The history of the relationship between Great Britain and Ireland (technically termed, together with over 6000 smaller islands, the British Isles) is a long and tortuous one. According to Tim Pat Coogan, “In Ireland, history repeats itself, first as tragedy, and then as tragedy.” ¹ He says further:

Two sets of Christians, overseen by an arm’s length British Government, and observed by a reluctant but increasingly involved Irish Government, were about to engage in a war which would prove yet again that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. ²

For all of recorded history peoples from the European mainland made their way Westward until there was no further to go. The original inhabitants of the British Isles were subsequently merged with European immigrants—the Celts, Romans, Angles, Saxons, Jutes, Danes, and Normans. Since the collapse of the British Empire and the subsequent enlargement of the European Union new waves of immigrants arrived, first from Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean, to be joined more recently by Eastern Europeans. Why the movement of peoples has been inexorably from East to West is a question for anthropologists. I simply note it.

The people of Great Britain , by and large, absorbed the new peoples into a slowly evolving British identity—at one and the same time British, Angles and Saxon, Jute, Dane, Norman, and now African and Asian. When these same European immigrants, or their children, crossed the choppy waters of the Irish Sea to colonize Ireland in the 1160s—as they had colonized Great Britain—it marked the beginning of a troubled history. The Irish had been a more or less self-contained and confident people. In some tellings, while the European mainland was in the midst of the “dark ages,” Ireland alone preserved learning in its monasteries. ³ Before the Norman invasion, the Irish monks had sought to colonize Scotland and Northumbria with a home-grown form of religion that was a blend of Irish paganism and early Christianity that borrowed much from the East and the desert fathers and mothers of Egypt. The Irish monks fought for and lost Northumbria, and eventually Scotland, as the Roman mission spread North and West. In time, the Roman Rite of Christianity would conquer and dominate Ireland too. Later the Vikings fought over, won, and then lost parts of Ireland. Those that remained intermarried and became “as Irish as the Irish.”

However, the Normans were a different prospect and theirs was a more thoroughgoing colonization. It was in the twelfth century that seeds were sown of the seemingly interminable trouble between Great Britain and Ireland—“eight hundred years of British oppression,” according to Coogan. ⁴ It was after the Norman invasion that the King of England considered himself King of Ireland too. Though the people of Great Britain, for the most part, did not consider themselves a subject people, despite waves of conquest and immigration from Europe, Irish identity from the twelfth century onward was shaped by the imperial domination of the English. Uprising and rebellions since then have in common the goal that the British ought to leave Ireland, and that Ireland be governed by the Irish. “Brits Out!” remained a rallying cry of the republican youth at the barricades in Derry and Belfast after 1968.

The relationship between Great Britain and Ireland was further complicated during the Reformation of the sixteenth century and the subsequent religious wars of the 1640s—the British under Cromwell—and later in the late 1680s under William of Orange. ⁵ Ironically, though the Celts of Ireland had resisted the imposition of the Roman rite, by the end of the first millennium CE, Ireland had become thoroughly Roman Catholic . Ireland did not follow the lead of England under Henry VIII in breaking with Rome. England’s subsequent independence from Rome and the ascendency of Protestantism became an unbearable burden for remaining Catholic Ireland. In the bid to make Ireland Protestant, “Catholic” became associated with treachery, and penal laws against Catholics deeply hurt the native population of Ireland. Says Coogan, “London regarded the Protestant settlers in Ireland not merely as members of the favoured Church, but as bulwarks of the crown.” ⁶

A rebellion by the Irish in 1798 was brutally put down, giving the British government an excuse to prorogue the Irish parliament, and through the Act of Union in 1800 to merge the parliaments. The center of economic and political power for the Irish shifted from Dublin to London, and Ireland fell into further decay.

The nineteenth century saw a galvanizing of Republican sentiment , exacerbated by the foreseeable, and perhaps preventable, great famine of the 1840s . With a million dead, a million and a half condemned to unbearable poverty, and a million fleeing Ireland, mostly for the USA, but some to England, anti-British sentiment was ignited into a blaze. These years saw the beginning of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), otherwise known as the Fenian Movement . The British government, in typical fashion, sought brutally to repress the movement. Coogan comments, “Hangings, floggings, jailings and transportations added new martyrs to the Irish physical force tradition.” ⁷ By the 1880s, Home Rule for Ireland had become an agenda item for the Westminster parliament. However, Home Rule was always democratically a problematic issue. The North, with a majority Protestant and pro-union population would never vote for separation from the UK. The south, a majority in the island as a whole, largely Catholic and pro-Republican would always vote for separation. This became the horns of a dilemma that characterized the relation of Britain and Ireland in the twentieth century. A democratic vote in the whole of Ireland would likely turn to separation from the UK. The northern six counties would likely rebel. In 1912, 470,000 people signed the Ulster Covenant with 100,000 enrolled in the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) . ⁸ Conservatives in Great Britain generally supported the UVF. The fear of a rebellion by Northern Irish Protestants underlay much of the policy of Westminster to Northern Ireland , and why British policy was perceived as uneven toward the Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries. Despite wanting to remain part of the UK—mostly for religious reasons—Northern Irish Protestants had a deep historical distrust of the English. ⁹ Immigration to Northern Ireland came from Scottish dissent rather from the English establishment—the same dissent was recently highlighted in the 2014 referendum for Scottish independence. Northern Ireland Protestantism has always held a distrust of both the Irish and the English.

The compromise solution was the partition of Ireland . The small, but significant, uprising at Easter in 1916 was followed by a heavy handed and woefully unproductive reaction by the British, the forming of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) out of the IRB, and the bitter rivalry between Republican leaders Michael Collins and Eamon De Valera . In 1922, the compromise was formalized in the partition of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland . Ireland formally became a republic in 1949.

However, the compromise of partition did not sit well with the Catholics in the North who remained Republican and became an underclass, dominated by the Protestant majority. Fearful of the growth of Catholicism in the North, mostly by a birthrate that outstripped that of the Protestants, Unionist Protestantism ensured its dominance by unjust practices in employment, schooling, and housing, ¹⁰ effectively creating a system of apartheid. ¹¹ For example, in 1970, “only four hundred out of ten thousand workers in the shipyard [the primary industry of Northern Ireland ] were Catholic.” ¹² According to David McKittrick and David McVea, “The idea was ingrained in many in the unionist community that Catholics per se were enemies of the state.” ¹³ So egregious were the injustices, that by the mid-1960s Northern Ireland was a powder keg waiting to be ignited.

The civil rights movement , on the back of successes in the USA, worked toward non-violent social change through civil disobedience. ¹⁴ The Northern Irish government at Stormont, with its police wing, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) , responded harshly. A civil rights march through Derry on October 5, 1968, was brutally disrupted. Television coverage meant that images were seen by many of the police brutality. The British government at Westminster continued to turn a blind eye. Eamon McCann, a Derry s...