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The area now known as Northern Ireland has had a diverse history. At the beginning of the 17th century, it changed from the bedrock of Irish resistance to the location of the Plantation of Ulster by Scottish and English colonists. Today, Northern Ireland is a diverse patchwork of community rivalries. In some towns and cities, whole communities fly various flags to indicate their allegiences. For example, some unionists and loyalists fly the Union Flag to indicate their wish to remain part of the United Kingdom. Some nationalists or republicans fly the tricolour of the Republic of Ireland to indicate their wish to become part of a United Ireland. In some less affluent areas, even the kerbstones are painted green/white/orange or red/white/blue, depending on whether a community is nationalist/republican or unionist/loyalist. In recent years, Nationalist areas have flown Palestinian flags to show their support Palestine in the disputes with Israel, this has been combatted in some Unionist areas with the flying of Israeli flags.
In 1922, Northern Ireland was formed from six of the nine counties of Ulster and, together with Great Britain, forms the present United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. This came about through the Government of Ireland Act, 1920 that also granted Home Rule to the rest of Ireland as Southern Ireland. In 1922, the rest of Ireland became independent and became known as the Irish Free State.
Early 20th century
From the late 19th Century, the majority of Irish people wanted the British government to give some sort of self-rule to Ireland. The Irish Nationalist Party regularly held the balance of power in the British House of Commons in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, a position from which it sought to gain Home Rule, which would have given Ireland autonomy in internal affairs, without breaking up the United Kingdom. Two bills granting home rule to Ireland were passed by the Commons in the 1886 and 1893—only to be rejected by the House of Lords. With the passing of the Parliament Act by the Liberal Party government in 1911 (which reduced the powers of the Lords from striking down Parliamentary Bills to delaying their implementation for two years) it was apparent that home rule would probably come into force in the next five years. The Home Rule Party had been campaigning for this for almost fifty years.
However, a significant minority were vehemently opposed to the idea and wished to retain the Union. Irish Unionists had been agitating successfully against Home Rule since the 1880s, and on 28 September 1912, the leader of the northern unionists, James Craig, introduced the Ulster Covenant in Belfast, pledging to exclude Ulster from home rule, which was signed by 450,000 men, some in their own blood. Whilst precipitating a split with the Unionist community in the south and west (which was particularly sizable in Dublin), it gave the northern Unionists a feasible goal to aim for.
By the early 20th Century, Belfast (the largest city in Ulster) had become the largest city in Ireland. Its industrial economy - with heavy engineering and shipbuilding - was closely integrated with that of Britain. Belfast was a substantially Protestant town - Catholics were largely confined to the west of the city and a few enclaves in the north - and, because of Conservative Party sympathy, the political voice of Unionism was strong in Parliament.
A third Home Rule Bill was introduced by the Liberal minority government in 1912. After heavy amendment by the House of Lords, the Commons agreed in 1914 to allow four counties of Ulster to vote themselves out of its provisions and then only for six years. Throughout 1913 and 1914, paramilitary "volunteer armies" were recruited and armed, firstly the unionist Ulster Volunteer Force, and in response, the nationalist Irish Volunteers. But events in Europe were to take precedence: in what was to be the opening shot of World War I, Gavrilo Princip assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in Sarajevo. Home rule was delayed for the duration of what was expected to be a short war and unionist and nationalist leaders agreed to encourage their volunteers to join the British army. The 36th(Ulster) Division, which was to suffer so severely at the Somme in 1916, was formed predominantly from the UVF. Nationalists joined in great numbers as well, with "old" Irish regiments from Munster and Leinster being greatly strengthened.
During the war, tensions continued to mount in Ireland. A small group in Dublin attempted a rebellion, the Easter Rising, in 1916. After summary trials, the British government had the leaders executed for treason. The government blamed the small Sinn Féin party, which had had little to do with it. Its previously negligible popular support grew and Sinn Féin was to the forefront in organising a campaign against the British threat of conscription. When the volunteers returned from the front in 1918 and 1919, they came back as battle-hardened soldiers rather than rag-tag yeomanry. In the general election of 1918, The Irish Parliamentary Party lost almost all of its seats to Sinn Féin. Unionists did well in the northeast, and five of the six IPP members returned in Ireland were elected in Ulster.
Guerrilla warfare raged across Ireland in the aftermath of the election. Although lower in intensity in the north, it was complicated by involving not only the Irish Republican Army and the British Army but the UVF as well. The Irish Nationalist Party retained much more support in the north than in the rest of Ireland.
