Conflict in Northern Ireland

Pushing the boundaries in Northern Ireland: young people, violence and sectarianism

This article examines the English and Welsh Catholic Church's reaction to the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) attacks on London during the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’. English Catholic bishops vociferously condemned these attacks yet regularly faced criticism for their perceived inaction. Letters published in secular and religious newspapers, and also sent directly to English Catholic bishops, reveal a dismayed public who called for religious retribution in the form of excommunication. I argue IRA attacks on English soil fell into a ‘grey area’ of Church condemnation: a Catholic bishop would not comment on events outside his own nation. No Irish Catholic bishop had excommunicated an IRA member, so for an English bishop to do so would have been setting a precedent. However, the IRA’s shift to a bombing campaign in England had allowed English bishops to comment on the conflict in Northern Ireland. Subsequently, statements and actions by English bishops would directly impact on how Irish bishops could mediate the conflict in Northern Ireland. Provisional IRA attacks on London specifically garnered international press attention and greater focus on the reactions of the Catholic Archbishop of Westminster, amplifying the English Catholic Church’s response more broadly. This article highlights the evolving relationship between Irish and English bishops, from one of mutual anger to one of mutual understanding, through an examination of three attacks: the Old Bailey bombing (1973); the Harrods Bombing (1983); and the London Docklands Bombing (1996). Drawing on seldom discussed archival material, religious papers, and correspondence, this article elucidates the entangled relationship between English and Irish Churches, suggesting that such a complicated relationship, at times, hindered the Irish Catholic Church’s ability to mediate the conflict and aide the peace process.

Armed groups are prone to instability and fragmentation, but what explains variation among the new groups that emerge? I argue that the internal politics preceding organizational splits is critical. When it comes to the survival of breakaway groups, those forming around single issue areas gain an advantage by attracting more homogeneous, preference-aligned recruits. On the other hand, those forming over a variety of grievances attract a more heterogeneous population whose divergent views undermine cohesion and cooperation, necessitate hierarchy, and diminish the odds of organizational survival. I test this argument with a case study of two Republican groups from Northern Ireland—the Real Irish Republican Army and the Irish National Liberation Army. The findings confirm my argument and underscore the limited utility of studying organizational fractures from the sole perspective of contemporaneous external events like conciliation and repression. Rather, I show how internal political dynamics influence the composition, identity, and overall trajectory of breakaway groups. This has implications for designing effective counterinsurgent policies, for understanding the formation of armed groups, and for anticipating whether breakaway groups are likely to escalate, moderate, or adopt spoiling behavior.

The conflict in Northern Ireland, known colloquially as the ‘Troubles’, is often understood as a religious war but in fact is underpinned by competing religious, political, and national ideologies, often dichotomised into those who wish Northern Ireland to reunify with Ireland and those who wish it to remain part of the United Kingdom. These ideologies are bound up in a series of social identities that are represented by the Protestant and Catholic communities. In this chapter, we trace the relationship between identity, conflict, and peace in Northern Ireland from the emergence of the ‘Troubles’ up until and following the signing of the Good Friday/Belfast Peace Agreement. Specifically, we cover four key themes that underlie much of the work on social identity in Northern Ireland: (a) the prevalence of social categorisation, identification, and comparison strategies; (b) the role of identity in conflict; (c) the relationship between stress, coping, and identity; and (d) the role of intergroup contact in promoting identity for peace. In doing so, we argue that whilst identity lies at the root of the Northern Irish conflict, it also presents important exciting opportunities for peace.

This study provides a cross-national exploration of the media and public responses to the 2002 Irish Republican Army (IRA) statement of apology for the hundreds of non-combatant deaths caused by them over the past 30 years. The study explored responses to the statement in national, regional, and local news papers across the United States, England, and Northern Ireland. It was hypothesized that relational closeness to victims of the IRA campaign would affect attitudes toward the IRA apology, as would geographical closeness to the political violence in Northern Ireland; also within Northern Ireland there would be differences in attitudes toward the statement due to the ethnopolitical orientation of the newspapers' intended readership. The results broadly supported these hypotheses, with the U.S. print media being generally more positive and the English print media more negative in attitude toward the statement of apology. Also, among responses in England, those areas that had suffered directly from IRA violence tended to have the most negative reactions of all. In Northern Ireland, newspapers with a predominately Catholic readership responded to the IRA apology generally positively, whereas newspapers with a predominately Protestant readership responded generally negatively. The results illustrate difficulties facing peace processes in settings of ethnic violence and the complexity of responses to apology and forgiveness of relevant publics within and outside actual conflict areas.

