Northern Ireland

C

Union

The British government’s answer to the uprising of 1798 was to draw the whole of Ireland fully into the United Kingdom, by the Act of Union of 1800. The Union did not benefit Ireland as a whole. No longer a capital, Dublin declined, and the rural population grew to unsustainable levels before the potato blight and famine of 1845 to 1850 set the population trend into rapid reverse. Memory of the famine and mass emigration generated the bitterness that later underpinned nationalist fervor.

C

1

Entrenchment and Politicization

Many of Ulster's rural areas and its nonindustrial small towns experienced the same pattern of economic collapse and downward population spiral that the rest of Ireland suffered. The Presbyterians, horrified by what had been unleashed in 1798, drew back from republicanism and embraced the politics of the Union. The Orange Order, with its overt political commitment to the Union and its central focus of opposition to Catholicism, became an important force for creating a single Protestant identity. Thus in politics, in theology, and in society, the modern ethnic division between Catholics and Protestants was gradually confirmed among the elite and the common people.

An exception to the economic and population decline that afflicted the rest of the region was the growth of large-scale factory industry in Belfast and neighboring towns and, to a lesser extent, in Londonderry (Derry). Belfast had the fastest population growth rate of any of the United Kingdom’s major industrial cities in the second half of the 19th century, growing from about 20,000 in 1800 to 386,000 in 1911. In the early 19th century, 3 percent of Ulster’s population lived in Belfast; 100 years later it was more than 30 percent.

However, Belfast’s economic growth could not provide an escape from poverty for a large portion of the city’s population, both Catholic and Protestant. These rival working-class groups lived side by side in Belfast. Rioting and intimidation became chronic in the blue-collar neighborhoods, and a tight ethnic segregation developed in housing patterns. The city also acquired a reputation for uncompromising Orangeism. Protestants continued to migrate to the city in large numbers, but new Catholic arrivals tailed off, so that the Protestant proportion of the city’s population increased from less than two-thirds to more than three-quarters in the 50 years leading up to 1911.

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Prior to the mid-19th century, conflicts between the region’s ethnic groups were essentially local feuds. Only with the extension of electoral democracy did the conflicts gradually come to take on a genuinely political significance. In 1868 the British government extended voting rights in Ireland to all male heads of household in urban areas. In 1885 rights were extended to those in rural areas as well. Although women and other adult males living in a household remained excluded until 1918, the 19th century changes brought every family into the democratic process. The result was the creation of new political parties and an Irish party political culture distinct from that of Britain. At first, many Protestants and the Orange Order embraced Britain’s Conservative Party, and many elite Presbyterians remained loyal to the Liberal Party. However, by 1886 these two groups had merged to form the Unionist Party. Catholics rallied around the Home Rule Party, a nationalist movement that had been formed in the south of Ireland in the 1870s and introduced into Ulster in 1883. Only at that relatively late stage did northern Catholics come to identify their cause fully with that of all-Ireland nationalism.

C

2

Fight over Home Rule

By the 1880s Irish nationalist members constituted a large third-party bloc in the British Parliament, causing the Liberal government of 1886 to propose a bill providing home rule for Ireland. The bill was defeated in the House of Commons, and a second Home Rule Bill was defeated in the House of Lords in 1893. British Liberals nevertheless remained committed to home rule, and opposition to this policy became the cornerstone of Ulster Protestant politics. In 1905 the Ulster Unionist Council was formed as a body to coordinate loyalist activity among the Protestant business people, farmers, and workers of the north. Within five years the council had begun purchasing and stockpiling weapons, preparing to defend loyalist interests by any means necessary. This marked the formal beginning of Ulster—as distinct from all-Ireland—unionism.

The British Liberal government introduced the third Home Rule Bill in 1912. The bill passed in the House of Commons twice and was defeated in the House of Lords both times. Ulster Unionists organized massive demonstrations of resistance. In September 1912 more than 470,000 men and women signed petitions of opposition to home rule, and from 1912 to 1914 an armed Ulster Volunteer Force of 100,000 men was organized under the leadership of upper-class Protestants. Northern nationalists, who had so far limited themselves to purely parliamentary tactics, were taken aback by Protestant militarization.

In 1914 the third Home Rule Bill passed in the House of Commons for a third time; under a new British parliamentary procedure established by the Parliament Act of 1911, this rendered approval by the House of Lords unnecessary. Ulster Unionists steeled themselves for civil war against the British government, but within weeks the outbreak of World War I (1914-1918) turned all eyes to continental Europe.

The British government considered the “Irish question” to be deferred until the end of the war, but in 1916 the Easter Rebellion in Dublin brought it back to the forefront. The rebellion, organized by the then small Irish Volunteer Force, which became the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in 1919, was quickly, although bloodily, suppressed. The British government, however, in the hope of preventing a sympathetic rise in violent Irish militarism, made an attempt to implement Irish home rule. This entailed calling upon northern nationalists to sacrifice their own short-term interests by accepting that the six northeastern counties be temporarily excluded from the home rule settlement. They reluctantly agreed. Negotiations proceeded, but the partition of Ireland had come a step nearer. In the south, Sinn Fein, a new party closely linked to the IRA, swept the moderate home rule nationalists aside in 1918 elections to the British Parliament.

