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Unionist resistance was strongest in the north-eastern counties where the largest concentration of Protestants lived. In the nineteenth century, especially around Belfast, a prosperous economy had been developed based on industries such as linen, shipbuilding and engineering. This north-eastern region was very much part of the British industrial economy, Belfast having closer ties and economic similarities with Glasgow and Liverpool than with Dublin.
The collective self-image of Unionists today is not far removed from that of their ancestors as they arrived in Ireland, or from that of the founding fathers of Northern Ireland. They saw themselves as a frontier community facing wily and violent enemies, and backed by only half-hearted friends.
O’Neill’s six-year term represented a turning point in Northern Ireland’s history. The O’Neill years might be regarded as a tragic missed opportunity in that with hindsight they appear to have been the last chance to tackle, by political means and in a time of relative peace, Northern Ireland’s structural problems.
North-south relations had been so glacial that prime ministers of the two states had not met since the 1920s, and there was virtually no co-ordination between the two governments. Years later a southern civil servant recalled that one of the few channels of communication was provided by rugby matches in Dublin, where Belfast and Dublin officials would meet discreetly to sort out shared problems.
an important component of Unionism has been a distrust of the English and a suspicion of English motives. This derives in part from the fact that many Protestants come from Scottish Dissenting stock, a tradition which has its reservations about the English, and in part from the psychology of the settler who is forever nervous about sentiments back in the homeland.
The use of internment was to continue for another four years, during which time it attracted much condemnation of Britain and never looked like defeating the IRA. It came to be almost universally regarded as a misjudgement of historic proportions which inflicted tremendous damage both politically and in terms of fatalities.
The prevailing Unionist theory was that there was a military solution to the troubles and that the IRA could be isolated and defeated almost without reference to the wider political picture: hence Faulkner’s image of ‘excising a deep seated tumour’.
The non-involvement of many of those killed became evident later, at inquests or when the authorities quietly paid out substantial compensation to relatives of the dead.
Reminds me of The Boys
The worst year of the troubles was 1972, its death toll of almost five hundred far exceeding that of any other year. Fourteen of those deaths occurred in Londonderry on 30 January, in what was to be remembered as one of the key events of the troubles, Bloody Sunday.
Father Daly said later: ‘A lot of the younger people in Derry who may have been more pacifist became quite militant as a result of it. People who were there on that day and who saw what happened were absolutely enraged by it and just wanted to seek some kind of revenge for it. In later years many young people I visited in prison told me quite explicitly that they would never have become involved in the IRA but for what they witnessed, and heard of happening, on Bloody Sunday.’
Nonetheless, three events taken together – the introduction of internment, Bloody Sunday and the fall of Stormont – served to trigger the worst violence ever seen in Northern Ireland.
Thus after only one week of the new Northern Ireland executive’s existence its head had effectively lost his party, which meant that all three major Unionist parties – the UUP, DUP and Vanguard – were opposed to the entire initiative. Paisley and the other anti-Sunningdale Unionists, who had already formed an umbrella United Ulster Unionist Council (UUUC), were now joined by West and the main Unionist party.
too many 'U's
The army took the straightforward position that their job was to combat terrorism and not to curb street protests,
In the days that followed many loyalists proudly and defiantly sported pieces of sponge in their lapels.
Deplorables
A collective nationalist rejection of the old Stormont had eventually brought that institution down; now Unionists had managed to destroy its successor. The analysis that there appeared to be a double veto, with Unionists and nationalists able to deny the other what they wanted, caused a great many to conclude that this was a problem without a solution.
The mid-1970s ceasefire period is remembered in republican folklore as a disaster which brought the IRA close to defeat. It was said to have reduced morale and recruiting, and in republican terms it diverted the IRA’s energies away from the security forces and into overtly sectarian killing and internecine feuding.
The IRA attacked a number of Protestant bars, while the UVF and UDA targeted many Catholic pubs.
Attack the core third place: pubs
Loyalists were more unabashedly and consistently sectarian than the IRA. Republicans often denied the IRA was involved in sectarian killings and sometimes used a cover name to claim responsibility for attacks. The UVF and UDA, by contrast, made little secret of the fact that they regarded the Catholic population in general as legitimate targets,
No one could know it at the time, but late 1976 and early 1977 were to mark the end of the most violent phase of the troubles.
