Conflict in Northern Ireland: A Background Essay

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Conflict in Northern Ireland: A Background Essay

By John Darby

This chapter is in three sections; first, an outline of the development of the Irish conflict; second, brief descriptions of the main contemporary parties and interests in conflict; and third, an overview of approaches to managing or resolving the conflict.

. DATES AND SLOGANS

Dates are important in Ireland. This section will select four critical dates, each of which represents a major lurch in the already unstable chronicle of Anglo-Irish relationships. What follows, therefore, is not an abbreviated history but an attempt to identify a succession of themes.

170: The Norman Invasion

More than a century after the Norman Conquest of England, Henry II of England claimed and attempted to attach Ireland to his kingdom. He succeeded in establishing control in a small area around Dublin known as the Pale. Over the next four centuries this area was the beach-head for the kingdom of Ireland, adopting English administrative practices and the English language and looking to London for protection and leadership. A number of attempts were made to extend English control over the rest of Ireland, but the major expansion of English dominion did not take place until the sixteenth century. For the Irish clans who disputed the rest of the island with each other, England became the major external threat to their sovereignty and customs.

609: The Plantation of Ulster

By the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, military conquest had established English rule over most of the island of Ireland, with the principal exception of the northern province of Ulster. The Ulster clans, under Hugh O'Neill, had succeeded in overcoming their instinctive rivalries to create an effective alliance against Elizabeth's armies. After a long and damaging campaign, Ulster was eventually brought under English control and the Irish leaders left the island for Europe. Their land was confiscated and distributed to colonists from Britain. By 1703, less than 5 per cent of the land of Ulster was still in the hands of the Catholic Irish.

The Plantation of Ulster was unique among Irish plantations in that it set out to attract colonists of all classes from England, Scotland and Wales by generous offers of land. Essentially it sought to transplant a society to Ireland. The native Irish remained, but were initially excluded from the towns built by the Planters, and banished to the mountains and bogs on the margins of the land they had previously owned. The sum of the Plantation of Ulster was the introduction of a foreign community, which spoke a different language, represented an alien culture and way of life, including a new type of land tenure and management. In addition, most of the newcomers were Protestant by religion, while the native Irish were Catholic. So the broad outlines of the current conflict in Northern Ireland had been sketched out within fifty years of the plantation: the same territory was occupied by two hostile groups, one believing the land had been usurped and the other believing that their tenure was constantly under threat of rebellion. They often lived in separate quarters. They identified their differences as religious and cultural as well as territorial.

The next two centuries consolidated the differences. There were many risings. The Dublin based institutions of government - an Irish monarchy, parliament and government, reflecting those in Britain enforced a series of penal laws against Catholics and, to a lesser extent, Presbyterians. In 1801, in an attempt to secure more direct control of Irish affairs, the Irish parliament and government were abolished by an Act of Union and its responsibilities taken over by Westminster. During the nineteenth century a succession of movements attempted to overthrow the union. Some of these movements, including the Repeal movement in the 1840s and the Home Rule movement from the 1870s, were parliamentary. Others, like the Fenians and the Irish Republican Brotherhood, were dedicated to overthrowing the union by the use of physical force. It is probable that the union would have been repealed by a Home Rule act but for the intervention of the First World War. During the war an armed rising was attempted in Dublin during Easter week, 1916. The rising failed and the leaders were executed, creating a wave of sympathy for the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Féin. In the 1918 election Sinn Féin effectively replaced the old Irish Parliamentary Party and established its own Irish parliament. The resulting War of Independence between Britain and the IRA was eventually ended by a treaty and the Government of Ireland Act in 1920.
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Since the 1880s, many Ulster Protestants had become increasingly concerned about the possible establishment of home rule for Ireland. They prepared for resistance. In 1912 a civil war seemed imminent, but the focus was shifted from Ulster by the start of the First World War and by the Easter rising. From 1918, Ulster Protestants increasingly settled for a fall-back position and set out to ensure that the northern counties of Ireland, at least, should be excluded from any Home Rule arrangements. The 1920 Government of Ireland Act, which came into effect in the following year, recognised and confirmed ...

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