The Government of Ireland Act of 1920 proposed that both “Southern Ireland” and “Northern Ireland” have devolved parliaments for running Irish affairs, both under the ultimate authority of the British government. The parliament of Southern Ireland never met, as Sinn Fein and the IRA fought on for full independence, which it achieved as the Irish Free State in 1922. Northern Ireland, however, did come into existence in 1921. The Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) won 40 of the 52 seats in the new Parliament and set up a government. The situation in Belfast degenerated almost into civil war: The IRA attempted to continue its campaign in the north, and the forces of the new state acted ruthlessly to suppress opposition.

D

Northern Ireland Under Home Rule

Ulster unionists had sought to prevent home rule for Ireland or, failing that, to have Ulster excluded from it. Instead they found themselves governing six of the nine Ulster counties, with Belfast a capital city for the first time. The British government, having failed to persuade the unionists into a home rule Ireland, had in effect placed on them the responsibility for maintaining stable government in the northern area. Sovereign authority rested with the British Parliament, but day-to-day direction from the British government was impossible. In practice, the British government’s power was restricted to the ability to dissolve the provincial government entirely, which they ultimately did do in 1972. After a few abortive attempts to moderate local policy, the British Parliament gave the UUP government full support.

The underlying problem in the new six-county province of Northern Ireland was the sharp divide between the Protestant majority and the reluctant and resentful Catholic minority amounting to more than one-third of its population. In parts of western Northern Ireland, Catholics formed a majority. Furthermore, neither the British government nor the new Northern Irish government made any effort to achieve reconciliation between Protestants and Catholics. The political structure established in Northern Ireland by the British government emphasized majority rule and offered no encouragement to the governing party to seek out the middle ground. The Unionist government in turn made little perceptible effort to do so. Thinly veiled government rhetoric equated patriotic opposition to nationalism with anti-Catholicism and Catholicism with disloyalty. The bias was reflected in civil service hiring patterns. This Northern Irish Protestant point of view was only reinforced by the increasingly hardline rhetoric of the province’s southern neighbor.

In 1937 the Irish Free State (under the new name of Eire or, in English, simply “Ireland”) adopted a new constitution that claimed jurisdiction over the entire island of Ireland, “pending reintegration of the national territory,” and declared the Roman Catholic religion to have a special position in the state.

Differences between Northern Ireland and the independent state of Eire continued during World War II (1939-1945). The government of Eire was neutral during the war, whereas Northern Ireland supplied military personnel and produced ships, aircraft, and cloth for military uniforms for the British war effort. The ports of Belfast and Londonderry/Derry were of strategic importance to Allied shipping, and Belfast was damaged considerably by German air raids.

The British Parliament in 1949 affirmed the status of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom unless its own parliament decided otherwise. In 1955 the IRA began a terrorist campaign aimed at expelling British forces from Northern Ireland. Low-level terrorist acts continued through 1957 and 1958, but faded away by 1962. In 1962 the government of Ireland condemned terrorism as a means of achieving unification.

In the 1960s opposition to the government of Northern Ireland grew as Catholics witnessed the strategies and successes of the American civil rights movement on their televisions. Civil disobedience campaigns against discriminatory actions of Protestant-dominated local councils quickly found strong support in Catholic neighborhoods. This was accompanied by increased sectarian street violence. In October 1968 a peaceful civil rights march in Londonderry/Derry was violently broken up by police.

Conflict between Catholics and Protestants escalated, first in Londonderry/Derry and then in Belfast. By the summer of 1969, the police force, which was inadequate in numbers, skills, and on occasion impartiality, was unable to control the violence. In August 1969 the government of Northern Ireland requested that the British government send in the army to support the police. As the British army gradually brought civil disorder under control, the IRA began to reemerge. Catholics, who had initially welcomed the army as protectors against the Protestants, came to see the large-scale presence of British troops in Catholic neighborhoods as a hostile British occupation. As curfews and house-to-house arms searches concentrated on Catholic neighborhoods, IRA recruiting rose.

The government of Northern Ireland reformed the province’s system of local government, but the reforms failed to satisfy Catholic opinion and created an aggressive Protestant backlash that impeded further progress. In August 1971 the government introduced internment (imprisonment without trial), and 300 republicans were rounded up. The IRA campaigns continued to escalate. At the same time, recruitment rose in Protestant vigilante groups such as the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF, not directly linked with the 1912-1914 body of the same name), which targeted suspected IRA members.

E

Direct Rule

In March 1972 the British government insisted on taking over control of security policy, knowing that the government of Northern Ireland would resign in protest. The province then came under the direct rule of the British Parliament, pending the negotiation of new political structures acceptable to Catholics as well as to Protestants.

The British government created the post of secretary of state for Northern Ireland, with a seat in the British Cabinet, and a team of British junior ministers took over direction of Northern Ireland’s governmental departments. From then until the early 1990s Northern Ireland’s legislation passed through the British Parliament by orders in council (ordinances technically issued directly from the British monarch in consultation with members of the Cabinet) rather than as fully debated legislation. In 1983 the number of Northern Irish representatives in the British Parliament increased from 12 to 17, and in 1997 to 18. In a 1973 referendum largely boycotted by Roman Catholics, the voters of Northern Ireland chose to retain ties with Britain rather than join the Republic of Ireland.

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