The Troubles

Based on Wikipedia: The Troubles

For thirty years, neighbors killed neighbors in Northern Ireland. Not over theology exactly, though outsiders often called it a religious war. The conflict that came to be known simply as "the Troubles"—a masterpiece of grim understatement—was really about something more primal: who belongs here, and who gets to decide?

A Polite Word for Civil War

The English language has a particular gift for euphemism, and "the Troubles" ranks among its finest specimens. The term had been used for centuries to describe violent upheaval—the British Parliament employed it after the devastating Wars of the Three Kingdoms in the 1600s, and the Irish used it to describe their revolutionary period in the early 1900s. When violence erupted in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s, the old word was dusted off once more.

What exactly were the Troubles? Scholars have struggled to categorize them. An asymmetric war. A low-intensity conflict. An ethno-nationalist struggle with sectarian dimensions. All technically accurate, and all somehow missing the point.

Here is what they were in plain terms: a bloody, three-decade fight over whether Northern Ireland should remain part of the United Kingdom or join with the Republic of Ireland to form a united Irish nation. On one side stood unionists and loyalists, predominantly Protestant, who wanted to stay British. On the other stood nationalists and republicans, predominantly Catholic, who wanted to become Irish.

The conflict killed more than 3,500 people. Just over half were civilians caught in the crossfire or deliberately targeted. About a third were members of British security forces. The remainder were paramilitaries on both sides. Behind these numbers lie individual tragedies: the pub bombings, the assassinations, the children caught in crossfire, the families torn apart not just by death but by the terrible question of which side they were on.

Four Centuries of Grievance

To understand why people were killing each other in Belfast in the 1970s, you have to go back to 1609, when King James I of England embarked on what he called the Plantation of Ulster.

The scheme was elegant in its brutality. Take land from the native Irish Catholics. Give it to Protestant settlers from Scotland and England—"planters," they were called, like crops to be cultivated in foreign soil. The goal was to pacify Ireland's most rebellious province by literally replacing its population.

It worked, more or less. Protestant communities took root in Ulster. Two bloody religious wars followed—the Irish Confederate Wars of the 1640s and the Williamite War of 1689 to 1691—and the Protestants won both. Their victory was then codified into law through the Penal Laws, a comprehensive system designed to crush Catholic life. Catholics could not hold public office. They could not practice law. They could not own good land. They could not vote. They could not educate their children in Catholic schools.

The laws applied to other non-Anglicans too, including Presbyterian Protestants, but Catholics bore the heaviest burden. For generations, they were second-class citizens in their own country.

When these laws began loosening in the late 1700s, something unexpected happened. Instead of reconciliation, competition intensified. Catholics could suddenly buy land and enter trades. Protestant vigilante groups called the "Peep o' Day Boys" formed to terrorize them back into submission. Catholics organized their own defense groups called the "Defenders." Violence bred more violence.

Out of this chaos emerged the Orange Order in 1795, a Protestant fraternal organization pledging loyalty to the heirs of William of Orange—the Protestant king who had won the Williamite War a century earlier. The Orange Order still marches through Northern Ireland today, a living reminder that some wounds never fully heal.

Partition: Drawing Lines in Blood

By the early 1900s, a movement for Irish Home Rule—limited self-government while remaining part of the United Kingdom—had gained significant momentum. Most nationalists supported it. Most unionists were terrified by it.

Their fear had a demographic logic. Catholics made up roughly 75 percent of Ireland's population. Any all-Ireland parliament would inevitably be dominated by Catholics. Protestants, concentrated in Ulster, would become a permanent minority in what they saw as a hostile Catholic state controlled by the Roman Catholic Church.

In 1912, nearly half a million Ulster Protestants signed the Ulster Covenant, pledging to resist Home Rule "by all means necessary." Some signed in their own blood. They formed the Ulster Volunteer Force, a paramilitary army prepared to fight the British government rather than accept Irish self-rule.

Nationalists responded by forming the Irish Volunteers. Ireland teetered on the brink of civil war.

Then came World War One, and everything paused. Home Rule passed the British Parliament but was suspended for the duration of the conflict. Many Irish volunteers joined the British Army, fighting in the trenches of France and Belgium.

