Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict

by David McKittrick

Northern Ireland is never going to be a utopia,

Why not?

the troubles can be seen as a more violent expression of existing animosities and unresolved issues of nationality, religion, power and territorial rivalry.

Protestants, who made up roughly two-thirds of the population

Almost all Protestants voted Unionist but scarcely any Catholics did. Catholics, the second major element of the equation, made up the other one-third of the population and in the main viewed themselves not as British but as Irish.

Most of the Protestants were descendants of settlers who emigrated from England and Scotland to various parts of Ireland with the encouragement of English governments, mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Unionists feared Home Rule as a threat to the Union with Britain, and as a prelude to complete Irish independence and the ending of Protestant and British domination of Irish affairs.

In the spring of 1914 Unionist leaders organised the smuggling in of 25,000 rifles and 3 million rounds of ammunition from Germany. These were used to arm an unofficial Protestant militia, the Ulster Volunteer Force.

By the time World War One ended in 1918, the Irish desire for Home Rule had been swept away and replaced by the demand for an independent Irish republic.

In the two years from June 1920 until June 1922, 428 people were killed, two-thirds of them Catholic,

London was never as committed to the Union as they were. They lived in a state of political nervousness, constantly fearing British policy might move to support a united Ireland.

the Unionist establishment, which was to run the state on the basis of Protestant majority rule for the following half-century, actively discriminated against Catholics in the allocation of jobs and housing, over political rights and in other areas.

The defining feature of the new entity was its demographics: it was two-thirds Protestant and one-third Catholic, the guiding concept in deciding its borders having been that it should have a decisive Protestant majority.

Most Unionist politicians had not wanted their own devolved parliament in Belfast,

Catholic representatives of the time tended to hope not for some new shared system, but for its collapse. They often resorted to boycotting the new institutions,

the 1920 settlement had ensured that nationalists were forever excluded from power and that Unionists forever wielded it in unbroken one-party rule. The steps the Unionist party took in the 1920s to strengthen its own power, and to defend the existence of the state, created a system of extraordinary longevity which was to preserve and reinforce many of the attitudes of the 1920s.

They saw themselves as a frontier community facing wily and violent enemies, and backed by only half-hearted allies.

The Catholic civil rights movement would take to the streets in 1968 with complaints which related directly to the arrangements of the 1920s.

In 1922 the voting system known as proportional representation (PR) was abolished.

The first-past-the-post system introduced in its place, together with the highly partisan redrawing of local government boundaries, was of huge benefit to the Unionist party.

7,500 Unionist voters returned twelve councillors while 10,000 nationalist voters returned only eight.

the ending of PR in elections to parliament worked beautifully, his party winning thirty-seven of the fifty-two seats in 1929. While the exercise had been aimed at wiping out independent Unionists, the 37 to 15 majority it delivered to Craig was so overwhelming that most of the Catholic opposition simply gave up.

Judges and magistrates were almost all Protestants, many of them closely associated with the Unionist party. Between 1937 and 1968, for example, thirteen sitting Unionist MPs were appointed judges,

Although it seemed for a fleeting moment that the new police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), might become religiously integrated, it remained throughout its history more than 90 per cent Protestant.

The political, legal and policing worlds were thus inextricably linked: one community governed, judged and policed the other.

The civil service was predominantly Protestant, with perhaps 10 per cent Catholic representation in its lower reaches. A 1943 survey established that there were no Catholics in the 55 most senior jobs, with only 37 Catholics in the 600 middle-ranking posts.

Catholic unemployment was generally more than double Protestant unemployment, partly because of these patterns and partly because a higher proportion of Catholics lived in areas of high unemployment such as the west.

apparently innocuous practices such as recruitment of staff by word of mouth or on the recommendation of a friend or a relative.

voting in local government elections was limited to ratepayers and their spouses. A new house would thus often carry two votes, a matter that could be of great political significance in areas where the Unionist and nationalist votes were evenly balanced.

lodgers and anyone living at home with their parents could not vote. This restriction, which most affected the poorer sections of the population, was later to provide one of the most potent slogans for the civil rights movement with its demand for ‘one man – one vote’.

the acceleration in house building after 1945 heightened the potential for controversy by providing local councils with many more houses to assign. This was a heavily politicised activity:

Orange lodges provided the framework for the Ulster Volunteer Force,

An Orange lodge was established within the RUC, while Orangemen made up the bulk of the B Specials, who in some areas were based in Orange halls.

Between 1921 and 1969 only three of fifty-four Unionist cabinet ministers were not members of the Order.

the Order complained that a Catholic was working as a gardener in the grounds of Stormont, the large east Belfast estate where a new parliament building had been erected. The fact that the man had a distinguished war record and a personal reference from the Prince of Wales himself was not enough to overcome the Orange objection to his religion.

Some ministers were personally frankly anti-Catholic; others did not necessarily hold extreme views, but regarded voicing them as a political necessity.

One minister, Basil Brooke, who was later to become prime minister, declared: ‘Many in the audience employ Catholics, but I have not one about my place. Catholics are out to destroy Ulster with all their might and power. They want to nullify the Protestant vote and take all they can out of Ulster, and then see it go to hell.’ When the then prime minister, James Craig, was asked to disown this statement he responded not with condemnation but endorsement,

Many of the better-educated Catholics went on to the priesthood but overall the Catholic middle class was unusually small. Its members tended to service the Catholic community in areas such as the law, medicine, education, construction, shops and pubs.

the Catholic emigration rate was higher than that of Protestants.

Many Catholic schools advised pupils not to apply to the civil service or local authorities for jobs, regarding such applications as pointless.

Many nationalists simply did not vote or voted only rarely, succumbing to apathy brought on by the realisation that the Unionist voting machine was invincible.

The IRA stayed in being throughout Northern Ireland’s history, though it remained tiny and ineffectual before its rapid expansion in the early 1970s.

the judgement of the Catholic population as a whole that its violence was futile.

A major 1960s opinion poll found, in fact, that more Protestants than Catholics indicated they were ready to condone violence in support of political ends.

while Catholic northerners looked fondly to Dublin, Dublin tended to regard them as an unwelcome nuisance.

Since elections were essentially decided on a religious headcount, the side which was in the minority in a constituency often simply gave up and stopped fielding a candidate there.

The government headed by Clement Attlee inserted a clause in the new Ireland Bill laying down that Northern Ireland would remain in the UK so long as a majority in the Stormont parliament in Belfast wanted it. Given Stormont’s inbuilt Unionist majority, nationalists protested that the clause copper-fastened the partition of Ireland.

the government was fully aware of the allegations that Stormont was being run in an unfair manner.

Attlee had few illusions about Stormont’s record, for he turned down a request from the Unionist government to have the power to appoint Supreme Court judges transferred from London to Belfast.

Terence O’Neill sought to change the entire tone of government, introducing the rhetoric of Protestant–Catholic reconciliation in place of the unapologetically Protestant stance of Craig and Brooke. In retrospect it was an inadequate attempt to brush away decades of division without tackling the underlying problems.

Northern Ireland Labour party. This was a left-leaning party which, though it had both Catholics and Protestants in its ranks, supported the Union with Britain and attracted largely Protestant support.