Britain’s Thirty Years’ War in Northern Ireland

Abstract

It is difficult to square John Nagl’s praise of the British Army’s capacity for organizational learning with its poor early performance in Northern Ireland after 1969. As Irish historian John Bew notes, while the British Army views their intervention in Northern Ireland as “a rare success,” in fact, the application of the army’s historically coercive COIN tactics there in the months from 1970 proved to be the least successful phase of the thirty-year campaign. When combined with Westminster’s early policy of neglect and delayed intervention, the army’s actions most certainly gave unrest momentum by helping to transform a political confrontation into an inter-communal conflict that endured for more than three decades. The British experience in Northern Ireland also reinforces Clausewitz’s dictum that war is politics, and that small war tactics applied in the absence of a political strategy designed to isolate extremists by presenting viable alternatives to the majority of the population offer a recipe for repression or prolonged stalemate, which is exactly what Northern Ireland became after 1970. The crisis that evolved in Northern Ireland in the late 1960s was the product of a collision between the post-Great War “Troubles” with the 1960s civil rights movement. The Catholic minority in Ulster, which made up slightly more than one-third of the population, viewed the partition of the island in 1921 as a denial of full national self-determination. However, although they were subject to electoral, housing, health care, educational, and employment discrimination by Protestant-dominated local councils, neither IRA attempts to harness German assistance to provoke rebellion during World War II, nor the so-called “Border Campaign” of the 1950s had encountered more than a whisper of popular support among Catholics in the North, many of whom viewed the IRA as “guys who would take the eye out of your head and say you’d look better without it.”