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Community
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Partition had created a perverse situation in which two religious communities, which for centuries had felt a degree of tension, each came to feel like an embattled minority: Protestants, who formed a majority of the population in Northern Ireland but a minority on the island as a whole, feared being subsumed by Catholic Ireland; Catholics, who represented a majority on the island but a minority in Northern Ireland, felt that they were discriminated against in the six counties. Northern Ireland was home to a million Protestants and half a million Catholics, and it was true that the Catholics
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“Why did you not fight back?”
Everywhere there was rubble and broken glass, what one poet would memorably describe as “Belfast confetti.”
In West Belfast, Catholic mothers ventured up to the army’s sandbagged posts and offered the soldiers cups of tea.
The troops had scarcely arrived before they began to lose the goodwill of the community. The young soldiers did not understand the complicated ethnic geography of Belfast. They soon came to be seen not as a neutral referee in the conflict, but rather as an occupying force—a heavily armed ally of the B-Specials and the RUC.
and early ’60s, but the effort drew little support from the community. By the late sixties, some members of the IRA’s leadership in Dublin had begun to question the utility of the gun in Irish politics, and to adopt a more avowedly Marxist philosophy, which advocated peaceful resistance through politics.
One of Albert Price’s old friends, the writer Brendan Behan, famously remarked that in any meeting of Irish republicans, the first item on the agenda is the split.