The IRA fell back on hoping that political stalemate, continued violence, occasional attacks in Britain, international pressure, the enormous cost and the apparent insolubility of the problem would ultimately sap Britain’s will to stay in Northern Ireland. To the republican mind, Unionists were not a major problem, being merely puppets of British imperialism. In republican theory the real enemy was Britain;
The conference precipitated an important personnel change at the highest level of Northern Ireland politics. Gerry Fitt, leader of the SDLP since its formation in 1970, believed his party was wrong in its decision to boycott the conference and resigned from it. More generally he complained that the SDLP was becoming less socialist and too nationalist. The party’s other most prominent socialist, Paddy Devlin, had already gone, citing similar reasons. Fitt and Devlin had been among Northern Ireland’s best-known political personalities since the 1960s, providing much of the SDLP’s early socialist
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In launching the second hungerstrike Sands and the others again rejected the advice of the outside IRA leadership. The IRA felt the hungerstrikes represented a serious diversion of resources of all kinds from their main campaign of violence, and feared another damaging and divisive failure.
The original feeling among republicans was that they had suffered a huge defeat in the hungerstrike. One prisoner wrote: ‘Despite my relief that no one else would die, I still felt gutted because ten men had died and we had not won our demands. My morale was never as low.’ Thatcher had taken on the IRA head-on and in the end their willpower cracked while hers did not. She said at one point, ‘Faced with the failure of their discredited cause the men of violence have chosen in recent months to play what might be their last card.’
The paradox at the centre of all this success for the Provisionals is that their gains have come through an election won by the very opposite of a Provo campaign, a campaign based on an appeal to save life, and through the self-sacrifice of their men. Somebody somewhere among the Provos has finally come to accept the truth of the old saying that it is not those who inflict the most who ultimately win, but those who endure the most.
In other words, more than 30,000 men were involved with groups that have carried out killings and a great deal of other violence, a statistic which illustrates how deeply society was permeated by paramilitarism.
~2%
Four soldiers died. In Britain an extra dimension of condemnation arose from the fact that a number of horses were also killed in the Hyde Park explosion. One horse which survived numerous injuries, Sefton, become an equine symbol of British defiance of the IRA and something close to a national hero.
Perhaps Mrs Thatcher had a less than comprehensive grasp of Irish history but she’s an intensely pragmatic politician. She was conscious of the need to do something – not to solve the situation, but to move it forward from the impasse which it had reached.
The agreement survived it all. Historian Alvin Jackson summed up: ‘The Unionists had once again backed themselves into a tactical dead-end in order to demonstrate the intensity of their convictions. Unionist tardiness and negativism had led inexorably towards marginalisation and humiliation.’
The authorities knew nothing of the Libyan link, which amounted to the worst British intelligence lapse for decades.
It was not only Hume who had been in touch with the republicans but also the Catholic Church, the Irish government and, above all, the British government. London’s line to the republicans stretched back not just for years but, intermittently, for decades. Almost all of this was however hidden from public view.
He said, ‘What’s this about? How do you expect me to continue with any process when I take up the papers this morning and in every paper on the front page is Gerry Adams carrying a coffin?’ I said, ‘Look, John, you have to understand that if the guy didn’t carry the coffin he wouldn’t be able to maintain his credibility with that organisation and bring people with him.’
Irish insurgents had never in the past handed over their weapons in the wake of conflicts. The modern IRA had sprung from the vicious ghetto fighting of 1969, when the previous republican leadership was bitterly accused of leaving Catholic areas unarmed and undefended against loyalist incursions.
Although the major republican and loyalist groups were on ceasefire a collection of minor paramilitary organisations were not, actively opposing the peace process and seeking to sabotage it. On the republican side such elements included the INLA, while on the loyalist side those still active included the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF), which was based mostly in Portadown and had broken away from the much larger UVF.
The next step came with the holding of simultaneous referendums, north and south, on 22 May, to give approval to the Good Friday Agreement. Catholics were well over 90 per cent in favour, north and south, but there was much agonising within the Protestant community. In the end it split down the middle, with around half of Unionists voting Yes in the referendum and around half voting No.
The Protestants of Northern Ireland have long been pilloried for their siege mentality, their resistance to change and for what their critics characterise as an unsavoury mixture of reactionary instincts and religious bigotry. The British encouraged them to move to Ireland essentially as a garrison community for Britain’s own defensive purposes. Those settlers were bound to develop a siege mentality given that they experienced actual sieges, most famously Londonderry in 1689.
A majority of civil rights supporters went on to support the SDLP. Another section of nationalists switched from civil rights to supporting republicanism, putting its faith in violence and the pursuit of victory rather then accommodation. This division of northern nationalists into two distinct elements, one constitutional and one violent, followed a fault-line which went back for many decades.
Many other figures played an important part during the troubles, though none as substantial as Hume, Adams and Paisley.
Part of any unreasonableness is clearly traceable back to the system which London first set up and then forgot. It took half a century for the troubles to erupt, but the lethal energy with which they did is testimony to the lack of outside supervision for so long. A critic of Britain would lay at London’s door a chapter of political and security misjudgements and mistakes, in which internment and Bloody Sunday would figure prominently. The model of the troubles as a clash between two unreasonable warring tribes is thus a misleading or at least an incomplete picture.