But in Dublin, during Easter 1916, a small group of radical nationalists decided not to wait. They seized key buildings and proclaimed an Irish Republic. The Easter Rising lasted less than a week before British forces crushed it. The British then made a catastrophic mistake: they executed sixteen of its leaders, transforming obscure revolutionaries into martyrs.

Public opinion shifted dramatically. In the 1918 general election, the separatist Sinn Féin party won 47 percent of the vote and a majority of Irish seats. They refused to take their seats in Westminster. Instead, they established their own parliament in Dublin—the Dáil—and declared independence.

The Irish War of Independence followed, a brutal guerrilla conflict between Irish republicans and British forces. By 1921, Britain was ready to negotiate.

The result was partition. The Government of Ireland Act of 1920 created two separate jurisdictions: Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland. The South would eventually become the Irish Free State in 1922, and later the Republic of Ireland. The North—six counties carefully chosen to ensure a Protestant majority—would remain part of the United Kingdom.

The border made some geographical and historical sense, but it also created an immediate problem. Northern Ireland contained a substantial Catholic minority, about 35 percent of the population. These Catholics found themselves trapped in a state explicitly designed to keep them powerless.

A State Built on Exclusion

From its founding, Northern Ireland was a Protestant state for a Protestant people. This wasn't subtext. The first Prime Minister, James Craig, said it openly, contrasting his Protestant parliament with the Catholic parliament in Dublin.

The tools of exclusion were systematic. Electoral boundaries were redrawn—gerrymandered—to ensure unionist majorities even in areas where nationalists actually outnumbered them. In Derry City, for instance, a nationalist majority of voters somehow elected a unionist-controlled council. Proportional representation, which might have given Catholics fair representation, was abolished in favor of first-past-the-post voting that maximized unionist advantage.

Housing was allocated by local councils, which meant Protestant councils could ensure Catholics never accumulated enough residents in any area to threaten electoral control. Jobs in the public sector went disproportionately to Protestants. The police force—the Royal Ulster Constabulary, or RUC—was overwhelmingly Protestant and widely seen as an arm of the unionist state rather than a neutral law enforcement body.

Then there was the Special Powers Act of 1922, which gave the government sweeping authority to intern suspects without trial, ban organizations, and administer corporal punishment. It was supposed to be temporary, a response to the violence surrounding partition. It remained in effect for fifty years, used almost exclusively against Catholics.

The message was clear: this state was not for you.

The Civil Rights Movement and the Road to Violence

For decades, Northern Ireland's Catholics largely accepted their subordinate position. They had few options. The Irish Republican Army, the militant remnant from the independence struggle, occasionally launched campaigns of violence, but these fizzled without popular support. Most Catholics just tried to get on with their lives.

Then came the 1960s, and the world changed.

The American civil rights movement offered a new model: nonviolent resistance, mass protest, moral pressure. In 1967, inspired by events across the Atlantic, activists in Northern Ireland formed the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. They didn't demand Irish unification. They demanded something simpler: equal treatment. Fair housing allocation. An end to gerrymandering. One person, one vote. Reform of the police.

The response was revealing. Peaceful marches were attacked by loyalist mobs. Police either stood by or joined in. When civil rights activists organized a march in Derry in October 1968, the RUC beat them with batons as television cameras rolled. The footage shocked the world.

Rather than prompting reform, the crackdown radicalized both sides. Catholic communities felt besieged. Protestant hardliners saw any concession as the beginning of the end. The situation spiraled.

In August 1969, after days of rioting in Belfast and Derry, the British government deployed army troops to restore order. It was supposed to be a temporary measure. British soldiers would remain in Northern Ireland for 38 years, in what became the longest continuous deployment in British military history.

At first, some Catholics welcomed the soldiers. Surely the British Army would be more neutral than the RUC? That hope didn't last long.

Bloody Sunday and the Rise of the Provisionals

The Irish Republican Army had been largely dormant when the Troubles began. But as violence intensified and the British Army's presence grew, a new, more militant faction emerged: the Provisional IRA, so named because they claimed legitimacy from the provisional government declared during the 1916 Easter Rising.

The Provisionals, or "Provos," had a simple analysis. Peaceful protest had failed. The British were an occupying force. Armed struggle was the only path to a united Ireland.

Their campaign began with bombings and shootings. The British responded with internment—mass arrest without trial of suspected republicans. The policy was disastrous. Intelligence was often wrong. Innocent people were swept up and detained in brutal conditions. Far from crushing the IRA, internment became its greatest recruiting tool.

