Northern Ireland Conflict

I

Introduction

Northern Ireland Conflict, internal war in Northern Ireland that commenced in response to the civil rights marches of 1968-1969 and that led to the deaths of more than 3,500 people. The term often used in Ireland and the United Kingdom to describe this conflict was the Troubles. This term was originally used to describe the disturbances and violence of 1919-1923 (the Irish war of independence and subsequent civil war; see Irish Revolution). With the onset of violence and unrest in Northern Ireland, the term quickly came back into use. The period of the Troubles is usually thought to have begun in 1969 and to have ended with the paramilitary cease-fires of 1994, with a definitive symbolic closure in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. Although conflict and intermittent violence continued, longtime foes in Northern Ireland joined to form a power-sharing government in 2007.

II

Causes of the Troubles

The long-term causes of the conflict lie in the division between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland. This conflict, in turn, has roots in the British conquest of Ulster when English and Scottish Protestant settlers were given land and political privileges. Over subsequent centuries, Protestants maintained a relative advantage over Catholics. In the late 19th century, when nationalists (predominantly Catholic) mobilized for Irish home rule, Protestants in the northeast successfully campaigned for their exclusion. In 1920 “Ulster unionists” were given limited self-government within the United Kingdom for the six northeastern counties of Ireland, where they formed two-thirds of the population. The unionists governed Northern Ireland for the next 50 years, forming a state that expressed their ethos and interests, with extensive repressive powers enforced by armed security forces that were overwhelmingly Protestant. The result was deep resentment among the Catholics in Northern Ireland, although they were too weak and badly organized to be able to challenge Protestant power.

In the 1960s economic restructuring, rising unemployment, and political centralization pitted unionist modernizers, headed by Prime Minister Terence O’Neill, against local unionists, who also mistrusted O’Neill’s rapprochement with Northern Irish nationalists and the Irish state. Meanwhile, the civil rights movement organized and mobilized the Catholic population (with some Protestant support).

A series of civil rights marches commenced in 1968 and met with a strong reaction from sections of the unionist population, the government, and the security forces. Television cameras showed the Royal Ulster Constabulary beating civil rights marchers in Londonderry in October 1968. The modernizers in the unionist government quickly lost control not only of the Catholic population but also of large sections of unionists. As civil unrest, riots, and communal expulsions increased, in August 1969 the British Army was called in to support the government.

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III

Key Events 1969-1998

As violence increased and loyalist paramilitary groups formed, the unionist government balanced moderate reforms with stern repressive measures. The Catholic population resisted, creating urban “no go areas” that the security forces could not enter. A newly armed Provisional Irish Republican Army was formed by militants within the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to defend Catholic neighborhoods and to force British withdrawal. An attempt to defeat the IRA by introducing internment without trial in August 1971 led to a dramatic increase in republican violence and an alienation of moderates within the Catholic and nationalist population. A series of incidents, culminating in the killing of 13 unarmed demonstrators by British paratroopers on “Bloody Sunday,” January 30, 1972, convinced the British government that it was time to take control of Northern Ireland away from unionists. In 1972 the British government initiated a period of “direct rule.”

The British government aimed to reinstate the Northern Ireland Assembly on an agreed cross-community basis. In 1973 the government won wide agreement on an assembly with a power-sharing executive composed of moderates from the nationalist, unionist, and cross-community parties. A Council of Ireland was agreed upon between these parties and the British and Irish governments at Sunningdale, in Berkshire, in December. A power-sharing executive was formed in January 1974. It was opposed by anti-agreement unionists, who overwhelmingly defeated pro-agreement unionist candidates in a British general election called in February 1974.

An Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) composed of loyalist trade unionists, paramilitaries, and politicians also organized a strike against the executive and the proposed Council of Ireland. Although initially small in scale and functioning partly by intimidation, the strike quickly won widespread Protestant support. When the electricity supplies of Northern Ireland were withdrawn on a phased basis, unionists in the executive resigned, and the moderate power-sharing faction of unionism lost all influence for the next 15 years. A debate continues today on whether swift British Army intervention in the first days of the strike could have defeated it.

From 1974 the British Labour government, supported by unionists, focused on economic development and security policies. They introduced “criminalization” (treating paramilitary prisoners as ordinary criminals) and “Ulsterization” (replacing many British Army units with an expansion of Northern Ireland-based security forces). Fair employment policies, introduced in 1976, were weak and ineffective. Nationalists were marginalized, and in response, John Hume, leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), sought allies in the Irish state, the European Union (EU), and the United States.

