Before the company's opening performance, four prominent Northern Irish writers were invited to join the project:—Seamus Deane, David Hammond, Seamus Heaney, and Tom Paulin—who would eventually become Field Day's board of directors.
[citation needed] The directors and members of the company argued believed that Field Day had a crucial role to play in the resolution of "the Troubles", by producing analyses of the opinions, myths and stereotypes intrinsic to the political situation in Northern Ireland.
In September 1983, Field Day began publishing a series of pamphlets aimed primarily at the academic community, "in which the nature of the Irish problem could be explored and, as a result, more successfully confronted than it had been hitherto".
[5] In 2005, Field Day Publications was launched in association with the Dublin school of the Keough-Naughton Institute for Irish studies at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.
With Seamus Deane as general editor, the company's first publication was Field Day Review 1, an annual journal primarily concerned with Irish literary and political culture in an international context, which published essays and interviews by well-known academics.