For more than a generation Northern Ireland was the site of one of Europe’s most bloody and protracted recent conflicts. Between 1969 and 2007 the Troubles, as the conflict became euphemistically known, claimed the lives of around 3,700 people, with over ten times as many injured in countless bomb and gun attacks. The sectarian nature of the conflict, together with the indiscriminate character of the violence, entrenched the bitterness and hatred that continues to polarize relations between and within communities in Northern Ireland today. But what are the origins of the Troubles? How did the main protagonists fight their ‘war’? And why did political violence persist for so long? Moreover, what lessons can be drawn from the transition from the long war to – hopefully – a long peace?
Although the conflict between Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists has its roots in the settler–native confrontations of the 17th century, its most recent phase can be traced to the partition of Ireland and the formation of a separate Northern Ireland in the 1920s, and the subsequent hold over politics, culture and society enjoyed by the Ulster Unionist Party until the collapse of the Stormont administration in 1972. In the late 1960s a conglomerate of Catholics, nationalists, Republicans and agnostic socialists – along with a handful of Protestants – opposed to Unionist dominance founded the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA). The organization aimed ‘to bring to Northern Ireland effective democracy, and to end all the forms of injustice, intimidation, discrimination and deprivation, which result from the partisan rule of the Stormont regime’. Many activists were exercised by what they saw as the local Unionist regime’s discriminatory policies towards them in jobs, housing and electoral politics, while a minority of extremists were intent on sparking civil unrest and anarchy. The storm whipped up by NICRA protest marches would lead to a groundswell of support for a radical redistribution of these civil rights, eventually bringing both communities into direct confrontation with one another.
The NICRA marches sparked off counterdemonstrations led by fundamentalist Protestant preacher the Revd Ian Paisley, whose oratory sent crowds into frenzied hysteria when civil rights marches passed through predominantly Unionist areas. Heavy-handed responses by militant Loyalists and elements of the local Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the auxiliary Ulster Special Constabulary (USC, or ‘B’ Specials) provoked further unrest and violence. The reformist impulse behind the initial civil rights marches soon gave way to a mushrooming of militancy. Protestants were jettisoned from NICRA’s ranks, and as the province spiralled further into sectarian clashes and civil disorder the Irish Republican Army (IRA) emerged as the cutting edge of Catholic defenderism.
In the heightened atmosphere of the Orange Order’s annual marching season during the summer of 1969, nationalist protestors soon found themselves in open conflict with their Protestant neighbours and the police. Widespread sectarian rioting led to the formation of vigilante groups as respective communities clashed on the streets of Northern Ireland. The Troubles, which had lain subdued since the 1920s – with only the occasional glimmer of violence – had been reignited.
Few actions in the Troubles were as momentous as the intervention of British troops. Ordered into the province on 14 August 1969 by Home Secretary James Callaghan, following a request by his counterpart in the Northern Ireland government, the troops’ task was to ‘provide military assistance to the civil power’. Despite its initial peacekeeping posture the British Army was very quickly thrust into the midst of a vicious cycle gripping Northern Ireland’s streets. Between 1971 and 1997 Britain saw 770 of its armed forces personnel killed and countless wounded. Approximately 250,000 soldiers qualified for the Northern Ireland clasp of the Army’s General Service Medal, and Operation Banner became the longest campaign in British military history.
British troops stand guard in Belfast in August 1969. (© Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis)
In both political and military terms Operation Banner was one of the most significant interventions in modern times. It lasted longer than the Palestine deployment under the British Mandate (1920s to the 1940s) and was infinitely more complex and controversial than the Aden campaign of the 1960s. Politically, many high-profile atrocities – such as the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets by the various terrorist groups – provoked universal outrage. The knee-jerk reactions of the Security Forces – made up of the RUC, the locally recruited Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR, later the Royal Irish Regiment Home Service Force), and the British Army – from time to time also served to generate international furore and led to high-profile inquiries. The Parker and Compton Inquiries investigated allegations of the ill-treatment of terrorist suspects, while the Saville Inquiry was appointed to determine responsibility for the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’, when soldiers shot dead 14 people. These investigations portrayed Britain and her Security Forces in a poor light and, arguably, handed propaganda victories to militant Republicanism.
Many Catholic nationalists joined the IRA, a clandestine organization with a long lineage stretching back to the separatist Fenian Movement and the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In 25 years of violence, Republican paramilitaries (mainly the IRA) were responsible for the murders of over 2,000 people – mostly Protestants. Loyalist paramilitary groups – founded primarily in response to the escalation of Republican violence – killed over 1,018 people, mostly Catholics. The Security Forces were responsible for approximately 363 deaths. Despite the highly sophisticated propaganda campaigns undertaken by terrorists, the sad truth was that most victims of the Troubles were ordinary Protestants and Catholics. Even with the running-down of their respective military campaigns and the onset of the ‘peace process’ in the 1990s, paramilitaries continued to harass their respective communities with intimidation, threats, violence and murder.
While the 1998 Belfast (or ‘Good Friday’) Agreement saw the main Unionist and nationalist traditions reach a political accommodation, violence continued on the streets until the decommissioning of IRA weapons in 2005. Power-sharing institutions were finally devolved by the British government to the local Stormont Assembly in a deal between Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party and Gerry Adams’ Sinn Féin in May 2007. Meanwhile, it had been announced in July 2006 that due to the winding up of the IRA’s campaign the year before – and in the spirit of ‘normalization’ – the British Army would be terminating Operation Banner in July 2007. The statements that Loyalist paramilitaries were ending their terror campaigns served further to bolster the fledgling power-sharing executive at Stormont. All of these developments acted as the adhesive binding together the peace and political processes in the decade after the signing of the Belfast Agreement.