Troubled history of Northen Ireland

                                                    Contents

Introduction…………………………………………………………………….......3

Chapter 1 History of the Conflict………………………………………………..…6

1.1   Plantation of Ulster………………………………………………...…7

1.2 Rebellion……………………………………………………………..9

1.3 Northern Ireland under Home Rule…………………………………10

Conclusions……………………………………………………………..12

Chapter 2 The Troubles…………………………………………………………...14

               2.1 The Civil Rights Movement………………………………………...14

               2.2 Battle of the Bogside ……………………………………………….16

               2.3 Bloody Sunday……………………………………………………...19

               2.4 Ulster Workers' Council Strike……………………………………..20

               2.5 Dublin and Monaghan Bombings…………………………………..21

               2.6 Hunger Strike……………………………………………………….22

               Conclusions……………………………………………………………..24

Chapter 3 Peace Process……………………………………………………….....25

                  3.1 Early attempt: Anglo-Irish Agreement……………………………..25

              3.2 Paramilitary Ceasefires……………………………………………..26

               3.3 Belfast Agreement…………………………………………………..27

               Conclusions……………………………………………………………..29

Conclusion………………………………………………………………………..31

Resources…………………………………………………………………………33

                                          Introduction 

The course paper is devoted to the problem of the troubles that broke out in Northern Ireland in 1969. They proved that even liberal democratic institutions and a standard of living enviable in all but the wealthiest countries were no proof against ethnic conflict in the contemporary age. In a multicultural world, the                      troubles raised profound questions regarding the willingness of peoples to live with one another. The ability of law-bound states to cope with severe public disorder under the glare of international attention was sorely tested.                                                                                                       

          The introduction takes a historical perspective, but in doing so it does not suggest that the conflict is primeval or beyond reason, that Catholics in Ulster feel Irish, and Protestants feel British, and that both countenance violence to vindicate their identities, is not peculiar. The twentieth century attests to the willingness of many peoples to fight, kill, and die to preserve their national way of life. This nationalism does not have a very long history. In the pre-modern age “nation” meant little more, often less, than religion, clan, or region. But nor is it yet a thing of the past. Almost every state in the world bases itself upon a shared sense of belonging and mutual obligation that is patriotic or nationalistic. It is hard to imagine democracy operating otherwise. Almost every government strives to defend its national culture against erosion, and puts the welfare of its people before all. Northern Ireland’s tragedy is that its people have not been able to agree upon a common identity. Rather than stand by each other, they compete. Being so alike – in language, appearance, and broad culture – they cling tenaciously to that which marks them out. The successful consolidation of either British unionism or Irish nationalism, it is feared, will submerge the other. Other people’s identity is secure because it is buttressed by a state. Their shared nationalism is often mere background to the more important pursuit of personal development. In Northern Ireland, that luxury has been lacking. Neither nationalists nor unionists feel they may rest easy. Everyone who feels part of a community, and would defend the privilege of that belonging, can identify with Ulster’s plight.                                                      

There has never been a shortage of myths about the Irish conflict, and the renewed demand for information since 1969. Some of them are based on an element of truth. The research scene has changed considerably since those early days. It is difficult to imagine an ethnic conflict anywhere in the world which has been more thoroughly researched. Basic data have become more readily available to researchers. A body of theory, as distinct from polemic, has emerged. More subjectively, the depth of scholarship has also improved. The most far-reaching change has been the shift during the 1990s towards the provision of electronic source of information. The growth of interest both inside Northern Ireland and elsewhere is reflected in a variety of associations, centres, study groups and other forms of research collaboration. At every level, from undergraduate dissertation to major research project, a more serious approach to the conflict has been adopted.                                                                                                                                           

          This problem is very important for undergraduates, postgraduates, journalists, established academics and policy-makers because Northern Ireland conflict is considered as one of the most intractable of the ethnic conflicts in the world.

The topicality of the theme of this course paper is determined by the increasing interest in the Northern Ireland troubled history even from outside the country– educationalists are interested in its segregated school system, churchmen in the apparently denominational basis of the conflict, students in violence and its effects, medical researchers are examining the emergency procedures and surgical techniques in its hospitals.

The object of this study is the Northern Ireland conflict.

