Troubles in Northern Ireland

10 Key excerpts on "Troubles in Northern Ireland"

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  Ireland's History

  Prehistory to the Present

  • Kenneth L. Campbell(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  Violence had not entirely eased by then, and there were splinter groups, such as that calling itself the Real IRA, that refused to recognize the agreement. However, visible signs of progress by 2000 included the replacement of armored Land Rovers with regular patrol cars and the appearance of police on foot or bicycles in some districts. Perhaps the greatest irony of the period is that the Troubles began with demands for civil rights and yet resulted in greater security measures and the abrogation of the rights of so many people, from the victims of violence to the suspension of civil liberties as a strategy by the British in the fight against terrorism. But it is also ironic that in their desire to unify Ireland, the IRA created a greater divide between the North and the South as many Catholics in the republic gradually tired of the havoc wreaked by the IRA in the North. This is not to say that the IRA was wholly responsible for the Troubles; revolutions arise because the existing structure has not proven flexible enough to accommodate or address the grievances of a significant portion of the population. By the late 1960s, the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland had aspirations that simply would not allow them to accept the status quo. In their determination to defend the status quo without compromise, rival Protestant organizations did much to prevent an atmosphere of conciliation that might have undermined the goals of the more extreme Nationalists. 22 Kristen P. Williams and Neal G. Jesse (2001), “Resolving Nationalist Conflicts: Promoting Overlapping Identities and Pooling Sovereignty: The 1998 Northern Irish Peace Agreement.” Political Psychology , 22, p. 571. IRELAND’S HISTORY 324 Unfortunately, Protestants believed such a defense was necessary in order to ensure their own survival and that of their faith.

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  Combating Terrorism in Northern Ireland

  • James Dingley(Author)
  • 2008(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  In many ways not much has changed in 200 years. Since its inception in 1921 Northern Ireland has largely been content to settle down to a mutually agreed segregation between Catholic/Nationalism and Protestant/Unionism. At first some serious moves were made to include Catholics in to the State, 26 but these were dropped almost by mutual consent and the Province settled down to a segregated and sectarian life, both sides defining their own space and territory. The result was that two worlds almost incomprehensible to the other emerged, with little contact and opposed interests and identity. 27 Each eyed the other suspiciously and kept a constant eye open for infringements of its space. Nationalists kept up an anti-state rhetoric without ever having the political clout to do anything about it, while Unionists had control of the state but were always reminded of a Nationalist threat too big to ignore. Analysing the ‘troubles’ To those not familiar with Northern Ireland the ‘troubles’ over the last 37 years seem something of a mystery, even the partition of Ireland appears a mystery to outsiders. Why should a small island of only around five million people be so divided and why should the one and a half million population of Northern Ireland be further divided? These, of course, are fundamental questions, and ones that go to the heart of many other conflicts around the world, the former Yugoslavia being a good example, with its bitter conflicts and divisions over the past 15 years, or the sectarian violence in Indonesia, Sri Lanka or the Basque Lands. Failure to answer these questions has often been at the heart of failing to resolve these conflicts either at the military or political level

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  Lost in Transformation

  Violent Peace and Peaceful Conflict in Northern Ireland

  • A. Mitchell(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  45 3 Radical Violence and the Beginning of ‘the Troubles’ – Northern Ireland 1965–72 Mainstream narratives of the prolonged cycle of violence that took place in Northern Ireland during the twentieth century tend to frame it as the explosion of tensions between ethnic groups (see McGrattan, 2010). Yet, as I argued in the last chapter, the conditions of tension, division and overtly conflictual forms of world-building had existed in the region for years, even centuries, prior to the outbreak of this particular cycle of violence. Established threatworks were often in place, which helped groups, communities and individuals to resist radical threats and thus to coexist for the most part non-violently. What, then, changed these conditions? Here, I shall re-examine the beginning of the Troubles from the perspective of threatworks and their destruction by means of radical violence. The source of this radical violence was not the spontaneous or opportunistic clash of rival groups; rather, it was in large part caused by the dilution or destruction of threatworks, or violence against conflictual forms of world-building, that occurred through large-scale social, eco- nomic and political change. In the twentieth century, Northern Ireland experienced several waves of large-scale change. The first occurred in the period between 1916 and 1922, during the civil war which resulted in the creation of the province. This was followed by a period of apparent consolidation and state-building, albeit jarred by frequent episodes of social unrest and ten- sion (see Ruane and Todd, 1996; O’Neill, 1969) before the emergence of recognizable events of the Troubles in the late 1960s. Between these two points, however, another period of radical change took place in the form of post-WWII and early Cold War modernization, which swept through Northern Ireland from the continent.

