For more than thirty years, the Troubles consumed Northern Ireland. Almost 3,000 people died as a direct result of the conflict. It was a conflict that did no credit to either side. The pettiness and discrimination that characterised unionist rule led eventually to a nationalist revolt. The early unionist response was to repeat the dose of the 1920s: state violence. However, in the television age this proved an embarrassment to the sovereign government in London: the world was able to watch the goings-on in this strange corner of the United Kingdom.
When the civil disturbances of 1969 reduced Northern Ireland to anarchy, the words ‘IRA: I Ran Away’ appeared on gable walls. The IRA had swung to the left in the 1960s, following the failure of the 1956–62 campaign, and had come under the influence of a Dublin-based socialist leadership. There was a consequent emphasis on social action and lack of emphasis on traditional republican concerns. This proved costly when working-class Catholic ghettos came under attack from loyalist mobs, often aided and abetted by police and B Specials. The movement split. The left-wingers formed the Official IRA and the more traditional — and it must be said more practical — element became the Provisional IRA. The Provos concentrated on community defence in the first instance — to purge the I Ran Away smear— and then moved on to a resumption of the 1920–22 civil war by attempting to shoot and bomb the British out of Ireland altogether.
Following 1969, the police began a rolling series of reforms that, no matter what they did, would never convince nationalists that they were anything other than a sectarian arm of the state. The B Specials were abolished. The local government franchise was reformed to end the sort of gerrymandering that obtained in Derry. It was too little too late.
In August 1971, the unionist government introduced internment without trial. It was a botched job, based in part on faulty and out-of-date security information. But even if it had been a perfect operation, it would have remained a disastrous error of judgment. It massively increased nationalist alienation from the state and support for the Provos, whose operational capacity remained undiminished. The following year, 1972, was the most violent of the troubles, with 470 deaths, over 10,000 shooting incidents and almost 2,000 bomb explosions. In the same year, London closed the parliament at Stormont and imposed direct rule.
The Provisional IRA represented the nationalist extreme. The mainstream was represented by the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), whose principal theoretician was John Hume from Derry. He preached a reconciliation of the two traditions through negotiation and movement towards an agreed future for both parts of Ireland. The SDLP was totally opposed to the violence of the IRA, not to mention the reciprocated assaults from loyalist paramilitaries.
In 1974, the British and Irish governments and the main Northern Ireland parties reached a deal at Sunningdale, near London, for a power-sharing, devolved government in Belfast. An Executive was duly set up and lasted a mere five months before being brought down by a unionist general strike.
Thereafter, the Troubles rumbled on from one atrocity and ambush to another, with dirty work on both sides and likewise on the part of the British army despite repeated denials which no one believed. The deaths of ten republican hunger strikers in 1981 probably represented a psychological low point, although it also made the more intelligent people in the IRA and Sinn Féin realise that while the war could not be lost it could not be won either. Hunger strike candidates won by-elections and demonstrated the potential for political action. It took the best part of twenty years for this potential to transmute into practical politics. The republican movement was steeped in a culture of violence and would require much subtle persuasion to wean it off the gun. There were practical problems, of which the question of paramilitary prisoners was the most pressing (this consideration also affected loyalist paramilitary groups).
The most important political development of those years was the Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985, signed by Margaret Thatcher for the UK and Garret FitzGerald for the Republic. It marked the beginning of a genuine rapprochement between Dublin and London and increased co-operation between the two governments. Crucially, it set up a joint ministerial conference supported by a permanent secretariat in Belfast. It stopped short of joint authority but gave Dublin a voice in the governance of Northern Ireland for the first time. Although it led to predictable unionist rage at a deal done over their heads, it created the conditions that made the peace process of the late 1990s possible. It also recognised the simple reality that more than one-third of the population of Northern Ireland had no loyalty to the state and had no reason to have any such loyalty.
By the late 1980s, it seemed that the problem of Northern Ireland was insoluble. Here were irreconcilable opposites, renewing an inter-communal quarrel centuries old, speaking and shouting past each other in a dialogue of the deaf. It was a dreary time in a dreary place without much evidence of hope. It was not a time to build. Yet build they did, and splendidly.
The Waterfront Hall in Belfast is the finest concert venue in Ireland, with the possible exception of the Grand Canal Theatre in Dublin. But the latter was designed by the international celebrity architect Daniel Libeskind and was the showy child of the Celtic Tiger. The Waterfront Hall was a local effort, designed by the Belfast practice of Robinson McIlwaine. Planning began in 1989 and the building finally opened in 1997, a year before the Belfast Agreement. In other words, the Troubles were in full swing for most of its gestation.
There was another side to Belfast and to Northern Ireland during all the bad years, and this building is palpable evidence of it. For all its hatreds and horrors, this was not the Balkans or Lebanon. Civil society did not break down. Outside the worst ghetto areas, there was an air of something like normality. Not all of that was illusion. There were strong elements on both sides, not least in the churches, that helped to maintain the common decencies of social life in desperately trying circumstances. For every ranting Protestant ultra like Ian Paisley or for every republican priest, there were heroic figures like Rev. Ken Newell and Fr Denis Faul. One was in no doubt as to their commitment to their respective traditions, but they also gave witness to the best of both traditions — and to their shared Christianity — by refusing to be silenced when they saw evil done by their own side.
They were not alone. History and politics had rendered Northern Ireland an unstable place, incapable of full normality. It wasn’t and couldn’t be like the Republic or the Home Counties. But considering the stresses of history and of the troubles, corroding the civic fabric of society for so long, the wonder is that it retained as much secular stability as it did. It just did not give up. The peace, when it came, was a fudge; no one pretended that the two sides had suddenly kissed and made up. But it happened, most improbably, when the two political extremes — Paisley’s Democratic Unionists and Sinn Féin — somehow contrived an agreement to co-habit and share power in a devolved provincial government. This could not have happened without a civic centre of gravity, a stable middle ground on which the forces of social cohesion could stand. If any building in the province bears witness to these stabilising, normalising forces, it is this.
