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Northern Ireland - A Land Rich in History
The Beginning
What makes the strife in Northern Ireland so comparatively intractable is a history that is longer and more complex than even the oldest and most tangled confrontations between nationalists and colonialists. In fact, today's Irish Republican Army (IRA) sees itself as the direct de-scendant of resistance fighters who be-gan challenging imperial rule centuries before the advent of the colonial system. To Irish republicans, the current struggle in the area commonly referred to as Ulster is but the latest phase of a war for self-determination that got underway 800 years ago.
Beginning with the invasion of Ire-land in 1170 by a Norman nobleman known as Strongbow, certain patterns have regularly recurred throughout the bloody past and right up to the latest atrocity. At no time have Irish national-ists completely acquiesced to English control over even a portion of the island. Repeatedly, they have risen in arms and protested in parliamentary forums, often to no avail. The protracted conflict has also been marked by vicious sectarian-ism, violence on all sides, adamant re-fusals to compromise, and eventual con-cessions that usually fail to satisfy one or another aggrieved party.
Most Irish people, including the Prot-estants of Ulster, regard themselves as culturally distinct from the British. For Catholics, who now comprise a large ma-jority of the entire island's inhabitants, the differences are generally deep-rooted, the product of a legacy that ex-tends to the Gaelic settlement of Ireland more than two millennia ago. It was the Gaels, a branch of the Celtic people, who were subjugated by Strongbow in the 12th century in the name of the Anglo--Norman monarch Henry II.
In 1500 Ireland had an identity, language, culture and social order independent of English society. The medieval conquest of Ireland never managed to extend beyond a small area around Dublin, known as the Pale. All this was to change in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as social developments in the rest of Europe began to have dramatic effects on Ireland's relationship to Britain.
The Reformation
The source of these changes was the profound effect of the Reformation and Counter Reformation. This amounted, among other matters spiritual and temporal, to fundamental reorganization of the relationship between Church and State, brought on by the conflict between the new Protestant movement and the established order of the Roman Catholic Church. By the 1560s, Norway', Denmark, Sweden, Prussia, England and most of Germany and the Netherlands had joined the Protestant revolution. Italy, Spain, France and Ireland remained firmly catholic. This realignment created a series of territorial disputes and a host of politics ambitions that often became characterized by religious denomination.
Strategic Interests
It was in this context of sectarianism that the Tudor monarchs of England turned their attention to Ireland. Catholic Ireland was perceived as a potential threat to Protestant England's security. The developing expansionism determined by the transition of Feudalism coupled with advances in naval technology elevated strategic considerations to new levels or primacy in the restructured states of Europe. In Ireland, the Dublin based representatives of Henry VIII began to try and exert their influence over the Irish Chieftains around the Pale. In 1539 this provoked a rebellion in the area around Dublin that was quelled with unprecedented ferocity. It was a taste of things to come, a first glimpse of the imperatives of the emerging new order in England.
Beyond the Pale
Eventually, the Pale was subordinated to English rule. 'Elizabeth I installed military governors in Connaught and Munster. A rebellion in Munster was crushed in 1583 and a few years later England had a presence and partial control over three-quarters of Ireland, Only Ulster, the most Gaelic and resistant province remained defiant.
England's war with Spam throughout the 1580's served to fuel the English determination 'to hold Ireland, while Irish rebels, seeing their enemy's enemy as their friend, sought and gained support from the Spanish.
The Flight of the Earls
In Ulster the two most powerful chieftains, O'Neill and O'Donnell, had bought themselves some time by giving limited allegiance to the English Crown, taking the Tudor titles of the Earls of Tyrone and Tyrconnell respectively. However, realizing that any allegiance to the English monarch would eventually lead to subordination, they rose against the Crown in a war that lasted five years. They were defeated in 1603 and surrendered to Mountjoy, Elizabeth I's deputy in Ireland. Rather than hand over their land and become servants of the victorious army, as was the custom, the Earls or Tyrone and Tyrconnell took the unprecedented step of going into voluntary exile.
The 'flight of the Earls' created an unusual vacuum in the newly conquered province. The British Crown was left without the customary means of controlling the defeated province.