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  Ireland

  A Short History

  • Joseph Coohill(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Oneworld Publications

    (Publisher)

  Perhaps most important, however, was the further close development of the Irish Republic and the European Community, and the dramatic economic improvements of the late 1980s and early 1990s. The economy recovered in the late 1980s and 1990s as a result of reforms in finance and government economics, as well as more sophisticated economic relationships with the international community. By the mid-1990s, economic growth in the Republic was much higher than anywhere else in the developed world, which prompted the nickname ‘The Celtic Tiger’, and the ‘greening’ of economic relations with Britain and the rest of the European Union. Irish exports to the EU rose dramatically in th 1990s (and at a time when overall EU growth was not as healthy). Problems persisted, however. Unemployment was higher than expected in a buoyant economy, and the economic successes of the 1990s were not followed by enough improvements in social conditions. At the time it seemed that these important changes resulted from three basic trends in economics in the Republic. The first was a more moderate and prudent level of government borrowing and more vigilant attention to the balance of payments and inflation (but the next chapter shows the hollowness of this belief). The second was a move away from economic shadowing of Britain, and of comparing economic successes with Britain. And the third was a much greater emphasis on the Republic’s place in Europe and the international market. Not being blinkered by looking only at the British economy (which, in the second half of the twentieth century, has been a poor performer over the long term), and thinking of itself in European and world terms made the economy much more flexible and potentially powerful. Joining ‘Euroland’ (the eleven countries that planned to adopt the Euro as a currency) in 1999, while Britain stayed on the sidelines, was symbolic of this highly significant change in outlook and economic sophistication.

  INTERPRETATIONS

  It will take a good deal of time and historical distance before the ‘triumphs’ of the 1980s and 1990s can get adequate attention from historians. And there will be as much debate about their causes and meanings as any other aspect of Irish history. The Troubles in Northern Ireland, however, have been interpreted in a number of different ways. Perhaps more than any other aspect of Irish history, the difficulties in the north have had their own impact on how historians have considered Irish history of all periods, and in some cases have changed the ways those histories have been written. The Troubles have been so influential that they have caused some of the most prominent Irish historians to change their own interpretations in subsequent editions of their books.

  The most important work on interpreting the situation in Northern Ireland is John Whyte’s Interpreting Northern Ireland

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  The Gun in Politics

  Analysis of Irish Political Conflict, 1916-86

  • J. Bowyer Bell(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  PART III The Ulster Troubles Since 1969: Old Myths, Old Realities, and Alien Perspectives Killing a man is murder Unless you do it to the sound of trumpets. —Voltaire

  Ireland in 1969 was apparently fated to spend the rest of the century living amid interesting times. There was no surprise-free future for those of the secret army gathered before Tones grave in June 1968. The volunteers and veterans would soon go various ways, often into opposing secret armies; their lives disrupted, sacrificed, spent, or wasted in the pursuit of the Republic. A few names would become well known, appearing nightly on the television news not just in Dublin or Belfast but also in New York and Rome and Paris. Some would drift away but never again would the army lack for volunteers or official opponents or alien observers.

  By the end of1969, the Province of Northern Ireland had become a nexus of turmoil. Each new year seemed to find the level of violence higher, the number of dead greater, the alienation and anguish deeper. Finally, after a decade of rioting, insurrection and reform, random murder and spectacular assassinations, new ballads, new history one-hour television spectaculars and the arrival of droves of analysts and speculators in theories of violence, the Troubles became institutionalized. The level of violence was managed and monitored by the security forces and maintained by the IRA; the Unionists perpetually hovered on the edge of a pogrom, and the governments of Dublin and London sought only the quiet life and a return to politics without the gun. On distant maps in bureaucrats' offices, on the walls of university classrooms and newspaper offices, at the back of volumns on terror and war, Ulster was circled red, a crisis point. Some years the circles might be made thick with greasy wax crayon and others a simple check. But Ulster, Ireland (the Troubles), was always on the butchers list

