Northern Ireland

Jonathan Tonge

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780745631417, 9780745631400
• eBook ISBN: 9780745657455
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

For almost three decades the troubles in Northern Ireland raged, claiming over 3,600 lives, with civilians accounting for almost half the fatalities. In this book, Jonathan Tonge examines the reasons for that conflict; the motivations of the groups involved and explores the prospects for a post-conflict Northern Ireland.

The book:

• 
  
• assesses the motivations and campaigns of the IRA, UVF and UDA and other armed groups
  
• discusses what each paramilitary group achieved through violence
  
• analyses the continuing controversies surrounding the Northern Irelands dirty war
  
• outlines the extent of collusion between British security forces and loyalist paramilitaries
  
• explores how governments and political parties shaped the peace process
  
• scrutinizes prospects for the political development of unionism and nationalism within a devolved power sharing framework
  
• examines whether the sectarian divide is strengthening or weakening
  
• concludes by assessing whether Northern Ireland can move permanently from violence and instability to become a normal peaceful polity, in which the war is merely a historic relic

Written by an acknowledged expert in the field, Northern Ireland combines incisive analysis, original research and a lucid style to provide an important assessment of what has been described as an 800 year old problem.

1

Theories of the Conflict ————

Part of the problem in resolving the Northern Ireland conflict was that for years those involved or interested, whether ‘combatants’ or analysts, disagreed on its basis. Republicans offered a beguilingly simple colonial analysis, which found much sympathy outside the narrow confines of unionism, in which Northern Ireland was seen as one of Britain’s last colonies, a relic of Empire from which it had rapidly retreated elsewhere. This analysis was not confined to the militant republicans of Sinn Fein and the IRA. Northern Ireland was described as a ‘failed political entity’ by a Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the Irish Republic, Charles Haughey. Constitutional republicans within Fianna Fail, often the governing party in the Irish Republic, denounced the partition of Ireland, suggesting that unionist-British rule in the North had been disastrous. It had been sectarian majority rule, followed by descent into violence and failed political initiatives.

Non-republicans offered a variety of alternative explanations, although the most common unionist complaint was the ‘irredentist’ claim to Northern Ireland held, if not pursued, under the 1937 constitution of the Irish Republic. Within academia, accounts of the conflict were often partisan union-ist (e.g. Wilson 1955, 1989) or nationalist-oriented accounts (e.g. Farrell 1976). Given that academic inquiry was often coloured by background, the lack of consensus among political representatives and paramilitary actors was unsurprising. None the less, academics did acknowledge that the conflict was a product of a multiplicity of factors. In his assessment of rival academic works, John Whyte noted that ‘while there is agreement that the conflict results from a mixture of religious, economic, political and psychological factors, there is no agreement on their relative importance. In particular there is a divergence on how much stress to put on religion’ (Whyte 1991: 245).

Ethno-national Explanations and Solutions

The most orthodox modern explanation of the Northern Ireland problem is that it is ethno-national in nature, a contest between two peoples who want their ‘state to be ruled by their nation’ (McGarry and O’Leary 1995: 354). The armed conflict from 1970 until the end of the century was based primarily around the violent attempt of Irish republicans to coerce the unionist population into a state to which they felt they did not belong. Unionists believe themselves to be ‘simply British’ (Ulster Unionist Party 2003). Nationalists regard themselves as Irish, and both populations desire political expression of their identity. Unionists, an overwhelming majority of whom want Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom, defend the constitutional status quo, whilst conceding a modest all-Ireland dimension to political arrangements. Nationalist desires for an independent, united Ireland are not as extensive or as intense as unionist demands for Northern Ireland to remain out of an independent Ireland, according to successive Northern Ireland Life and Times Surveys (see also Bric and Coakley 2004a: 2–4). Nationalists have been prepared to settle for an Irish dimension, rather than Irish unity and independence, accepting, however reluctantly, Northern Ireland’s location within the United Kingdom. The violent struggle of armed republicans to achieve a united, independent Ireland ended in failure, although the compromise reached by republicans, the 1998 Good Friday Agreement (GFA), offered power sharing for nationalists within Northern Ireland, allied to the establishment of six new cross-border bodies, creating all-island economic activity.

Ethno-national explanations offer a number of advantages. They acknowledge the polarity of identity and aspiration in Northern Ireland. Palpably, most individuals from a Protestant-unionist tradition are likely to support Northern Ireland’s continued place in the United Kingdom and regard themselves as British. Equally, the sense of Irishness felt by a Catholic nationalist is unlikely to wither. Ethno-national explanations legitimize the political aspirations of both communities, whilst allowing the diversion of such aspirations into the identity politics which began to displace territorial politics during the Northern Ireland peace process. Territorial politics are more dangerous, being based upon the assertion, by force on occasion, of national self-determination within boundaries which may be contested. Identity politics are less threatening, in that the recognition of unionists and nationalists as British and Irish respectively does not threaten the state.