The fourth and final Home Rule Bill (the Government of Ireland Act 1920) partitioned the island into Northern Ireland (six northeastern counties) and "Southern Ireland" (the remaining twenty six). Some Unionists such as Sir Edward Carson opposed partition bitterly, seeing it as a betrayal of unionists in the rest of Ireland.
Northern Ireland received self-government within the United Kingdom and London generally left it to its own devices. The early years of the new "state" were marked by bitter violence, particularly in Belfast. The IRA was determined to oppose the partition of Ireland and the Unionist authorities created the (mainly ex-UVF) Ulster Special Constabulary to aid the Royal Ulster Constabulary and introduced draconian emergency powers to put down the IRA. Many died, mainly Catholics, in political violence, which gradually petered out after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922 and through 1923.
The continuing violence created a climate of "pogrom" in the new region, and there was a migration of some Catholics across the new border - further isolating those who remained in the north. Despite the mixed religious affiliation of the old Royal Irish Constabulary and the transfer of many Catholic RIC police officers to the newly formed Royal Ulster Constabulary, northern Catholics did not join the new force in great numbers. Sectarian police recruitment – supposedly justified by the need to suppress the IRA – added to nationalists' alienation from the state.
1925 to 1965
Under successive Unionist Prime Ministers from Sir James Craig (later Lord Craigavon) onwards, the unionist establishment practiced what is considered by some a policy of discrimination against the nationalist/Catholic minority. Gerrymandered towns and city boundaries rigged local government elections to ensure unionist control of local councils. Catholics were packed into Catholic-dominated wards rather than being allowed to move into Protestant wards, while predominantly Protestant wards were subdivided to create multiple Protestant-dominated wards. Voting arrangements which gave commercial companies votes and minimum income regulations also helped achieve similar ends. Disputes over local government gerrymandering were at the heart of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. .
In addition, there was widespread discrimination in employment, particularly at senior levels in the public sector and in some sectors of the economy such as shipbuilding and heavy engineering. Emigration to seek employment was significantly more prevalent among the Catholic population. As a result Northern Ireland's demography shifted further in favour of Protestants and their ascendancy seemed impregnable by the late 1950s.
Perhaps most fatally, the abolition of Proportional Representation in 1929 meant that the structure of party politics gave the Ulster Unionist Party a continual sizable majority in the Northern Ireland Parliament, leading to fifty years of one-party rule. While Nationalist parties continued to retain the same number of seats that they had under Proportional Representation, the Northern Ireland Labour Party and various smaller leftist Unionist groups were smothered.
In 1935, the worst violence since partition convulsed Belfast. After an Orange Order parade decided to return to the city centre through a Catholic area instead of its usual route, the resulting violence left nine people dead. Over 2,000 Catholics were forced to leave their homes.
Though disputed for decades, many leaders of unionism now admit that Northern Ireland government in the period 1922-1972 was discriminatory, although prominent Democratic Unionist Party figures continue to deny it. One unionist leader, Nobel Peace Prize joint-winner, former UUP leader and First Minister of Northern Ireland David Trimble, openly described Northern Ireland as having been a "cold house for Catholics."
Despite this, Northern Ireland stayed relatively peaceful for most of the following five decades, except for some brief flurries of IRA activity and the (Luftwaffe) Belfast blitz during the Second World War and the so-called 'Border Campaign' from 1956 to 1962, with little support among the wider Catholic community. However, many Catholics were resentful towards the state, and nationalist politics was sullen and defeatist. Meanwhile, the period saw an almost complete synthesis between the Ulster Unionist Party and the loyalist Orange Order, with Catholics being excluded from any position of political or civil authority outside of a handful of Nationalist-controlled councils.
1966 to 1998
Main article The Troubles.
In the 1960s, moderate Unionist prime minister Terence O'Neill (later Lord O'Neill of the Maine) tried to reform the system, but encountered strong opposition from both fundamentalist Protestant leaders like Ian Paisley and within his own party. The increasing pressures from Nationalists for reform and from extreme Loyalists for "No Surrender" led to the appearance of the civil rights movement, under figures such as Austin Currie and joint-winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, John Hume. It had some moderate Protestant support and membership, and a considerable dose of student radicalism after Northern Ireland was swept up in the world-wide student revolts of 1968. Clashes between marchers and the Royal Ulster Constabulary led to increased communal strife, with elements both among the police and student radicals actively seeking to up the temperature, culminating in a violent attack by a unionist mob (which included police reservists) on a march, at Burntollet, outside Derry on 4 January 1969 as the police looked on. Wholescale violence erupted after an Apprentice Boys march was forced through the nationalist Bogside area of Derry on 12 August 1969 by the RUC, which led to large scale disorder. Rioting continued until the 14th of August, and in that time 1,091 canisters, each containing 12.5g of CS gas and 14 canisters containing 50g of CS gas, were released into the densely populated residential area by the RUC. The following thirty years of civil strife became to be known as the Troubles.