The subject of the research is the main reasons for the conflict, military events during this difficult time and the consequences of the troubles.

The methods used are description, comparison, synthesis and analysis.

The main purpose of the course paper is to analyze the peculiarities of the troubles that broke out in Northern Ireland in 1969.                                                                 

The following objectives are setup:                                                                                                                              1. to find out the main reasons for the ethnic conflict;

2. to give the precise description of the events, that took place during the troubles;

3. to define the consequences of the problems;

4. to study the peace process.

The course paper consists of 3 parts.

In chapter 1 attention is given to the background of the conflict.

Chapter 2 describes such events as battles, strikes and bombings.

Chapter 3 analyses agreements, which led to peace in Northern Ireland.

The work is based on the research of such British authors as Russell Stetler, John Darby, Sean Farren, Robert Mulvihill, Marc Mulholland, Austen Morgan and others.

                                Chapter 1 History of the Conflict

Two general points about the historical origins of the conflict are worth making. The first is that the proximity of Britain and Ireland has guaranteed a long history of interaction and linkage. In addition to the military and political history of conquest and resistance, there were exchanges, many of them unequal, of people, cultures, goods, technologies, ideas and language.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     

              The second general point relates to the peculiar nature of the settlement of the northern areas of the island of Ireland by English and Scottish settlers from the sixteenth century onwards. The plantation of Ulster attracted settlers from all classes, many of them smallholders or artisans. This pattern of settlement meant that the Protestant settlers lived in close proximity to the Catholic Irish who were cleared to the geographical margins but not exterminated. Within several generations the broad outlines of the conflict had been established. The territory contained two groups who differed in political allegiance, religious practice and cultural values. One group believed that their land had been stolen, while the other was in a constant state of apprehension. Northern Ireland still suffers from the problems of rival ethnic groups living cheek by jowl and in suspicion of each other.                                                                                                                                                         

              The island was partitioned in 1921, with the southern twenty-six counties gaining independence from Britain. The other six north-eastern counties remained part of the United Kingdom. The new state of Northern Ireland had an in-built Protestant majority (roughly 65 per cent Protestant and 35 per cent Catholic at the time of partition) and acquired its own parliament and considerable autonomy within the United Kingdom. Sovereignty was retained in Westminster, as was responsibility for defence, foreign policy and other UK concerns. London was content to leave most Northern Ireland matters in the hands of the new Stormont administration. From its inception until the return of Direct Rule in 1972, political tension was constant in Northern Ireland, only varying in intensity. Sectarian strains were never far from the surface. A chronically insecure Protestant majority, an alienated Catholic minority, electoral malpractice, ethnic bias in the distribution of housing and welfare services, and a declining economy meant that the state could never command full political legitimacy. Nevertheless few observers could see the meltdown around the corner.

1.1   Plantation of Ulster

Prior to its conquest in the Nine Years War of the 1590s, Ulster was the most Gaelic part of Ireland and the only province that was completely outside English control. The war, of 1594–1603, ended with the surrender of the O’Neill and O’Donnell lords to the English crown, but was also a hugely costly and humiliating episode for the English government in Ireland. Moreover, in the short term it had been a failure, since the surrender terms given to the rebels were very generous, re-granting them much of their former lands, but under English law.

However, when Hugh O'Neill and the other rebel Earls left Ireland in 1607 (the so called Flight of the Earls) to seek Spanish help for a new rebellion, the Lord Deputy, Arthur Chichester, seized the opportunity to colonise the province and declared the lands of O’Neill, O’Donnell and their followers forfeit. Initially, Chichester planned a fairly modest plantation, including large grants to native Irish lords who had sided with the English during the war. However, this plan was interrupted by the rebellion of Cahir O’Doherty of Donegal in 1608, a former ally of the English, who felt that he had not been fairly rewarded for his role in the war. The rebellion was swiftly put down and O’Doherty killed but it gave Chichester the justification for expropriating all native landowners in the province.

James VI of Scotland had become King of England in 1603, uniting those two crowns –also of course gaining possession of the Kingdom of Ireland – an English possession. The Plantation of Ulster was sold to him as a joint "British", i.e. English and Scottish, venture to pacify and civilise Ulster. So at least half of the settlers would be Scots. Six counties were involved in the official plantation – Armagh, Fermanagh, Cavan, Coleraine, Donegal and Tyrone.