Then came Bloody Sunday.

On January 30, 1972, British paratroopers shot dead thirteen unarmed civilians during a civil rights march in Derry. Another victim died later from his wounds. The soldiers claimed they had come under fire first. Eyewitnesses said the victims were fleeing or helping the wounded. An initial British inquiry exonerated the soldiers. It took until 2010—thirty-eight years—for another inquiry to conclude that the killings were "unjustified and unjustifiable."

Bloody Sunday transformed the conflict. Moderate nationalists who had opposed violence now saw the British Army as the enemy. IRA recruitment surged. The cycle of violence accelerated.

The Actors and Their Methods

The Troubles involved a bewildering array of armed groups, each with its own ideology, methods, and internal feuds.

On the republican side, the Provisional IRA was the largest and most formidable. They conducted a sustained guerrilla campaign against British forces—ambushes, assassinations, sophisticated bombings. They also struck commercial and political targets, including devastating attacks in England itself. The Birmingham pub bombings of 1974 killed 21 people. Car bombs and incendiary devices damaged property worth billions of pounds.

The Irish National Liberation Army, or INLA, was smaller and even more radical. They were responsible for assassinating Conservative politician Airey Neave in 1979, killed by a bomb placed under his car as he drove out of the House of Commons parking lot.

On the loyalist side, the Ulster Volunteer Force—reviving the name of the original anti-Home Rule militia—conducted a campaign of murder aimed primarily at Catholic civilians. Their logic, if it can be called that, was simple: terrorize the Catholic community into withdrawing support from the IRA. The Ulster Defence Association pursued similar tactics under the cover name "Ulster Freedom Fighters."

Loyalist violence followed a particularly ugly pattern. Whereas the IRA often claimed their targets had some connection to British security forces, loyalists frequently killed Catholics simply for being Catholic—random taxi drivers, pub patrons, people walking home from work. They were responsible for 48 percent of all civilian deaths during the Troubles, compared to 39 percent attributed to republicans.

The British security forces—the Army and the RUC—officially pursued a counterinsurgency strategy, but the lines blurred badly. Multiple investigations revealed collusion between security forces and loyalist paramilitaries. Intelligence was shared. Weapons found their way into loyalist hands. Some killings had the fingerprints of state involvement.

Then there were the walls.

Peace Lines: Architecture of Division

In Belfast and other cities, authorities erected barriers between Protestant and Catholic neighborhoods. They called them "peace lines," another of those mordant euphemisms. Twenty-foot walls of steel, brick, and concrete snaking through working-class neighborhoods, separating people who had once been neighbors.

The first peace lines went up in 1969 as a temporary measure. Over fifty years later, many still stand. Some have gates that close at night. Residents have adapted—hanging baskets of flowers on the walls, painting murals, treating these monuments to failure as normal features of the urban landscape.

The walls worked, in a grim sense. Sectarian murders declined in areas where they were erected. But they also cemented division, making it physically difficult for communities to mix, ensuring that children grew up never meeting anyone from "the other side."

The Human Cost

Three thousand five hundred and thirty-two people died in the Troubles. That figure deserves to be spelled out rather than rendered in numerals. Each death was someone's child, parent, sibling, friend.

Republican paramilitaries killed the most people—about 60 percent of the total. Loyalist paramilitaries killed about 30 percent. Security forces killed about 10 percent. But these statistics can mislead. The IRA primarily targeted security forces and economic infrastructure. Loyalists primarily targeted civilians. British forces primarily shot young Catholic men in disputed circumstances.

Beyond the dead were the injured—tens of thousands of them—and the traumatized, whose numbers cannot be calculated. Entire communities lived under a constant threat of violence. Cars parked in the wrong place might be bombs. Strangers asking your name might be assessing whether you were Protestant or Catholic, friend or target. Children learned to identify the crack of gunfire, the specific sound of different weapons.

The damage was also economic. Investment fled. Tourism collapsed. Talented young people emigrated. Northern Ireland, which had been one of Britain's industrial heartlands, fell into decline. Whole areas became no-go zones, controlled by paramilitaries who imposed their own rough justice.

Why Didn't It End Sooner?

The Troubles lasted thirty years. Why so long?