Reflecting on the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace Process: 20 years since the Good Friday Agreement John Doyle Director, Institute for International Conflict Resolution and Reconstruction Dublin City University Editor of Irish Studies in International Affairs This special issue of Irish Studies in International Affairs has been produced to mark the twentieth anniversary of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. It is also appropriate to reflect on the period of conflict itself, as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of the beginning of the modern Northern Ireland conflict.The volume draws on ten articles that were published in Irish Studies in International Affairs between 1994 and 2018. These articles are reproduced exactly as they were first published, without any updating or editing of the text. They need therefore to be read in the context of the year in which they were written. However, bringing them together in this one volume provides a strong reference for scholarship in Irish Studies in International Affairs on different dimensions of the Northern Ireland conflict and peace process, over the past 25 years. The articles are arranged by topic and period they cover, rather than the year in which they were published, to provide the reader with a chronological approach to the conflict from its early days to the implementation of the agreement. The articles are reprinted with their original pagination to ensure consistency between those who cite this volume and the original printing. Inevitably when producing a volume based on previously published works not all aspects of the conflict and peace process are covered or covered equally. However, the ten selected articles do represent some of the most important issues which scholars of the peace process have discussed. To quote former US Senator George Mitchell, chair of the talks which led to the agreement, ‘By itself, the Good Friday Agreement does not provide or guarantee peace and stability, but it makes them possible’.1 The articles that follow look at the conflict and its escalation, but in particular, they explore the basis for the Good Friday Agreement, and why it was possible to negotiate it in 1998 and not in earlier years. 1 George Mitchell ‘Conflict Resolution: Ireland and Beyond’, Irish Studies in International Affairs’ 14 (2003), 3–8: 6. 2 Irish Studies in International Affairs The volume begins with an article by Martin Mansergh, first published in 1995, setting out the background to the peace process.2 Mansergh is a former diplomat and a former member of both Seanad Éireann and Dáil Éireann, but he is best known for his role as advisor on Northern Ireland to Fianna Fáil governments (and oppositions) from 1977 onwards and as one of those who were involved in the earliest secret talks with Sinn Féin. His article seeks to explore why the conflict erupted and why it went on so long. It also provides a fascinating summary of the early years of the peace process—events to which he was so often a direct witness and participant. The next article, by Michael Kennedy, on the reaction of the Irish Department of External Affairs to the outbreak of the troubles in Northern Ireland, was first published in 2001.3 Kennedy draws on the archival records of that period to clearly show how ill-prepared the department was for the emerging crisis in Northern Ireland. It also demonstrates that there was no agreed strategy on how Ireland might influence a change in the status quo. This article represents an excellent micro-study of how we can consider the broader issues around the origins and escalation of the conflict.Armed conflict was not inevitable, but there were clear structural features which increased the possibility of conflict, including decades of intense discrimination against the Irish nationalist minority in Northern Ireland and their effective exclusion from public life. Northern Ireland also featured a classic ‘rising expectations’ context, as a generation of young nationalists, growing up in a more internationalised environment, demanded more of the state. The international context of the US civil rights movement was hugely influential, in the approach and even the name of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, as were the new left and student protests of the...

Democratic governments have been grappling with the issue of the rule of law and terrorism long before the Northern Ireland crisis, and they continue to do so after September 11, 2001, and the more recent terrorist acts in Britain and Spain. However, Britain had to deal with a very specific form of terrorist activity in Northern Ireland, from a very specific group, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), from 1922 to 1998. To complicate matters, this confrontation was managed through the security policy of a decentralized Unionist government in Ulster from 1922 to 1972. In 1998, a major breakthrough was achieved when the Good Friday Agreement was signed establishing a consociational structure of governance for Northern Ireland, and issues that were incandescent from 1969 to 1998 then began to ameliorate. Further compromises on the issues of arms decommissioning by the IRA, police control, and prisoner release during the period from 1998 to 2007, coupled with an emphasis on Islam-based terrorist activities in Britain proper, led to a further winding down of security legislation and the use of the courts in Ulster. Thus, this chapter focuses primarily on the legislation, security activities, and the courts in Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1998.