Colonial Explanations

The IRA’s armed struggle had impetus from a range of perceived grievances, including the illegitimacy of partition, the mistreatment of nationalists by the unionist population, economic inequality and religious sectarianism (Bishop and Mallie 1988; Buckland 1981; Coogan 1996; English 2003; Farrell 1976; McIntyre 1995, 2001; M. Smith 1995; Tonge 2002, 2005). Supposedly at the core of IRA activity, however, was a desire to end Ireland’s connection with Britain, the source of ‘all our evils’ according to one of the ‘fathers’ of republicanism, Wolfe Tone, who led a rebellion against British rule in 1798.

According to colonial interpretations, Ireland was colonized by Britain, a subordination codified by the Act of Union of 1800. This colonization involved a series of crimes against the Irish people, who were denied nationhood: discrimination, evidenced by a series of anti-Catholic laws during the nineteenth century; maltreatment and neglect, demonstrated by the Irish famine; and subordination, epitomized by the brutal quelling of rebellions and execution of rebels, most notably after the 1916 Easter Rising against British rule. Under pressure from the native population, the British government retreated from twenty-six of the thirty-two counties of the colony it held. The ‘war in the North’ against British rule, episodic after partition but sustained from 1970 until the mid-1990s, was justified as ‘unfinished business’ – a struggle for national liberation against a foreign occupying force. The IRA believed that Britain would withdraw from one of its remaining colonies in the same manner as it had retreated from Empire elsewhere. Republicans of different hues shared the colonial analysis of Britain’s occupation of Northern Ireland. There were marked differences concerning the morality and utility of force as a means to end that occupation, but republicanism was the ‘dominant dream’ on the island (Bowyer Bell 2000: 36, 98).

Under traditional colonial interpretations, the assertion of the ‘principle of consent’ for constitutional change, the basis of British policy towards Northern Ireland for decades, was unacceptable. It referred only to consent within the six counties which created the artificial statelet of Northern Ireland, against the will of the majority of Irish people. In the last – perhaps final – all-Ireland general election of 1918, a majority of Ireland’s voters supported Sinn Fein, campaigning for an independent Ireland. Instead, they got partition, formally chosen by no voters. Since that election, the option of a sovereign independent and united Ireland has never been laid before the inhabitants of the island. Whilst it could be claimed that the Irish people voted de facto for partition by supporting the GFA in the referendums North and South in 1998, this was not a true act of Irish self-determination, as the colonial power determined which constitutional options were laid before the electorate. Only 50 per cent of the Irish electorate registered support for the removal of Articles Two and Three of the constitution of the Irish Republic, laying claim to Northern Ireland, in the 1998 referendum. Had the option of registering support for a united Ireland appeared on the ballot paper, the outcome might have been different, even though the practical possibility of its rapid implementation appeared to be zero. Although results depend on whether the prospect of Irish unity is posed as an aspiration or an imperative, up to two-thirds of the citizens on the island of Ireland support a united Ireland (W. H. Cox 1985; Hayes and McAllister 1996; Tonge 2005). The colonial analysis of Britain’s supposed ‘lack of interest’ highlights the willingness of successive Westminster governments to commit thousands of troops to defend the territorial integrity of a statelet created against the will of the majority of Irish people.

The colonial interpretation has not necessarily been diminished by Britain’s insistence that it has no ‘selfish, strategic or economic interest’ in Northern Ireland. British withdrawal would have been humiliating for a British government, and its continuing claim to sovereignty is at least a partial consequence of aversion to such a reverse. The British sovereign claim, under the no ‘selfish interest’ mantra, has been portrayed as an altruistic act which prevented the Irish and British on the island from engaging in civil war. There may be some truth in this analysis, but it was unclear why British forces were required to maintain order when they were clearly not neutral brokers. Indeed, British security forces sometimes colluded with loyalist paramilitaries to quell insurgency. Although the level of suppression of the native population was minor compared to several other global conflicts, the state apparatus deployed to stop the secession of Britain’s ‘last colony’ was hardly a paradigm of liberal democracy. It included (the list is far from exhaustive) internment without trial, state-sponsored killing and collusion, direct state killings, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners, the arrest of thousands of Irish people under the Prevention of Terrorism Act, only a small minority of whom were ever charged, the construction of a plethora of security installations, extensive stop and search powers, and the abolition of trial by jury. If these were the actions of a government without ‘selfish strategic or economic interest’, it is tempting to ask what would have happened if such altruism and selflessness had been replaced by partisanship?