Part of the answer is that neither side could win. The IRA could never defeat the British Army militarily, but the British Army could never eliminate the IRA. Both sides were too strong to be destroyed and too weak to prevail. Military stalemate tends to perpetuate itself.

Part of the answer is that violence created its own momentum. Every killing demanded revenge. Martyrs inspired new recruits. Compromise became betrayal. The most militant voices on each side effectively controlled the agenda—moderates who advocated peace were vulnerable to accusations of selling out.

Part of the answer is simple political failure. Solutions existed. Power-sharing arrangements were proposed as early as 1973. But hard-liners on both sides torpedoed them. Unionists couldn't accept sharing power with nationalists. Republicans couldn't accept anything short of British withdrawal. Politicians who might have bridged the gap were assassinated or marginalized.

And part of the answer lies in Britain's own ambivalence. Northern Ireland was technically part of the United Kingdom, but many in Britain viewed it as an alien place, its quarrels incomprehensible. The British government oscillated between repression and negotiation, between treating the conflict as a security problem and acknowledging it as a political one.

The Road to Peace

By the late 1980s, exhaustion was setting in. The IRA's campaign had failed to achieve British withdrawal. Loyalist violence had failed to cow the Catholic community. The British security forces had failed to defeat the paramilitaries. Everyone was losing.

Quiet contacts began between enemies. The British government talked secretly to the IRA. Nationalist politicians talked to loyalist paramilitaries. Irish and British governments, historically suspicious of each other, began cooperating.

In 1994, the IRA declared a ceasefire. Loyalist paramilitaries followed. Negotiations began in earnest, mediated by American Senator George Mitchell. There were setbacks—the IRA briefly ended its ceasefire, car bombs killed civilians in England, trust repeatedly broke down—but the talks continued.

On April 10, 1998, Good Friday, the parties reached an agreement.

The Good Friday Agreement was a masterpiece of constructive ambiguity. It didn't resolve the fundamental question of Northern Ireland's status. Instead, it created structures that allowed both communities to pursue their aspirations peacefully. Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom for as long as a majority wished—satisfying unionists. But mechanisms existed for a future vote on reunification—satisfying nationalists. A power-sharing executive would give both communities a stake in government. Police would be reformed. Paramilitary prisoners would be released. Weapons would be decommissioned.

The Agreement was approved by referendums in both Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. In the North, 71 percent voted yes. In the South, 94 percent.

It wasn't perfect. Implementation took years. The power-sharing executive collapsed repeatedly. Decommissioning of weapons moved agonizingly slowly. Splinter groups continued occasional violence—the Real IRA, the Continuity IRA, various loyalist factions. "Punishment attacks"—kneecappings and beatings by paramilitaries enforcing their own law—continued well into the 2000s.

But the war was over. The killing mostly stopped. Normal politics became possible.

The Troubles Today

More than twenty-five years after the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland remains a work in progress. The peace lines still stand. Segregation persists—most children still attend either Catholic or Protestant schools, not both. Political parties still largely divide along sectarian lines.

Brexit reopened wounds that had been healing. The question of the Irish border—which the Good Friday Agreement had essentially dissolved—returned with force. New tensions emerged between Northern Ireland and Britain itself.

Violence still flickers. Dissident republicans continue sporadic attacks. Loyalist paramilitaries have evolved into organized crime networks controlling drug supply, running extortion rackets, and intimidating their own communities. Occasional riots erupt, particularly around the contentious summer marching season when Orange Order parades wind through Catholic neighborhoods.

Yet Northern Ireland has undeniably transformed. A generation has grown up without regular bombings and shootings. Economic development has followed peace. Belfast's city center, once a ghost town after dark, buzzes with restaurants and nightlife. Cross-community friendships, while still the exception rather than the rule, exist in ways they couldn't during the Troubles.

The fundamental question remains unresolved. Northern Ireland exists because neither side could impose its will on the other. It persists because the alternative—renewed violence—is unthinkable. Whether it will eventually join a united Ireland or remain permanently British, no one can say.

Perhaps that ambiguity is itself the achievement. For centuries, the question of Ireland's relationship with Britain was answered with blood. The Troubles proved that neither side could win that fight. The Good Friday Agreement proved that both sides could stop fighting without admitting defeat.

That may not be the ending anyone wanted. But it's better than what came before.