The Irish language and Irish history were not taught in state schools. However most nationalists in the North traditionally voted for the moderate Nationalist Party.
There was an ineffective, mostly southern-based IRA guerrilla campaign against Northern Ireland from to , but with little nationalist support within the North and faced with internment on both sides of the border, it achieved little.
Their aim was to end the discrimination against Catholics within Northern Ireland. This led to increasingly bitter rioting between the Catholic population, especially in Derry, and the RUC.
The unrest culminated in a series of severe riots across Northern Ireland in August , in which 8 people were killed, hundreds of homes destroyed and 1, people displaced. Civil rights agitation from brought a violent response from the state and loyalists, culminating in severe rioting in August In Belfast, the rioting developed into street fighting between Catholics and Protestants during which an entire Catholic street — Bombay Street — was burned out.
The British Army was deployed to restore order and was initially welcomed by Catholics. The riots marked a watershed. The IRA split into two factions, with the more militant, the Provisionals, claiming the existing organisation had failed to defend Catholics during the rioting. They were determined to launch a new armed campaign against Northern Ireland. The other faction, known as the Officials favoured building a left wing political party and fostering unity among the Catholic and Protestant working class before attempting to achieve a united Ireland.
However it was the Provisionals who would go on to dominate. British troops were initially welcomed by Catholics as their protectors but were rapidly drawn into a counter-insurgency campaign against Republican paramilitaries. In the initial sweep no loyalists at all were detained. Even those opposed to violence, such as the SDLP, walked out of the Stormont Parliament and led their supporters in a rent and rates strike.
As a result, many republicans would depict the armed campaign of the following 25 years and defensive and retaliatory. Unlike previous IRA campaigns internment was not introduced in the Republic of Ireland, leading unionists to allege that the southern state sympathised with republican paramilitaries.
The London government tried to defuse nationalist militancy with a series of reforms of Northern Ireland. The B Specials auxiliary police in theory but in practice a unionist militia were disbanded, electoral boundaries were redrawn to reflect Catholic numbers and housing and employment executives were set up to deal with discrimination. Republicans and state forces were not the only source of violence.
Loyalist groups also proliferated in the early s with many Protestant neighbourhoods setting up paramilitary and vigilante groups.
By both of these groups and others were killing significant numbers of Catholic civilians. Despite this, far fewer loyalist than republican militants were imprisoned. This massacre gave massive impetus to militant republicans. The Provisional IRA went on the offensive in , sparking off the most lethal phase of the conflict and causing London to suspend the government of Northern Ireland.
In addition to Bloody Sunday, its treatment of the nationalist population was often very violent — killing people, many of them civilians, from to There were other incidents of large scale shooting of civilians such as the Ballymurphy shootings 11 dead in and the Springhill shootings 5 deaths in It has recently emerged also that an undercover unit, the MRF, was carrying out assassinations and random shootings in Catholic areas and was responsible for at least 10 deaths, so some deaths attributed to paramilitary violence may actually have been undercover soldiers.
The Provisionals believed they were on the verge of victory by the summer of , or at any rate British withdrawal, when the British government opened direct talks with the IRA leadership. In response the IRA called a brief ceasefire. However no political agreement was reached — the IRA proposed no terms other than a united Ireland — and, after a standoff with the British Army and loyalists in the Lenadoon area of Belfast flared up into violence, the ceasefire was called off.
Concurrently loyalist killings also spiralled. Their actions included pub bombings such as the McGurk pub bombing in in which 15 were killed and the abduction and shooting of random Catholics. Yet another source of violence was spasmodic feuding between the rival republican factions. By the many-sided conflict showed no signs of ending. Although the death toll fell from to to it remained high throughout the s, with over 2, having died by the end of the decade.
They also took to bombing British cities. The loyalist paramilitaries also became increasingly indiscriminate in the period in which they killed over Catholic civilians. Republican groups killed 88 Protestants civilians in the same period. Loyalists also began bombing towns and cities south of the border, notably in the Dublin and Monaghan bombs of May , in which 33 people were killed. State forces were also a major source of violence in the early s as were loyalist paramilitaries.