The British army were deployed by the UK Home Secretary James Callaghan two days later on 14 August 1969. Two weeks later, control of security in Northern Ireland was passed from the Stormont government to General Ian Freeland. At first the soldiers received a warm welcome from Nationalists, who hoped they would protect them from Loyalist attack (which the now-Marxist IRA had, for ideological reasons, declined to do). However, tensions rose throughout the following years, with an important milestone in the worsening relationship between the army and nationalists being the Falls Road Curfew of 3 July 1970.
After the introduction of internment without trial for suspected IRA men on 9 August 1971, even the most moderate Nationalists reacted by completely withdrawing their consent from the tactics of the state. The SDLP members of the Parliament of Northern Ireland withdrew from that body on 15 August and a widespread campaign of civil disobedience began. Tensions were ratcheted to a higher level after the killing of fourteen unarmed civilians in Derry by the Parachute Regiment on 30 January 1972, an event dubbed Bloody Sunday.
Throughout this period, the modern constellation of paramilitary organisations began to form. After Bloody Sunday, their full fury was unleashed, and 1972 was the most violent year of the conflict. The appearance in 1970 of the Provisional IRA, a breakaway from the increasingly Marxist Official IRA, and a campaign of violence by unionist paramilitary groups like the Ulster Defence Association and others brought Northern Ireland to the brink of civil war. On 30 March 1972, the British government, unwilling to grant the unionist Northern Ireland government more authoritarian special powers, and now convinced of its inability to restore order, prorogued the Northern Ireland Parliament and introduced direct rule from London.
However, the British government held talks with various parties, including the IRA, during 1972 and 1973. On 9 December 1973, after talks in Sunningdale, Berkshire, the Ulster Unionist Party, SDLP and Alliance Party of Northern Ireland reached the Sunningdale Agreement on a cross-community government for Northern Ireland, which took office on 1 January 1974. The IRA was unimpressed, increasing the tempo of their violence, while unionists were outraged at the participation of nationalists in the government of Northern Ireland and at the cross-border Council of Ireland. Although the pro-Sunningdale parties had a clear majority in the new Northern Ireland Assembly, the failure of the pro-Agreement parties to co-ordinate their efforts in the General Election of 29 February, combined with an IRA-sponsored boycott by hardline republicans, allowed anti-Sunningdale Unionists to take 51.1% of the vote and 11 of Northern Ireland's 12 seats in the UK House of Commons.
Emboldened by this, a coalition of anti-Agreement Unionist politicians and paramilitaries encouraged a general strike on 15 May. The strikers brought Northern Ireland to a standstill by shutting down power stations, and after Prime Minister Harold Wilson refused to send in troops to take over from the strikers, the power-sharing executive collapsed on 28 May.
Some British politicians, notably former British Labour minister Tony Benn, advocated British withdrawal from Ireland, but many opposed this policy, and called their prediction of the possible results of British withdrawal the Doomsday Scenario, anticipating widespread communal strife. The worst fear envisaged a civil war which would engulf not just Northern Ireland, but also the Republic of Ireland and Scotland, both of which had major links with either or both communities. Later, the feared possible impact of British Withdrawal was the Balkanisation of Northern Ireland after the violent break-up of Yugoslavia and the chaos that ensued.
The level of violence declined from its early 1970s peak from 1972 onwards, stabilising at 50 to 100 deaths a year. The IRA bombed England and British army bases in Europe, with regular attacks in Northern Ireland. Loyalist paramilitaries, while claiming a (very) few Republican paramilitary casualties, for the most part targeted uninvolved Catholics working in Protestant areas or attacked Catholic-frequented pubs with what were euphemistically known as "spray jobs" with automatic gunfire.
Various fitful political talks took place from then until the early 1990s, backed by schemes such as Rolling Devolution, and 1975 saw a brief IRA ceasefire. The two events of real significance during this period, however, were the Hunger Strikes and the Anglo-Irish Agreement.
