubles. Today, in the absence of physical conflict, loyalists and republicans are engaged in a culture war wherein language, music, murals, parades, and sports are used to mark territory and claim symbolic space. Drawing on ethnographic work in loyalist pubs and social clubs across Northern Ireland, this paper focuses on the explicitly sectarian nature of the loyalist song scene and considers loyalist claims that such songs, with their use of anti-Catholic and anti-Irish references, are in fact ironic. Taking the seemingly paradoxical loyalist chant ‘we are not sectarian’ as its focus, the paper questions the limits of irony when it takes place on a large scale and whether irony functions differently within post-conflict societies, particularly among those dissatisfied with the Good Friday Agreement. It explores such questions at a time when loyalist music is increasingly becoming embroiled within contemporary debates around free speech and explores the connection between loyalism and the culture wars on both sides of the Atlantic.

Dr Stephen Millar is a Lecturer in Anthropology and Ethnomusicology at Queen’s University Belfast whose work focuses on the interconnections between music, power, and conflict. His first monograph Sounding Dissent (University of Michigan Press, 2020) explores how Irish republicans have used rebel songs to resist against the hegemonic power of the British state. Drawing on three years of sustained fieldwork within the rebel music scene, the book challenges the parameters of the postcolonial and reconceptualises political resistance through sound, using rebel songs to understand the history of political violence in Ireland. Today’s paper draws from his second monograph, Performing Paramilitarism which will be published by Oxford University Press in May 2026. This book examines the interconnection between loyalist songs and political violence in Northern Ireland from the Troubles to the present, unravelling the role songs play in inciting violence during war and legitimising structural violence during peace. It explores why musicians and audiences continue to consume loyalist songs, and how such songs form part of a cultural nostalgia for multiple and intersecting imagined pasts, which resonate with the rise of populism in other parts of the world.