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  The Accommodation of Cultural Diversity

  Case-Studies

  • C. Young(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The reforms which have been introduced since 1969 were the result of both internal and external influences. Chief among the internal pressures was the emergence of a larger Catholic middle class after the end of the Second World War, and their exclusion from equal electoral and economic rights. The civil rights movement of the 1960s, which was the main expression of this discontent, introduced forms of protest which were bor- rowed from North America and Europe. External influences continued to influence the direction of change in the future. Fair employment legisla- tion was borrowed consciously from similar experiences in Canada and elsewhere. There were occasional, if half-hearted and inconsistent, spasms of interest in examining models of constitutional change from other divided societies which might have application to Northern Ireland. More general international developments also had a local influence in Northern Ireland. The movement to initiate constitutional talks since 1990 has been motivated as much by events in the former Soviet Union and Yugoslavia and talks in South Africa and the Middle East than by spontaneous demands for talks from political parties in Northern Ireland. Timing is a critical factor at all stages of conflict resolution and man- agement. Understanding of the development of conflicts – for example, through the stages of tension, pre-violence, war and recovery – helps to determine appropriate entry points for policy interventions. In particular, it may help to provide early warning of when conflicts are likely to become violent. The Northern Irish experience provides an interesting lesson about John Darby 150 policy initiatives at the early stages of emerging violence. In the late 1960s the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, which articulated early minority grievances, identified six priority demands. By 1970, following the start of violence in 1969 and pressure from Britain, five had been con- ceded.

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  British Counterinsurgency

  From Palestine to Northern Ireland

  • J. Newsinger(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  7 The Long War: Northern Ireland, 1969–97 The conflict in Northern Ireland has been the most protracted of British counterinsurgency campaigns with the retreat from Empire ending up in what is still part of the United Kingdom. The conse- quences have been devastating. Nearly 2 per cent of the province’s population have been killed or injured since fighting began. If the ratio of fatalities to population were to be reproduced for the United Kingdom as a whole there would by now have been some 100 000 people killed, considerably more than were killed by German bombing during the Second World War. More people have died as a result of political violence in Northern Ireland since 1969 than in the rest of the European Community put together over the same period. 1 Moreover, the conflict has on a number of occasions extended into England. Only sheer luck saved Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet from death in the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton on 12 October 1984. Nevertheless, at the time of writing, it does seem that, at last, even this ‘Long War’ has come to an end. What we shall examine here is the conduct in this conflict of the security forces and, in particular, the transformation in strategy from a counterinsurgency model, that served only to exacerbate the situa- tion, to an internal security model that successfully contained it. How meaningful is it after so many years of conflict to talk in terms of victory or defeat? Have the British finally won ‘the Long War’? The Troubles begin Northern Ireland was established in conflict. The creation of the new devolved state involved the denial of national rights to a third of its population and was accompanied by violence and disorder that 151 approached the level of civil war. Over 550 people, mainly Catholics, were killed between July 1920 and July 1922.

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  Northern Ireland 1968-2008

  The Politics of Entrenchment

  • C. McGrattan(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  51 As McDowell points out, Sinn Féin in particular invests enormous effort into creating and maintaining carefully constructed stories about the Troubles and the wider Irish nationalist historical experience. Thus, the release of government files, which appeared to indicate that Adams’ lead- ership ignored British offers of a resolution to the 1981 hunger strikes in order to maintain momentum prior to the election of the Sinn Féin proxy candidate in an August by-election, despite the deaths of six pris- oners, sparked intense controversy among the republican leadership and grass-roots. 52 By ignoring the effect that previous choices have in influencing ideas about the future and in constraining political capacity, the ethno- religious interpretation of the Northern Ireland conflict tends to exclude political relationships and historical dynamics from the analysis alto- gether. While political events, such as parading, do have important com- munal and religious aspects, they only become politically and socially important because of the context in which they occur. The importance of context is implicitly acknowledged in Steve Bruce’s account of the emer- gence of Ian Paisley. While he correctly points out that an anti-modernist and anti-ecumenist spirit was prevalent among Ulster Protestants in the 1960s, Bruce admits that this was a response to the perceived threat posed 16 Northern Ireland 1968–2008 by a resurgent Northern nationalism and the economic reforms proposed by the Northern Ireland premier, Terence O’Neill. In this view, the rise of Paisleyism was inextricably associated with the perception of com- munal loss, together with the mobilising opportunities presented by the rupturing of the Stormont elite in the mid- to late 1960s.

