The "contact hypothesis" (Allport, 1954) proposes that contact with persons from a disliked group, under appropriate conditions, leads to decreased prejudice towards that outgroup. I will give a brief overview of the conflict in Northern Ireland, and review the results of studies on cross-community contact between Catholics and Protestants. I will then present the results of surveys, designed for the first time to include reliable measures of key social-psychological constructs (e.g., quantity of contact; quality of contact; intergroup anxiety; prejudice; perceived group variability). I conclude that intergroup contact, under appropriate (specified) conditions, can contribute to intergroup reconciliation. However, social-structural factors within Northern Ireland set limits on the extent of this contribution.