The plan for the plantation was determined by two factors, one was the wish to make sure the settlement could not be destroyed by rebellion as the first Munster plantation had been. This meant that, rather than settling the Planters in isolated pockets of land confiscated from convicted rebels, all of the land would be confiscated and then redistributed to create concentrations of British settlers around new towns and garrisons. What was more, the new landowners were explicitly banned from taking Irish tenants and had to import them from England and Scotland. The remaining Irish landowners were to be granted one quarter of the land in Ulster and the ordinary Irish population was supposed to be relocated to live near garrisons and Protestant churches. Moreover, the Planters were also barred from selling their lands to any Irishman.

The second major influence on the Plantation was the negotiation between various interest groups on the British side. The principal landowners were to be undertakers, wealthy men from England and Scotland who undertook to import tenants from their own estates. They were granted around 3000 acres (12 km²) each, on condition that they settle a minimum of 48 adult males (including at least 20 families) who had to be English-speaking and Protestant. However, veterans of the war in Ireland (known as servitors) and led by Arthur Chichester, successfully lobbied that they should be rewarded with land grants of their own. Since these former officers did not have enough private capital to fund the colonisation, their involvement was subsidised by the City of London (the financial sector in London), who were also granted their own town (Derry, now officially named Londonderry although typically called Derry in general parlance) and lands. The final major recipient of lands was the Protestant Church of Ireland, which was granted all the churches and lands previously owned by the Roman Catholic church. It was intended that clerics from England and the Pale would convert the native population to Protestantism.

The plantation was a mixed success for the English. By the 1630s, there were 20,000 adult male British settlers in Ulster, which meant that the total settler population could have been as high as 80,000. They formed local majorities of the population in the Finn and Foyle valleys (around modern Derry and east Donegal) in north Armagh and east Tyrone. Moreover, there had also been substantial settlement on unofficially planted lands in north Down, led by James Hamilton and Hugh Montgomery, and in south Antrim under Sir Randall MacDonnell. What was more, the settler population grew rapidly as just under half of the planters were women – a very high ratio compared to contemporary Spanish settlement in Latin America or English settlement in Virginia and New England.

                                                   1.2 Rebellion

A bloody episode in Irish history, the 1641 rebellion erupted in the first instance in Ulster, when rebel Catholic elements surprised Protestant settlers, massacring large numbers. In accounting for this sudden outbreak of revolt, historians are divided about the importance of its long and short term causes. In recent years, there has been a marked movement away from viewing the 1641 rebellion as a reaction to the Ulster Plantation of 1610. Quite apart from the significant time lapse involved, it has been pointed out that there is evidence of considerable economic and social interaction between the Protestant settlers and the Catholic native population in the intervening period.

Instead, short term factors are stressed. Some of the primary native Irish “beneficiaries” of the Ulster Plantation, it is suggested, having got into economic difficulties, resorted to desperate measures to combat this situation. Added to this, the rise of a puritan dominated English portended the onset of religious persecution in Ireland. Thus, 1641 is regarded to some extent as a pre-emptive strike by Catholic Ireland in an endeavor to overthrow the Protestant regime in Ireland. However, while there is considerable justification in affording importance to such short term factors, long-standing grievances associated with the Ulster Plantation remain a primary factor too. It is this smouldering resentment which contributed to the viciousness of the attacks on the Protestant settlers and the large numbers of fatalities involved.

The sheer volume of deaths associated with the 1641 rebellion is a contentious issue, not least because the number of Protestant fatalities was soon inflated to several hundreds of thousands by contemporary and subsequent Protestant writers. Modern research calculates the actual number of deaths to be 12,000 out of a total Protestant population in Ulster at the time of 40,000, a massacre by any scale even if some thousands of these occurred as a result of military combat rather than the slaughter of the defenseless.

The so-called 1641 rebellion actually lasted for almost ten years, spreading to other areas of Ireland when the native Irish of Ulster were joined in revolt by their Old English co-religionists. For a time, such was the success of the revolt that Protestant dominance in Ireland was in danger of being eradicated, not least when Owen Roe O’Neill led the Catholic rebels in Ulster to a famous victory at the battle of Benburb (County Tyrone) in 1646, the main Protestant army in Ireland having been annihilated. Political and cultural differences between the native Irish and the Old English are widely considered to have been a primary cause of the failure of the rebels to press home their military advantage.