On February 9, 1996, after a seventeen-month cease-fire, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) set off a bomb in East London. Less than a week later, the London police found and destroyed a bomb that the IRA had left in a telephone booth in the West End. A few days later, another IRA bomb went off on a doubledecker bus. The British government, under the leadership of John Major, asserted that it would have no official contact with Sinn Féin, the political arm of the IRA, until the paramilitary activities stopped. The government also deployed 500 additional troops in Northern Ireland. In October 1996, the IRA detonated two bombs at the British Army's headquarters in Lisburn, bringing the violent conflict back to Northern Ireland for the first time since the cease-fire. On May 1, 1997, Tony Blair was elected Great Britain's prime minister. His election brought a renewed sense of optimism and good will to the conflict in Northern Ireland. Responding to Blair's overtures, including his warning that “the settlement train is leaving, with or without them” (Hoge 1997a, A7), the IRA announced on July 19, 1997, that they had “ordered the unequivocal restoration of the cease-fire” (Clarity 1997c, 1). Soon thereafter, Sinn Féin was invited to participate in the peace talks, which reconvened on September 15, 1997.

Is the Northern Ireland problem still “... but Anglo-Irish relations writ small”, as Paul Arthur wrote in 2000? Would a solution to the conflict in Northern Ireland usher a complete “normalisation” of British-Irish relations? This article looks at how the management of the situation in Northern Ireland by the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland has evolved over recent decades, and argues that it is the way in which the two states have been brought to cooperate that has allowed them to go beyond the remnants of colonialism. Northern Ireland has admittedly remained for a long time the main element structuring relations between the UK and the Republic of Ireland. In that sense, it has been both a problem and a solution: it is a problem because many considered it to be a leftover from the colonial period that has to be resolved, but it also calls for a closer cooperation between the two states, which has entailed renegotiating their relations as a whole. In this perspective, we look at how Northern Ireland went from being the main consideration to one of the subjects of British-Irish relations, thus allowing both states to loosen the grip of history. Keywords: Ireland; Northern Ireland; United Kingdom; Conflict; Colonialism ----- Bibliography: Feron, Elise: Prisoners of History? British-Irish Relations and the Conflict in Northern Ireland, ERIS, 3-2014, pp. 94-109. https://doi.org/10.3224/eris.v1i3.19126

The intractability of ethnic conflicts is due in part to their selective focus on the past. Images of the past are used to legitimate the present social order, but such order presupposes shared memories, and as memories diverge, a society's members share neither experiences nor assumptions. (1) In addition, many of those memories are of past violence and humiliations, which have not been acknowledged or atoned for by the aggressors or their descendants, resulting in continuing pain, fear, and hatred in the victimized people. (2) It is not surprising that interventions seeking lasting peace in ethnic conflicts often involve a revisiting of the history of each side and an acceptance of responsibility for past actions of one's own community. Today this recovering of politically violent pasts can be observed in South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (3) and in Guatemala's Recovery of the Historic Memory Project. (4) In addition to accountability for past actions, some also are calling for corporate forgiveness of political violence as an ultimate step in reconciliation; (5) and such interventions are being at least tentatively explored for Northern Ireland. (6) Political violence in Ireland/Northern Ireland has a history centuries old, and selective remembering of that history perpetuates current sectarian attitudes and conflict. (7) Northern Irish Catholics and Protestants as distinct ethnic groups selectively remember, construct, interpret, and commemorate their shared history, resulting in distinct ethnic or social memories. (8) In Lyons's Social Identity Process Theory, these social memories serve to demonstrate each community's continuity, collective self-esteem, distinctiveness, efficacy, and cohesion. (9) Northern Ireland's political violence certainly is not on the scale of the horrific aggression observed in settings such as South Africa or Guatemala. On the other hand, Northern Ireland is inhabited by only about 1.7 million people, distributed among close-knit urban neighborhoods and rural communities. (10) Consequently, the thirty years of current conflict have touched the entire country. (11) Currently, Northern Ireland is experiencing a formal cessation of armed conflict between the major paramilitary organizations and security forces, although violence between the two communities still erupts, and tension provides a constant backdrop. However, it does not necessarily follow that a cessation in armed conflict results in a cessation of sectarian attitudes. (12) More than any other European nation, Ireland (North and South) has been characterized by emigration during the past three centuries. (13) Today in the United States alone, more than 40 million Americans claim some Irish descent. (14) The vast size of this immigrant population alone provides an impetus for a contemporary examination of its relationship with and attitudes toward Northern Ireland's political violence. Historically, Irish-American influence in Northern Ireland has been dominated by those with nationalist political agendas and a primary focus on constitutional politics. Lobbyists working at grass-roots level and political leaders in Washington, D.C., maintained pressure on Britain's policy in Ireland even before the enactment of partition in 1920. Utilizing a different strategy focused on economic injustice, Irish Americans established the McBride Principles in 1984 to counter Catholic economic disadvantage in Northern Ireland, with particular focus on discrimination in employment. (15) More militant Irish Americans, who support republican agendas, have raised millions of dollars for Irish republican causes, supplied the Irish Republican Army with weaponry, and aided its men on the run or those incarcerated. (16) The 1990s saw a presidential administration involved in the Northern Ireland conflict on an unprecedented scale. (17) Though there is substantial historical literature on Irish America, surprisingly few social and behavioral studies have been carried out. …

