90 The Peace Process

By 1972, Northern Ireland was in chaos: the body count from paramilitary violence was rising daily, British soldiers were patrolling the streets, and the entire state was divided along seemingly unbridgeable social lines. The British government, faced with governing this mess, began proceedings to restore Northern Ireland home rule on more stable grounds.

It was a gargantuan political puzzle. Negotiators had to bring together Catholic and Protestant politicians who were increasingly at each other’s throats.

The negotiators ironed out an agreement in December 1973 in Sunningdale, England. The principal point was the restoration of Northern Ireland home rule, with power shared between Catholics and Protestants. It called for the creation of a Council of Ireland to promote cooperation between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The English agreed to release political prisoners and reform the RUC, while the Irish agreed to suppress the IRA and to scale back their claims to Northern Ireland. People hoped that the compromise agreement would allow for lasting peace.

Sadly, it was not to be. Unionist groups felt that the arrangement ceded too much to Catholics. The Ulster Workers’ Council, a working-class Loyalist group, called a general strike in Belfast that lasted for thirteen days. The strike—and the paramilitary violence that accompanied it— brought Northern Ireland to a standstill. The local government decided to withdraw from the Sunningdale Agreement. The United Kingdom concluded that if it couldn’t reform Northern Ireland, it would try to contain it. For the next two decades, Britain treated the Troubles as primarily a security problem with the IRA.

In the following decades, the Troubles remained a source of pain and dismay for rational people throughout the world. The cycle of killing, retaliation, and counterkilling continued despite all attempts to stop it. Britain discovered that it could patrol the streets and throw thousands in jail, but as long as there was an angry young Catholic with a gun or a bomb, the violence would continue. The Catholic minority learned that they could talk to the politicians all they wanted, but as long as the Protestant working class wanted to maintain its position of superiority, the intimidation would continue. A shadow had fallen over Northern Ireland.

One of the more notorious episodes of the Troubles was the so-called Dirty Protest of IRA prisoners. The IRA prisoners wanted to be treated like prisoners of war, which would allow them to wear their own clothes, but the British insisted that they were common criminals. To protest, the prisoners refused to wear prison clothes or to clean their cells. For months, they huddled under blankets, wallowing in filth. International journalists called their conditions appalling, but British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher replied that if they chose to live in squalor, that was their problem.

In 1981, after it became clear that the dirty tactics wouldn’t work, the prisoners adopted a more extreme approach. Bobby Sands, a charismatic twenty-seven-year-old prisoner, announced that he would not eat until he received prisoner-of-war status. Every ten days, a fellow prisoner joined him on the hunger strike. The British thought he was bluffing; Prime Minister Thatcher refused to give in to the moral blackmail tactics. The IRA’s Gerry Adams pleaded with Sands to call off the strike, as did the Catholic bishop of Derry. While Sands wasted away, he won an election for Parliament as a Sinn Féin candidate.

But he never took his seat in Westminster. After sixty-six days without food, Bobby Sands, MP (member of Parliament), died. Riots struck throughout Belfast, and 100,000 people attended his funeral procession.

In the following months, nine more hunger strikers died. Finally, the prisoners called off the strike—they had decided not to lose any more lives in a futile gesture. Three days later, Britain granted the IRA prisoners most of their demands.