During the hunger strike, the republican movement gained its first taste of electoral politics with moderate electoral success on both sides of the border, including the election of Bobby Sands to the House of Commons. This convinced republicans to adopt the armalite and ballot box strategy and gradually take a more political approach.
By the 1990s, the failure of the IRA campaign to win mass public support or achieve its aim of British withdrawal, and in particular the public relations disaster of Enniskillen (when there were 11 fatalities among families attending a Remembrance Day ceremony), along with the replacement of the traditional republican leadership of Ruairí Ó Brádaigh by Gerry Adams, saw a move away from armed conflict to political engagement.
This change from paramilitary to political means was part of a broader Northern Ireland peace process, which followed the appearance of new leaders in London (John Major) and Dublin (Albert Reynolds).
Increased government focus on the problems of Northern Ireland led, in 1993, to the two prime ministers signing the Downing Street Declaration. At the same time Gerry Adams, leader of Sinn Féin, and John Hume, leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, engaged in talks. A new leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, David Trimble, initially perceived as a hardliner, brought his party into all-party negotiations that in 1998 produced the Belfast Agreement ("Good Friday Agreement"), signed by eight parties on 10 April 1998, although not involving Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionist Party or the UK Unionist Party. A majority of both communities in Northern Ireland approved this Agreement, as did the people of the Republic of Ireland, both by referendum on 22 May 1998. The Republic amended its constitution, Bunreacht na hÉireann, to replace a claim it made to the territory of Northern Ireland with an affirmation of the right of all the people of Ireland to be part of the Irish nation and a declaration of an aspiration towards a united Ireland (see the Nineteenth Amendment of the Constitution of Ireland).
Since the Good Friday Agreement
Under the Good Friday Agreement, properly known as the Belfast Agreement, voters elected a new Northern Ireland Assembly to form a parliament. Every party that reaches a specific level of support gains the right to name a member of its party to government and claim a ministry. Ulster Unionist party leader David Trimble became First Minister of Northern Ireland. The Deputy Leader of the SDLP, Seamus Mallon, became Deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland, though his party's new leader, Mark Durkan, subsequently replaced him. The Ulster Unionists, Social Democratic and Labour Party, Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party each had ministers by right in the power-sharing assembly.
The Assembly and its Executive operated on a stop-start basis, with repeated disagreements about whether the IRA was fulfilling its commitments to disarm, a new unionist precondition for sharing power with Sinn Féin that was not included in the Agreement, and also allegations from the Police Service of Northern Ireland's Special Branch that there was an IRA spy-ring operating in the heart of the civil service. It has since emerged that the spy-ring was run by MI5 (see Denis Donaldson). Northern Ireland is now, once more, run by the Direct Rule Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Peter Hain, and a British ministerial team answerable to him. Hain is answerable only to the Cabinet.
The changing British position to Northern Ireland was represented by the visit of the Queen to Parliament Buildings in Stormont, where she met nationalist ministers from the SDLP as well as unionist ministers, and spoke of the rights of people who perceive themselves as Irish to be treated as equal citizens with those who regard themselves as British. Similarly, on visits to Northern Ireland, the President of Ireland, Mary McAleese, met with unionist ministers and with the local Lord Lieutenant of each county, the representative of the Queen.
However, the Assembly elections of 30 November 2003 saw Sinn Féin and the DUP emerge as the largest parties in each community, which was perceived as making a restoration of the devolved institutions more difficult to achieve. However, serious talks between the political parties and the British and Irish governments saw steady, if stuttering, progress throughout 2004, with the DUP in particular surprising many observers with its newly discovered pragmatism. However, an arms-for-government deal between Sinn Féin and the DUP broke down in December 2004 due to a row over whether photographic evidence of IRA decommissioning was necessary, and the IRA refusal to countenance the provision of such evidence.
The 2005 British General Election saw further polarisation, although Sinn Féin did not make the breakthrough expected. The DUP took 9 seats, while Sinn Féin took one seat from the SDLP, failing to gain the SDLP leader Mark Durkan's Foyle seat as many had predicted. In the South Belfast constituency, the SDLP gained from the UUP as a result of a split unionist vote. The UUP only took one seat, with the leader David Trimble losing his and subsequently resigning as leader.
On July 28, 2005, the IRA made a public statement ordering an end to the armed campaign and instructing its members to dump arms and to pursue purely political programmes. While the British and Irish governments warmly welcomed the statement, political reaction in Northern Ireland itself was more muted and more mixed.
See also
References
- Dr Raymond McClean
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