Exorcising the Ghosts of Conflict in Northern Ireland: Stewart Parker's The Iceberg and Pentecost Richard Rankin Russell Plays and ghosts have a lot in common. The energy which flows from some intense moment of conflict in a particular time and place seems to activate them both. Plays intend to achieve resolution, however, whilst ghosts appear to be stuck fast in the quest for vengeance. Stewart Parker.1 Stewart Parker's The Iceberg (1974) and Pentecost (1987), works that function as bookends of his all-too-short dramatic career, are haunted by ghosts from Northern Ireland's history.2 Both plays accord with Bernard McKenna's description of Northern Irish drama as "'perform[ing]' moments of rupture that consciously emphasize the destruction of individuals' and communities' identities" (8). The Iceberg stages the loss of pride in the Irish Protestant community surrounding the sinking of the Titanic in 1913, whereas Pentecost explores a seeming triumph of Northern Irish Protestantism, the 1974 Ulster Workers' Council strike—an event, however, that led to a more inflexible political discourse and additional destructive violence in the province. Both works feature revenants, [End Page 42] persistent ghosts whose claims must be recognized and resolved through a process of reconciliation. Parker's revenants share their marginalized status with other ghosts from literature set in Northern Ireland: for example, Brian Friel's three Catholic characters trapped in the Derry Guildhall in The Freedom of the City (1973) and Seamus Heaney's fisherman friend Louis O'Neill in "Casualty" (1979). Friel's and Heaney's ghosts haunt the places where they were murdered and function as emblems of conscience for their respective authors who reject, finally, the official rhetoric of both Irish nationalism and British authority. Parker's ghosts also haunt their localities, watching and waiting for their presence to be realized and their lives given retrospective value and worth; unlike Heaney's shade of his friend O'Neill, however, they are steadfastly sectarian, bound to their respective Protestant communities by religious and cultural ties. Whereas Heaney's vision of his dead friend leads to a realization that he must leave his Catholic "tribe" to write poetry, Parker's imagined ghosts suggest a commitment to work within his own Protestant community to develop a drama that might soften a hardened political divide. Parker belonged to a cohort at Queen's University in Belfast in the early to mid-1960s that included Michael Longley, Seamus Heaney, and Bernard MacLaverty.3 All joined Philip Hobsbaum's Belfast Group, a writing group modeling a "twin emphasis on ethics and aesthetics" that proved crucial in developing the ecumenical, highly crafted work of participants (Russell, "Inscribing Cultural Corridors" 223). Parker would quickly merge an ethical compulsion to ameliorate sectarian tensions with his developing dramatic craft: his dual concern to experiment with a variety of styles and to fashion plays "composed of parts which work together in harmony" equipped him to critique the random violence and fragmentation in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s in formally diverse plays invoking a vision of cultural wholeness ("The Modern Poet as [End Page 43] Dramatist" 2).4 Parker's early concern with aesthetic harmony coincided with his developing ethical urge to promote social accord in the province through depicting its particularized local situation and engaging members of disparate factions in dialogue. Apparitions in The Iceberg and Pentecost emerge from the sense of deprivation engendered by the conflicts in the North—such as those from the 1910s and 1920s, and the contemporary Troubles that began in 1969, the latter of which includes Protestant opposition that toppled the provisional power-sharing government in 1974. The flitting, circling ghosts in these two dramas invoke that pervasive sense of dislocation among Northern Irish Protestants, who feel neither fully British nor Irish and fear abandonment by Britain. Moreover, these apparitions suggest a generalized Northern Irish working-class dispossession stemming from a shared poverty, a deprivation both fueling sectarianism and existing as a potential bond...