Meanwhile, a crisis developed in Northern Irish prisons as republican prisoners staged protests. In 1980 they commenced hunger strikes that won much sympathy throughout Ireland and internationally. Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister, refused compromise and ten hunger strikers died. Northern nationalists elected one hunger striker, Bobby Sands, as a member of the Westminster Parliament in a by-election. They turned out in tens of thousands at his funeral, and voted in significant numbers for candidates of Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA, at subsequent elections. Meanwhile, the IRA had gained Libyan arms supplies and escalated its violence, murdering Lord Mountbatten in August 1979 and nearly killing Thatcher in a bomb attack on the Conservative Party Conference at Brighton in October 1984. The IRA campaign was carried to Germany and Gibraltar, where the killing of three republicans in disputed circumstances in 1988 led to an intense cycle of funerals and murders in Northern Ireland.

Rising support for Sinn Féin spurred the Irish government into diplomatic action. The result was the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) of 1985, conceived as a way of ending nationalist alienation and increasing security cooperation between the Irish and British states. The AIA gave the Irish government a limited role in policymaking in Northern Ireland through the Anglo-Irish Intergovernmental Conference. It signaled a turn in British policy away from working solely within a British frame of reference toward an intergovernmental framework, and from reliance on the unionist population to stabilize Northern Ireland to an alliance with the Irish government. The Agreement met and survived massive unionist protest. By 1989 unionists were ready to negotiate a new settlement.

At the same time a peace process was developing, with informal discussions between republicans, the SDLP, and the British and Irish governments taking place from the late 1980s. In 1994 the IRA called a cease-fire, followed by a similar decision six weeks later by the loyalist paramilitaries. The nationalist parties worked together to convene all-party talks, but unionists and the British government stalled and there was a temporary breach of the republican cease-fire. The new Labour government announced that talks, including with Sinn Féin, were to begin in September 1997, but the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), led by Protestant cleric Ian Paisley, refused to attend. Under the chairmanship of former United States senator George Mitchell, the talks reached agreement on Good Friday, April 10, 1998, on a long and detailed list of constitutional and institutional provisions.

IV

Toward a Peace Settlement

From 1969 to 1998 the obstacles to settlement included an uncertain balance of power, continued inequality of the Catholic community, and continued insecurity of the Protestant population, who had been the main victims of the IRA campaign. After the Anglo-Irish Agreement (AIA) of 1985, the pace of reform increased so that by the late 1990s Catholic inequality in employment was being remedied. The AIA also provided an incentive for unionists to negotiate: only if they accepted power-sharing could they lessen the role of the Irish government.

Republicans’ motivations for peace were in part due to the military stalemate: By the late 1980s it was clear that an armed struggle would not force British withdrawal. There was also the increasing demographic strength of Catholics (44 percent of the population in 2001) and the hope that alliance with constitutional nationalists, the Irish state, and the Irish diaspora in the United States might provide a gradual path to Irish unity; these alliances, however, were conditional on an end to armed struggle.

The 1998 settlement, known as the Belfast Agreement, offered greater equality in Northern Ireland, a place for all parties in government relative to their strength in the elected assembly, increasing functional and economic integration between the two parts of Ireland, and constitutional security for unionists while they remained a majority in Northern Ireland. It involved the creation of institutions where Catholics and Protestants worked closely, proportionality in elections and in executive formation, mutual vetoes for the unionist and nationalist blocs, and a dual premiership. Unionists saw it as a way of stabilizing a now more egalitarian union with Great Britain. Republicans saw it as a step on the way to more radical change.

The reluctance of the IRA to decommission (surrender) its weapons—and the unwillingness of many unionists to settle for anything less—brought the peace process and implementation of the Belfast Agreement to an impasse on several occasions. In 2002 the British government suspended the Northern Ireland Assembly for the fourth time since the Belfast Agreement had been reached and returned Northern Ireland to direct rule from the British Parliament. Even though it was suspended, elections for the Assembly went ahead in 2005. Both Sinn Féin and the DUP gained strength, and the IRA came under increasing pressure to disarm. In July 2005 the IRA formally declared an end to its campaign against British rule and announced it would decommission its weapons. Decommissioning was completed later in the year.

Power-sharing, as called for in the Belfast Agreement, was restored to Northern Ireland’s government in 2007, when longtime foes from the DUP and Sinn Féin took office together. Paisley was sworn in as Northern Ireland’s first minister. Martin McGuinness, a former IRA commander and chief negotiator for the largely Roman Catholic Sinn Féin, became deputy first minister. The task of healing and rebuilding lay ahead.

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