The Weaknesses in Colonial Arguments

The flaws in colonial arguments include three principal items; the extent of the mandate for British withdrawal, the status of unionists, and the role of the British government. The 1918 all-Ireland referendum result produced an aggregate majority for British withdrawal, given that nationalists won 70 per cent of the votes in contested seats (McGarry and O’Leary 1995: 36). In four of the six counties – Antrim, Armagh, Derry and Down – that were to comprise Northern Ireland, union-ists none the less won a majority of votes (O’Leary and McGarry 1996). It could be argued that what was wrong was not partition per se, but the border drawn on the map, which had little political, geographic or historic logic. Although Fermanagh and Tyrone contained nationalist majorities, they were included in the new statelet, often erroneously referred to as Ulster, despite Northern Ireland being a deliberately emaciated version of the historic province. The border’s contours have become increasingly absurd given that demographic change (a rising number of Catholic nationalists) indicates that only Down and Antrim continue to have pro-Union majorities. ‘Self-determination’ for two counties appears preposterous.

None the less, it is apparent that, at the time of partition, the majority of the population in the north-east corner of the island did not want Ireland to secede from the British state, of which, after the 1800 Act of Union, it was an integral part. The intensity of British unionism exceeded that of Irish nationalism on several indicators. Many Irish nationalists fought for Britain in the First World War; the Sinn Fein vote in 1918 was partly a sympathy vote due to the execution of Irish rebels after the 1916 Easter Rising, and 471,000 unionists signed a solemn covenant to resist even the semi-independence of Home Rule for Ireland. The plea of the democrat that union-ists should not have been permitted to opt out of the people’s verdict was unpersuasive to those affected. Disagreement over the unit of self-determination has been central to the ‘problem of Ireland’. What emerged was a contrived and unsatisfactory unit in the North (although few states have natural boundaries), one which displeased the majority population on the island, but satisfied those to whom self-determination perhaps mattered more.

Under orthodox colonial interpretations, unionists are reduced to the status of neo-colonial agents of the British, duped into holding a British identity when they are merely deluded Irish people suffering from a false national consciousness. Leaving aside arguments over who was on the island first (one unionist account claims that settlers from Scotland were there first (Adamson 1982)), the claim that Protestant-British-unionists were simply Irish hardly resonated with a population whose national and political identities were essentially British. Adherents of colonial arguments could claim, with validity, that the ‘Britishness’ of unionists was something of a post-partition flag of convenience; indeed, until the collapse of Northern Ireland’s devolved parliament in 1972, a sizeable percentage adopted either an Ulster or an Irish identity (Rose 1971). None the less, unionists have always argued that their political identity is British, and that unionism is an ideology based upon defence of their Britishness. The classic colonial view was that, following British withdrawal, unionists would abandon attachment to the dissolved Union and recognize their status as Irish people. In such an unlikely scenario, it would indeed be possible that some unionists would acquiesce in a unification process, in the way that many nationalists accepted partition. Equally, the chance of an entirely peaceful unionist acceptance of such change, or their redefinition as Irish, is slim. By the 1990s, even republicans acknowledged the difficulty of Irish unification via coercion. Sinn Fein’s policy document, Towards a Lasting Peace in Ireland, conceded that unionism was not merely a deluded tradition, and that union-ists would have to be persuaded by the British government that a united Ireland could work in their interests, as a precursor to Irish unity (Sinn Fein 1992). This amounted to acceptance of the existence of two national populations on the island of Ireland, rather than the previous ‘we are all Irish’ republican approach.

The final weakness of colonial arguments lies in the perception of the role of the British government. The traditional republican view was based upon a critique of the ‘denial of national sovereignty to the Irish people through British occupation of part of the national territory’ (32 County Sovereignty Movement constitution, cited in Coakley 2002: 135). The British government insists that its ‘occupation’ represents nothing more than the will of the majority of the citizens of Northern Ireland. Although Britain was culpable in the partition of Ireland, that division was a consequence of existing ethnic rivalries, rather than a cunning plot by the British government, which desired Home Rule for the entire island. Far from being a colonial aggressor, the British government has long been anxious to divest itself of its ‘Irish problem’. The Westminster government draws no economic benefit from involvement in a Northern Ireland economy largely devoid of industrial capacity. Any geo-strategic value of Northern Ireland as an Atlantic outpost evaporated with the end of the Cold War. Indeed, it has been claimed that the end of the Cold War allowed a peace process to develop in which Britain could more credibly plead neutrality (M. Cox 1998; M. Cox et al. 2001). The British government has indicated that it will legislate to withdraw should there be sufficient demand within the ‘occupied’ territory.