Plantation
The solution to this problem was found in the system of "planting" loyal settlers throughout the province on land taken from the native Irish. It was a system of state-sponsored colonization that offered power and influence without the expense of maintaining a large garrison. The plan was to carefully regulate the plantation of Ulster so that land would be taken from dissident Irish Catholics and given to loyal Protestant settlers, thereby destroying the Irish political community and creating a Protestant ascendancy whose position was secured by loyalty to the British state. The six Counties of Armagh, Fermanagh, Coleraine, Cavan, Tyrone and Donegal were all systematically planted. Land was allocated to a series of "Undertakers" - landlords who "undertook" to bring in Scottish and English colonists, settle them in fortified villages, house them and arm them. Land was also granted to 'Servitors', soldiers who had served the Crown in the wars of the 1590s as a reward for their loyalty.
Ulster Custom
The intention of the plantation was to confiscate all the land from the native Gaelic Irish and to expel them completely from Ulster. However, there was no army powerful enough for this grand design. In consequence, the native Irish were instead pushed into the marginal land of the estates and forced into a subsistence level of existence, while the new colonists enjoyed an enhanced system of tenancy known as the "Ulster Custom." This created a system unique to Ulster that bonded the settler farmers economically to their landlords.
The resentment of the dispossessed Irish grew as the planter settlements prospered on their land. Gaelic culture, though not destroyed, was systematically overlaid by the Anglo-Irish settler culture. Resistance took the form of bands of outlaws that periodically attacked the settlements. During the course of this struggle, religion became a badge for the political division between dispossessed Irish (Catholic) and Anglo-Scottish settler (Protestant).
Sectarianism
Hatred of the Catholic faith had a long pedigree in 16th and 17th century England. The hysteria created by a host of so-called "Popish plots," such as that of Guy Fawkes and friends, had a positive function to play in the process of nation building in the young English Protestant state. Just as other societies have used anti-Semitism or fear of black people, so anti-Catholicism played a sort of bonding role in uniting English people against a commonly recognizable "enemy:" the Catholic Irish.
Ireland's Opportunity
Events in Britain in 1640 presented the Irish Catholics with an opportunity to challenge British authority. The English King Charles I was engaged in a power struggle with parliament, attempting to rule without its endorsement. The rising in Ireland began in 1641in the towns of Dungannon, Charlmont and Newry. By 1642 the English Civil War had commenced. The rising had posed a fundamental political question: could the king be trusted with an army to put down the rebellion or would he use it against his enemies at home? No army was dispatched and the years 1642-9 were a period of confusion and strife in Ireland and of Civil War in England.
After the defeat, trial and execution of Charles I, parliament turned its attention to Ireland. Cromwell was sent to Dublin, not only to re-conquer Ireland but also to exact revenge for the rising.
Cromwell
Cromwell, like a large number of his contemporaries, held the Irish in genuine contempt. He arrived in Dublin with 15,000 men determined to subdue Ireland as quickly and as cheaply as possible. He began his whirlwind campaign by committing one of the grossest atrocities in the entire history of Ireland: the sack and massacre of Drogheda. All the defenders of the garrison and most of the civilian population were put to the sword. The survivors were transported to the West Indies. This was followed by the similar destruction of the port of Wexford. Landlords who could not prove that they had not taken part in the rebellion and nearly all Catholic landowners had their estate confiscated and handed over to those who had fought with Cromwell or financed his campaign.
By the time he left Ireland, out of a population of 1,448,000, some 616,000 perished by sword, famine or plague. 100,000 were deported to be sold as slaves in the West Indies and a further 40,000 emigrated to join European armies.
The First Colony
Cromwell, in the space of nine months, had completed the conquest of Ireland and his settlement created a Protestant English upper class in a country of Catholics. Ireland was now England's first colony and England was on the eve of becoming the most powerful economic and political force in the world.
Economy of Famine
The divisions between the newcom-ers and the natives were exacerbated by the fact that England and Scotland had become largely Protestant while Ireland had remained devoutly Catholic. Subse-quent terrorist campaigns launched by the descendants of the Gaels against the planters from across the sea thus had as-pects of a religious vendetta, although the attackers may well have been moti-vated more by economic than by con-fessional concerns.
The Protestants were taking the best agricultural land in Ulster, and through the Penal Laws, a series of apartheid-like strictures, were consigning the Catholics to a separate and unequal status. Britain was also beginning the process of con-structing a far-flung Empire. Ireland was being assigned the role of food supplier within the imperial system.