The Stevens Enquiry report of stated that it had found evidence of high level collusion between state forces including police, army and intelligence and loyalist groups. However no political progress ensued and this had little appreciable effect on the level of political violence as republicans still killed people and simply meant that IRA attacks were usually claimed with adopted names.
In a major effort was made by the British government to find a political solution to the conflict. The Agreement was brought down by massive grassroots unionist opposition. It was also during the period of the Sunningdale Agreement that loyalist paramilitary violence peaked.
In the British Government tried to set up a power-sharing Agreement between unionists and nationalists. It collapsed after massive loyalist protests. Loyalist paramilitary roadblocks on all main roads prevented even those who did not support them from going to work. The two week strike caused the Unionist Party to pull out of the Agreement, making it null and void. There would be no further internal political agreements until Nationalists were enraged that the British Army was not deployed to break the strike.
In internment without trial was ended but convicted paramilitaries were treated as ordinary criminals. This provoked a grim struggle within the prisons. The second strand was ending internment without trial — viewed to have been a public relations disaster — in , and phasing in non-jury trials for paramilitaries.
They were to be housed, not in the Prisoner-of War type camp at Long Kesh but a purpose built prison — the Maze — situated next door. Moreover they were to be afforded no special treatment compared to ordinary criminals. This led to sustained protest by republican and initially, some loyalist prisoners for political status.
The protest culminated in the Hunger Strikes of in which 10 republican prisoners, led by Bobby Sands, starved themselves to death for political status. The deaths of the hunger strikers proved their willingness to die and undermined the Government strategy of painting them as apolitical criminals. Two more hunger strikers were voted into the Irish Dail.
There was widespread rioting in nationalist areas upon the deaths of the hunger strikers. Throughout the s the conflict sputtered on. The IRA had a change of leadership in the late s as southern leaders such as Ruari O Bradaigh were replaced by younger northerners such as Gerry Adams. Adams and his colleagues devised a strategy known as the Long War , in which the IRA would be reorganised into small cells, more difficult to penetrate with informers and continue their armed campaign indefinitely until British withdrawal.
Parallel, they would win political support through their party, Sinn Fein. The election of hunger strikers was a major fillip to this strategy. In they decided to enter the Dail if elected.
Political violence in Northern Ireland throughout the s remained at a lower level however than in the s. In only three years , and was the death toll over and in there were only 57 deaths due to the conflict see here. The IRA in Belfast and Derry never regained the momentum they had had in the previous decade and were heavily infiltrated by informers.
However many targets particularly of the part-time Ulster Defence Regiment were also killed while off-duty and unarmed. Bombings of civilian targets, particularly the Enniskillen bomb of in which 12 Protestants attending a war memorial service were killed, also damaged their popular support.
The IRA also continued to attack targets in Britain and further afield, attempting to assassinate Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in Brighton in for example and blowing up 11 British soldiers on parade in London as well as Harrods department store. Despite importing significant quantities of heavy weapons from Libya in the mids, the IRA was able only to modestly increase the intensity of their campaign by the end of the decade.
The exception to this was their bombing campaign in England. And at a time when Ireland is intensifying its campaign for a seat on the UN Security Council in , the deployment provides a useful sign of solidarity not only with Mali but with the whole of francophone west Africa, which supplies the largest contingents of troops to Minusma — and where Ireland, without a single embassy, has a shallow diplomatic footprint.
Rising infection rates in central and eastern Europe suggest a correlation between vaccine scepticism and populist politics. The plan for the capital looks too much like another aspirational plan, not the inspirational one it should be. Please update your payment details to keep enjoying your Irish Times subscription. Ireland has quietly joined a dangerous war World View: Government is remarkably reticent about its move to send forces to Mali Sat, Jun 15, , Islamist extremists The UN mission in Mali has its origins in the turmoil of , when a Tuareg separatist uprising against the state was exploited by Islamist extremists allied to al-Qaeda who took key cities in the desert north and threatened to sweep south towards the capital, Bamako.
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