Journal Article Northern Ireland: A Time of Choice and The Irish Triangle: Conflict in Northern Ireland Get access Northern Ireland: A Time of Choice. By Richard Rose. Washington: American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research; London: Macmillan. 1976. 175 pp. (AEI Foreign Affairs Study 33.) £6.95. Pb: $3.75. £2.95.The Irish Triangle: Conflict in Northern Ireland. By Roger H. Hull. Princeton: Princeton University Press. 1976. 312 pp. £9.40. A. S. Cohan A. S. Cohan 1University of Lancaster Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 53, Issue 3, July 1977, Pages 482–483, https://doi.org/10.2307/2615347 Published: 01 July 1977

Power-sharing government resumed in Northern Ireland on 8 May 2007 after a historic agreement was reached between the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein. Unionist Ian Paisley became First Minister and Sinn Fein’s Martin McGuinness, former Chief of Staff of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), became Deputy First Minister. The Provisional Republican movement has signed up to the decommissioning of weapons and policing in Northern Ireland; and hard-line Unionism has signed up to power-sharing and cross-border bodies. For the vast majority in Northern Ireland the conflict is over after almost a century of political turmoil and more than a generation of violent conflict. It is fitting, therefore, to examine the ‘war of ideas’ in the revisionist controversy that dominated Irish historiography throughout the period of this conflict. The purpose of this article is to offer an overview of this controversy. The writing on the Easter Rising of 1916 serves to illuminate the discussion and will aid in answering the issue of what the revisionist controversy is all about. In this article revisionism is defined as a re-examination of the ideological roots of current orthodoxy in response to the contemporary conflict in Northern Ireland. The article looks at how a variety of historians have reacted to this violent crisis, and how they concluded that revisionism was necessary: that is, how the deconstruction and re-evaluation of ideology and a new interpretation of history are crucial in understanding such crises of violence (and perhaps thereby defusing the tension). The article examines the nature and extent of this revisionist intellectual response. It recognizes that even though intellectuals are influenced by political conflicts, they do not necessarily follow political agendas.

ardly a week goes by in the United States (and to varying degrees, in the rest of the world) that the word terrorism does not appear in the collective consciousness, as represented, channeled, and shaped by the mass media in its many print, broadcast, and internet manifestations. While relatively few children worldwide (and even fewer children domestically in the United States) have been the specific targets for acts of terrorism, some have, and most are growing up in a world in which terrorism in its many aspects is a salient cultural phenomenon. This paper explores the impact of growing up in a world with terrorism on children and youth. It considers both the direct traumatic effects of being a victim and the indirect effects of living in communities and societies in which the threat of terrorism is on the minds of children, but perhaps more importantly, of adults generally, and parents and policy makers in particular. It also considers policy initiatives and programmatic responses. Children and Terrorism

The violent conflict in Northern Ireland that led to some 3700 deaths was tied to opposing ethno‐sectarian groups and the state and the disputation between them over that country’s constitutional future. Republicans such as the Irish Republican Army used violence in order to ‘gain’ a united Ireland. Whereas loyalists such as the Ulster Volunteer Force and the British state utilised violence in order to maintain Northern Ireland’s constitutional link with the United Kingdom. Geographers writing on this conflict have, via various forms of spatial analysis studied the consequences of that violence with regard to territoriality, the construction of ideological space and the perpetuation of ethno‐sectarian boundaries. In more recent times, the analysis of conflict and post‐conflict Northern Ireland has evaluated the governance of a divided society, the role paramilitaries have played in embedding peace and also the paradoxical role of reproducing conflict by other non‐violent means. Northern Ireland remains as a divided society but there is a prominent role for geographers who study such a complex place to add to wider international scholarship regarding resistance and domination, revanchism, discourse construction, post‐conflict and the impact upon place and also the role of agency in both perpetuating and removing violence.