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  When Reason Fails

  Portraits of Armies at War: America, Britain, Israel, and the Future

  • Michael Goodspeed(Author)
  • 2001(Publication Date)
  • Praeger

    (Publisher)

  With the partition of Ireland in 1922, extremists in the IRA refused to accept the division of Ireland and fought a bloody campaign in the Republic, which was eventually repressed by the Dublin government at a cost of 4,000 Irish lives. The IRA was subsequently outlawed in the Free State but managed to survive as an underground organization dedicated to reuniting Ireland and ending British rule. IRA bombings, arson, assassinations, and attacks on border posts were spo- radic and small in scale and until the recent troubles, never constituted a major threat to Britain or Northern Ireland. Nonetheless, the legacy of IRA gunmen con- tributed substantially to fuelling and perpetuating the traditional hatred, fear and suspicion that exits between elements of Northern Ireland’s Catholic and Protestant population. The goal of the IRA throughout the troubles was similar to that of its fore- bears, the unification of Ireland under a radical socialist government. With the fall of the Soviet Union and a series of subsequent cease-fires as well as progress in the peace talks the IRA quietly dropped much of its radical socialist rhetoric. 23 72 When Reason Fails As part of the IRA’s stated political platform a unified Ireland was to be a so- cialist state. How fervently the rank and file of IRA men and women ever believed in the creation of a socialist utopian Ireland is problematic. The IRA consistently maintained that their first objective has been to drive the British Army from Ire- land and their second objective was to establish a unified, radically socialist and Gaelic Irish state. Notwithstanding this, there have long been indications that the IRA was not as devoted to Marxist economic theory as their rhetoric might have lead one to believe. Early in the Troubles the Provisional IRA developed a five-point peace plan that envisaged a loose, democratic, federal system based on four ancient Irish provinces. Significantly, socialism did not figure in this plan.

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  Defying the IRA? : Intimidation, Coercion, and Communities During the Irish Revolution

  • Brian Hughes(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Liverpool University Press

    (Publisher)

  5 Defying the IRA in Belfast Defying the IRA in Belfast T he violence that took place in Belfast between 1920 and 1922 was unique in revolutionary Ireland. Peter Hart has described the conflict there as ‘a communal war and a sectarian war, fought on the basis of ethnic mobilisation rather than paramilitary organisation’. 1 Violence comprised rioting, sniping, bombing, burning, reprisal killing, and forced expulsion. Belfast followed its own revolutionary timeline and, in A. C. Hepburn’s words, ‘appeared to be one of the most peaceful places in Ireland’ until it witnessed a wave of rioting in July 1920 that coincided with the removal of thousands of Catholic workers from the city’s shipyards. 2 The following two years saw peaks of violence, usually around the traditional Orange celebrations in July, followed by periods of relative peace and culminating in the most intense period of violence during the first six months of 1922. 3 In this regard, the violence formed part of a longer tradition of ethnic rioting and communal disturbances dating back to the 1850s and continuing to the present day. 4 As intense as it was, there was little that was new about violence in Belfast at this time. A label commonly used, then and since, to describe the violence that occurred in Belfast (and similarly in Lisburn) against Catholics between 1920 and 1922 is ‘pogrom’ and Tim Wilson has referred to a ‘competition in murder’ whereby rival communities used violence aimed at inflicting enough suffering to bring about defeat for the opposition. 5 Though Catholics were disproportionate victims of violence, both sides of the religious divide 1 Hart, The I.R.A. at war , p. 249. 2 A. C. Hepburn, Catholic Belfast and Nationalist Ireland (Oxford, 2008), p. 205. 3 For detailed surveys of the nature of violence in Belfast, see Alan F. Parkinson, Belfast’s unholy war: the troubles of the 1920s (Dublin, 2004); McDermott, Northern divisions ; Lynch, The Northern IRA , esp.

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