No solution: the Labour government and the Northern Ireland conflict, 1974–79

Abstract

The ‘British’ experience in Northern Ireland made political and military policy-makers cautious of becoming more deeply involved in the war in Yugoslavia 1991–5. The conflict appeared, at that point, to be getting worse rather than better. The Irish Republican Army's (IRA) 1994 ceasefire and the peace process, leading to the Good Friday or Belfast Agreement of 1998, transformed perceptions. In the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the British military believed that they had a successful approach to counter-insurgency that drew on the experiences of Malaya and Northern Ireland. This optimism persisted and informed the deployment to Helmand in 2006. The memory of the complexity of the Northern Ireland conflict was erased and replaced with simplistic ‘lessons’, leading to disastrous consequences. Stuart Aveyard's informed and well-researched book reminds readers of the intractability of the Northern Ireland conflict. He states in the first sentence of the book: ‘In its broadest sense this is a book about the limitations of government power’ (p. 1). The British government could not have simply imposed a solution on Northern Ireland.