Consequent distortions in Ireland's agrarian economy caused most of the country's inhabitants to become depen-dent on a single crop: potatoes. When a potato blight struck in 1845, food sup-plies dwindled dangerously: A full-scale famine ensued two years later as land-lords kept feeding cereal crops to cattle that continued to be exported.
Ireland's population shrunk dramati-cally as a result of famine-induced star-vation and mass emigration from an eco-nomically devastated country. Prior to the blight, some eight million people lived on the island; 75 years later, the number had been reduced almost by one -half. Even today, due partly to ongoing emigration, Ireland's population is barely five million.
Predictably, another rising erupted in the aftermath of the famine. And like two earlier revolts by Wolfe Tone's United Irishmen and a group of conspirators led by Robert Emmet, this Irish Republican Brotherhood movement was quickly crushed, despite assistance provided by Irish-Americans who called themselves Fenians (Gaelic for "warriors"). Mainly peaceful protests, led by parliamentary politicians, also failed to gain emanci-pation for the Catholics of Ireland.
Turning Point
A small group of anti-colonialists again took up arms in 1916. And al-though this Easter Rising was also put down in short order, the execution of its instigators sparked widespread defiance of English rule. Three years later, the IRA began a guerrilla-style war that cul-minated in the birth of a quasi-independent Irish Free State, consisting of 26 of the island's 32 counties. Rebel leaders' acceptance of an arrangement that fell short of full independence and that kept six of Ulster's counties under British dominion led to a civil war in which the more moderate IRA faction prevailed. Northern Ireland, with its less than 60 percent Protestant majority, has thus been a part of the United Kingdom for nearly 75 years. The rest of Ireland, with its 95 percent Catholic majority, went on to achieve political sovereignty. Relations between the partitioned portions of the island have remained tense, as the dominant religious group in each sector adopted measures intended to reinforce its status.
A New Land
Having received self-government in 1920, Northern Ireland practiced a policy of wholesale discrimination against the nationalist/Roman Catholic minority. Northern Ireland became, in the words of Ulster Unionist Leader and the Assembly's First Minister David Trimble, a "cold place for Catholics." Gerrymandered towns and city boundaries rigged local government elections to ensure Protestant control of local councils. Voting arrangements which gave commercial companies votes, and minimum income regulations also helped achieve similar ends. These conditions dominated the next several decades, which also saw economic growth for the Unionist population, moderate involvemnt in WWII and contnued sectarian violence.
The Troubles
In the 1960s, moderate Unionist attempts to reform the system encountered wholesale opposition from fundamentalist Protestant leaders like the Reverend Ian Paisley. The increasing pressures from Nationalists for reform and from extreme Unionists for 'No surrender' led to the appearance of the civil rights movement under figures like John Hume, Austin Currie and others. Clashes between marchers and the Royal Ulster Constabulary led to increased communal strife. The British army, originally sent to Northern Ireland to protect Nationalists from attack, became implicated in allegations of collousion with Loyalist paramilitaries. The murder of thirteen unarmed civilians in Derry by British paratroopers on "Bloody Sunday" enflamed the situation and turned northern Nationalists against the British Army. The appearance of the Provisional IRA, a breakaway from the increasingly Marxist Official IRA, and a campaign of violence by Loyalist paramilitary groups like the Ulster Defence Association and others, brought Northern Ireland to the brink of civil war.
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, an era to become known as "The Troubles," extremists on both sides carried out a series of brutal acts of mass murders, often involving or even targeting innocent civilians. The most notorious outrages included the Le Mon bombing and the bombings in Enniskillen and Omagh, carried out by republicans in an attempt to force political change through guerilla warfare.
Some politicians (British and Irish) advocated British withdrawal from Northern Ireland, but successive Irish governments opposed this policy, despite their Nationalist politics. They called their prediction of the possible results of British withdrawal the Doomsday Scenario, depicting widespread communal strife, followed by the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of men, women and children as refugees to their community's 'side' of the province; nationalists fleeing to western Northern Ireland, unionists fleeing to eastern Northern Ireland. The worst fear envisaged a civil war which would engulf not just Northern Ireland, but their neighbouring Republic of Ireland and Scotland, both of which had major links with either or both communities.
In the early 1970s, the Parliament of Northern Ireland was prorogued after the province's Unionist government refused to agree to the British government demand that it hand over the powers of law and order. London introduced "direct rule" starting on March 24, 1972. New systems of governments were tried and failed in the next 15 to 20 years, including power-sharing under Sunningdale Agreement, rolling devolution and the Anglo-Irish Agreement.