What began as an event associated with the massacre of Irish Protestants was to end with the equally notable massacres wrought by the armies of Oliver Cromwell who landed in Ireland in 1649. The slaughter of the inhabitants of Drogheda and Wexford are as indelibly imprinted on the psyche of Irish Catholics as the previous massacres in Ulster are on Protestants [16, p. 34].

1.3 Northern Ireland under Home Rule

The 1920 con­stitution gave Northern Ireland a form of home rule, or devolution. It created a bicameral legisla­ture with a Senate and a House of Commons. New elections were to be held every five years, and voting qualifications were close to those in Great Britain.

Each of the boroughs, urban districts, and rural districts had its elected councils. But the local-government franchise excluded persons who were neither taxpayers nor property owners, and this meant that few Catholics had any voice in deci­sions that directly affected them.

The Northern Irish state represented a com­promise between the aspirations of Ulster s Union­ist leaders (those advocating continued union with Britain) and the realities of the political situation. Although both the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 and the treaty of 1921 gave Northern Ire­land the option to join the Free State and become part of a 32-county British dominion, the leaders of Ulster had no such plans. They were resolved to maintain privileges for Protestants or loyalists and were backed by the powerful Orange Order. This fraternal and secret society, which originated in conflicts between Protestants and Catholics in the 1790s, was dedicated to upholding Protestant ascendancy in the north.

Widespread unrest in the early 1920s and fears of IRA raids into the northern counties spurred the passage of the Civil Authorities Act in 1922. Better known as the Special Powers Act, this mea­sure gave the home secretary the power to deal with lawlessness as he saw fit. The government could arrest people on suspicion of belonging to illegal organizations, search for weapons without a warrant, impose curfews, and bar the entry of any undesirable persons into the six counties. To help enforce this measure the government cre­ated a part-time police force, called the В Spe­cials, to assist the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUG) in an emergency. During the 1920s and long after, the heavily armed B-Specials treated Catholics with suspicion and callousness.

From the 1920s on the government of North­ern Ireland consolidated its power and expanded the range of social services. The first three prime ministers Lord Craigavon (1921–1940), J. M. An­drews (1940–1943), and Lord Brookeborough (1943–1963) emulated patterns of state intervention in Great Britain by promoting better education, housing, public health, and utilities. But many Catholics regarded these social services as primarily benefiting Protestants.

The social and political elite that governed Northern Ireland derived its wealth from both landed estates and investments in industrial and commercial enterprises. These people tended to regard most of the Catholics as either overtly or potentially disloyal to the Unionist regime. Lord Craigavon boasted in 1932: "we are a Protestant parliament and a Protestant state" [19, p. 34]. When depres­sion forced layoffs in industry, Catholics were the first to go. When government-subsidized housing became available, Protestant applicants were the first to gain occupancy. When the number of Catholic voters threatened to disturb the Protes­tant majority on any local government council the electoral boundaries were redrawn so as to restrict the seats likely to fall into Catholic hands

Such inequities kept alive the spirit of rebel­lion among republicans in the north, most of whom had close ties to the IRA in Dublin. Dining the late 1930s and from 1954 to 1959, the IRA car­ried out sporadic attacks on customhouses and police barracks north of the border with the Republic. But no serious or mass assault took place in the north until the latter 1960s, when a com­bination of factors, including the 50th anniver­sary of the Easter Rising of 1916 in Dublin and the inspiration of the civil rights movement in the United States, culminated in a sustained chal­lenge to the regime.

                                          Conclusions    

From the sixteenth century, Ireland’s separate Gaelic society was steadily destroyed. Ireland modernized under British direction. That Ireland’s ruling elite owed its position to conquest was not unusual for early modern Europe. It was the coincidence of conquest with religious schism that prevented the emergence of a nation state uniting all classes. For the conquered Irish, adherence to Roman Catholicism provided consolation and hope for profane benefit should the true religion be restored in Britain. Protestantism served as a mark of superiority for the conquerors, both morally justifying their dominance and preventing dispersal of their privileges.