The Troubles: A History of Irish Terrorism and the Northern Ireland Conflict

In the popular imagination, Irish terrorism is mainly associated with the name “Irish Republican Army”, although since Ireland gained independence from Great Britain in 1921, a whole series of organizations with this name have existed. Over time, it split due to ideological and tactical disagreements, with a part usually abandoning radical violent methods of struggle, but there was always a part of the “Irish Republicans” who were ready to fight to the end and by all means. So for decades, both in Northern Ireland itself and elsewhere in the British Isles, bombs exploded and shots rang out regularly. Only in the last decade of the millennium did the Northern Ireland peace process finally begin, the most significant success of which is the so-called Good Friday Agreement, concluded on April 10, 1998 at about six thirty in the morning.

At the time, it was announced that the governments of Great Britain and Ireland, as well as the political forces of Northern Ireland, had decided to end the violence and to resolve the problem further by political methods.

The cause of the problem, as already mentioned, can be traced back to the beginning of the last century, when Ireland won its independence from the British Empire, and its roots, of course, go back even further. Ireland has been a strongly Catholic country since the early Middle Ages and was so at the time of independence; with the exception of six counties in the province of Ulster, where the inhabitants were mostly of the Protestant faith. These counties, under an agreement between the British and Irish governments, were allowed to choose which country to remain in. The Protestants of Northern Ireland chose the second option then – in the 20s of the last century – and have not changed their minds to this day. Even today in Northern Ireland, there is a principled division along religious lines – the Catholic minority are Irish nationalists, while the Protestant majority are loyalists, ie for remaining under the control of the British crown.

Northern Ireland experienced a particular escalation of violence in the second half of the 1960s, and the initiators of this violence were not Irish nationalists, but radical Ulster Protestants. It was they who turned with guns in their hands against Catholics who demanded respect for their rights and an end to discrimination. At that time, the radical Catholic forces increasingly lost public support, suffered from a lack of funds and weapons, and, forced by circumstances, turned to more legal methods of struggle. But when loyalist groups began to carry out assassinations against Catholics, attacked their residences, when it was discovered that the British police and army were actually supporting these thugs, it did not take long for a rapid increase in the popularity of Irish republicans and other Catholic radical groups. The actions of the British authorities and the army looked particularly unattractive in this context. Just one example – between 1971 and 1975, 1,981 people were arrested in connection with the riots in Northern Ireland, of which only 107 were Protestants; the rest are Catholics.

It is estimated that not nearly all of the detainees were members of radical Catholic organizations, but many became such when they got to know firsthand the methods of the British power structures.

Only in the 80s of the last century did more active initiatives for the search for a peaceful solution appear. The British government started negotiations with the most powerful Irish radical group at the time – the “Provisional Irish Republican Army”. Mutual consultations began between the various Irish parties on a possible peace process. The first concrete step was the “Joint Declaration of Peace”, which was issued in December 1993 by British Prime Minister John Major and his Irish counterpart Albert Reynolds. However, there was still a long and difficult way to go before the decisive agreement in 1998. And this agreement itself was by no means the end of all worries. Northern Ireland remains deeply divided, with the lines between Catholic and Protestant areas much sharper than they were half a century ago.

More

Report a bug