The Good Friday Agreement
By the 1990s, the failure of the IRA campaign to win mass public support or achieve its aim of British withdrawal, along with the replacement of the traditional Republican leadership by Gerry Adams, saw a move away from armed conflict to political engagement. The people of Northern Ireland were tired of living in violence and conflict.
These changes were followed by the appearance of new leaders in Dublin (Albert Reynolds), in London (John Major) and in Ulster Unionism (David Trimble). Contacts, initially between Adams and John Hume, leader of the Social Democratic and Labour Party, broadened out into all-party negotiations, that in 1998 produced the "Good Friday Agreement." A majority of both communities in Northern Ireland approved this Agreement, as did the people of the Republic of Ireland, who amended their constitution, Bunreacht nah Éireann, to replace a claim it made to the territory of Northern Ireland with a recognition of Northern Ireland's right to exist, while also acknowledging the nationalist desire for a united Ireland.
Under the Good Friday Agreement, voters elected a new Northern Ireland Assembly to form a Northern Irish 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, SDLP, Sinn Féin and the Democratic Unionist Party each had ministers by right in the power-sharing assembly.
The Assembly and its Executive are both currently suspended over Unionist threats due to the Provisional IRA's delay in implementing its agreement to decommission its weaponry, and also the alleged discovery of an IRA spy-ring operating in the heart of the civil service. Government is now once more run by the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland and a British ministerial team answerable to him. Whether the Good Friday Agreement has worked at all is a question under much debate.
Sources:
Troops Out Movement Magazine, England, 1999 - Jan Davies
A Short History of the Longest War - Kevin J. Kelley
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Ireland
Timeline
600-200 BCE: Celts enter Ireland
300s CE: First Christians arrive
500: First manuscripts written by Irish monks, preserving much Western knowledge through the Dark Ages
600-800 CE: Golden Age of Early Christian Ireland 800-1000s CE: Viking Wars
1169: England's Henry II sends invaders to Ireland led by a Norman nobleman. First claims by the crown on Irish land and people (military presence to continue for 829 years).
1541: After completing conquest and crushing Gaelic uprisings, England declares their king ruler of Ireland.
1600-1606: Plantation of Ulster. English laws imposed in Ireland, especially the troublesome north. England settles Protestant Scots on plantations established from confiscated land.
1609: The Flight of the Earls. Ulster Gaelic aristocracy flee. Their land and their rule redistributed to Protestant settlers.
1640s-50s: Irish uprisings lead to settler deaths, triggering England's Oliver Cromwell to invade and massacre/deport all resistance. Population reduced by hundreds of thousands.
1690: July 12, Battle of the Boyne. Catholic King James defeated by Protestant rival (anniversary still celebrated by militant Orangemen).
1710-20s: British laws expand, including their parliamentary right to legislate for Ireland and Penal Laws (apartheid-like restrictions on Catholic majority, denying them access to schools, jobs, and religion and reducing their land ownership to 7%). 1798: Wolfe Tone's legendary United Irishmen Rising is brutally crushed.
1800: Act of Union created United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Subsequent uprisings and repeal movement crushed.
1830s: Daniel O'Connell leads movement to repeal Penal Laws.
1845-1851: An Gorta Mor, The Great Hunger. Caused by over-dependence on potato crop. Population halved by starvation, eviction and emigration.
1857: Irish Republican Brotherhood established. 10 years later, their Fenian Uprising is crushed.
1870: Charles Stuart Parnell (English advocate for Ireland) leads Home Rule Party; later leads the Land League movement.
1905: Sinn Fein established to oppose British rule.
1912: Irish Protestants (Unionists) pledge to resist Home Rule for Ireland.
1916: Easter Rising. Irish rebellion defeated, 17 leaders executed.
1918: Last all-island vote. Sinn Fein wins 75%.
1919: IRA (with Michael Collins as a guerrilla leader) launches War of Indep. for an Irish Republic.
1920: British partition the island. The Sinn Fein dominated 26-county South and the 6-county North (Ulster's borders gerrymandered to secure Unionist majority).
1921: Treaty negotiated in London by Collins and PM Lloyd George. Irish compromise on core Republican principles: 1. lose North to partition 2. attain a "Free State" within the Empire, not a Republic 3. must continue to swear allegiance to the crown
1922-3: Civil War in Ireland over acceptability of Treaty. Free State is established.