Structural Explanations

Structural explanations of the Northern Ireland conflict suggest that much of the antagonism that developed in the late 1960s was a nationalist response to a disadvantaged economic position, exacerbated by second-class political status, rather than a demand for a united Ireland. Civil rights marches in the 1960s, attended overwhelmingly by nationalists, were demands for ‘British rights for British citizens’. Catholics began to demand a stake in the polity they had previously rejected, demanding ‘one man [sic] one vote’ (non-ratepayers were denied the franchise in local elections); economic equality and impartial policing. The structural argument suggests that nationalist demands were reformist. They were mishandled by a divided unionist government in the late 1960s, unsure how to deal with the challenge to its authority and vulnerable to reactionary forces within and outside the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP). In response to unionism’s hardline reaction, backed by the British Army from late 1969 onwards, nationalists divided into two broad categories: participatory constitutional forces within the SDLP, formed in 1970, and militant paramilitary forces, represented mainly by the PIRA. The responses of nationalists were conditioned by their conditions of oppression: long-standing political and economic inequality and then the crude responses of unionism and the British state to their subordinate position. As such, although economic issues have been ‘subsidiary themes’ in Northern Ireland, they may have been highly significant (Rose 1976: 36; Wichert 1999).

Protests against structural inequalities fuelled the rebirth of republicanism, providing it with modern meaning, in which the British government and its devolved unionist state could be blamed for oppressing Irish people. Significantly, the revival of militant republicanism was largely confined to the downtrodden Catholic working class, or poorer rural workers, in Northern Ireland and did not become an island-wide phenomenon. As McIntyre (2001: 209) notes, ‘partition in itself was insufficient to nourish, let alone sustain, a thirty-two countrywide nationalist ideology articulating the necessity of completing the “unfinished business” of 1921’.

Catholics were under-represented in political institutions, the police and civil service, also suffering economically in the ‘Orange state’ from 1921 until 1972. Various pleas of mitigation have been offered for the unionist regime. Discrimination was exaggerated for political ends, and was a product partly of Catholic inferiority according to accounts which engaged in cultural stereotyping (Wilson 1955, 1989). Nationalist abstention from state institutions worsened their plight (Buckland 1981). Sectarianism was practised to mask divisions within a unionist government less united than popularly supposed (Bew, Gibbon and Patterson 2002). Moreover, the unionist ‘Protestant state for a Protestant people’ (Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister notoriously referred to the legislature as being a ‘Protestant parliament for a Protestant people’) was created partly in response to the way in which the initially nonconfessional Irish Free State increasingly became a Catholic state for a Catholic people. The twenty-six-county state in the South embodied laws derived from Catholic social teaching and enshrined the special position of the Roman Catholic Church in its 1937 constitution. That constitution laid claim to Northern Ireland in Articles 2 and 3, heightening the siege mentality of unionists, a mind-set hardly assuaged by the IRA’s 1956–62 border campaign of violence, even though the IRA’s revival met with little Catholic enthusiasm.

Despite the extenuating circumstances, the unionist government was palpably guilty of sectarian discrimination. The regime was condemned by the words of its own leaders. A future Prime Minister, Basil Brooke, recommended ‘those people who are Loyalists not to employ Roman Catholics, 99 per cent of whom are disloyal’, sentiments endorsed by the Prime Minister, James Craig, who insisted that ‘there is not one of my colleagues who does not entirely agree with him’ (cited in Ryder and Kearney 2001: 43). Brooke boasted that he had ‘not a Catholic about his place’, insisting that ‘Catholics are out to destroy Ulster [sic] with all their might and power’, and later confirming that his remarks were made ‘after careful consideration’ (Irish News, 1 December 1935). Clientelist relationships developed in which Protestant workers were rewarded for support of the regime by preferential economic treatment (more jobs). Proportional representation was abolished for all forms of election by the end of the 1920s, to deny nationalist representation and solidify the unionist party bloc. Protestant supporters of the unionist government on local councils were allowed to create self-perpetuating fiefdoms through the gerrymandering of electoral boundaries. The extent of gerrymandering, blatant in cities such as Derry, allowed unionists, two-thirds of the population, to control 85 per cent of councils. The requirement for district election voters to be home-owners disproportionately disadvantaged Catholics, as did multiple business votes, given that homes and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Page
• Publisher
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• List of Tables
• Abbreviation
• Introduction
• 1 Theories of the Conflict
• 2 The Provisional IRA
• 3 The Overt War against the IRA
• 4 The Covert War against the IRA
• 5 The Politics of Sinn Fein
• 6 Republican Ultras
• 7 Loyalist Violence
• 8 War by Other Means or the Triumph of Moderation? The Party System
• 9 Auditing the Peace and Political Processes
• Conclusion
• Chronology
• Glossary
• Internet
• References
• Index