1930s-60s: Repub. of Ireland languished economically, widespread poverty, while the North (Protestants/ Unionists) prospers.
1939: IRA bombing campaign in England.
1949: Repeal of External Relations Act. Ireland leaves Commonwealth. Republic of Ireland declared (26 Southern counties). Joins UN 6 years later.
1950s: IRA Border Campaign.
1966: Loyalists form UVF to suppress Republicans and Catholics in general
1967: Civil Rights Movement in North begins. Centered in Derry, it fights discrimination against Catholics and Nationalists.
1969-71: Protest marches attacked by Loyalists and police. British Army presence increased. IRA campaign restarted. Policy of Internment (arrest and indefinite detention without trial) initiated.
1972: -Jan. 30, Bloody Sunday. 13 unarmed Civil Rights demonstrators shot dead by British soldiers in Derry. No one prosecuted. -May, Fall of Unionist-dominated Irish Parliament (Stormont); England suspends Northern govt., imposes direct rule. -July 21, Bloody Friday. The IRA exploded 22 bombs which, in 75 minutes, killed 9 people and seriously injured 130 others. -Bloodiest year of "The Troubles" with 472 deaths.
1973: British impose Diplock judicial system (one judge, no jury, reduced standards of evidence).
1974: May 17, Loyalist death squads plant 3 bombs in Dublin/ Monaghan, killing 33 civilians. Alleged British collusion but no prosecution.
1975: Criminalization policy begins, political prisoner status denied.
1976: Republican prisoners begin 5-year campaign to reclaim status, including protests and hunger strikes.
1978: Amnesty International cites prisoner abuse and legal rights violations. European Court rules interrogations are "inhumane and degrading."
1981: Beginning with Bobby Sands, 10 hunger strikers die in H-Block of Maze Prison. Sands elected to British Parliaments while dying.
1985: Anglo-Irish Agreement declared Northern Ireland's status determined by majority. Popular with only moderates, neither end of spectrum.
1991: Talks begin. Ongoing.
1994: IRA cease-fire. Intermittent Loyalist cease-fires as well.
1996: IRA breaks cease-fire, killing 2 in London bombs.
1997: May 1, end of18-year Conservative rule in UK with Labour Party victory. July 20, IRA cease-fire reinstated as UK/NI/US talks intensify.
1998: April 10, Good Friday Agreement (a.k.a. Belfast Agreement) signed by all 8 Northern parties at talks. May 22, referendum vote on GFA passed easily. June 25, NI votes for new 108-seat Assembly: UUP -- 28 SDLP -- 24 DUP -- 20 SF -- 18 July 1, David Trimble elected First Minister at Assembly's first meeting. July 5, standoff between RUC/British Army and Orangemen over banned march at Drumcree. July 12-15, hundreds of Orange marches to commemorate Battle of the Boyne. Silent protests held in honor of 3 Catholic schoolboys killed by Loyalist paramilitaries.
2000: Mar. 21, Saville hearing on "Bloody Sunday" begun. July 28, 76 paramilitary prisoners released from Maze jail; 428 since GFA. February, Assembly suspended because of IRA's failure to decommission. Restored in May, followed by IRA arms dump display.
2001: Assembly suspended and restored several times by Sec. of State John Reid, partly an attempt to delay action on the resignation of First Minister David Trimble and other Unionists over IRA's obstinacy. Oct. 23, IRA released statement of decommissioning. Nov. 4, RUC officially becomes the PSNI, with a 50/50 (Catholic/Protestant) recruitment policy.
2002: April, IRA issued a statement offering its "sincere apologies and condolences" for the "deaths and injuries of non-combatants". October, Assembly suspended by British Secretary of NI.
2003: April, Assembly is dissolved. November, new Assembly elections held.
2004: June, European Parliament elections see first Sinn Fein MEPs. Review of the GFA talks held in London.
From1969 to the present, nearly 4,000 have died. Out of a population of only 1,500,000 (1.5 million), this is a significant number - the rough equivalent of over 70,000 people in the United States. Three Catholics have been killed in Sectarian Killings (random religious-affiliation based killings of civilian, non-combatants, for each Sectarian Killing of a Protestant. (This ratio is the same in the current Palestine /Israel conflict - 3 Palestinian deaths for every Israeli one)
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