Study the recent newspaper article provided. Choose one of these articles and explain in your own words what it is about.
History GCSE
Modern World Study: Assessment Objective 2
To explain a current situation in the light of past events
a) Study the recent newspaper article provided. Choose one of these articles and explain in your own words what it is about.
The newspaper article entitled 'In a sectarian city, children go back to school and run a gauntlet of hate' from 'The Independent' dated Tuesday 4th September, 2001 shows an example of the on-going conflict between the Catholic and Protestant community.
The article is about how pupils from Holy Cross Catholic Girls Primary School in Ardoyne, Belfast have to go to school in a predominantly Protestant area. As a consequence, the local Protestant loyalists have started a heated campaign to prevent the Catholic school children from using Ardoyne Road as a route to their school. The Red Hand Defenders, Protestant loyalists have requested that parents take their children on an alternative route to school. This was met with a negative response as the, 'parents felt this would be like handing victory to the loyalists by giving in to their intimidation.' As a result the Protestant loyalists launched a far more aggressive campaign in which the children were spat at and called unkind names such as 'Fenian scum'. This term was once viewed as a favourable name for Catholics, but today in is seen as a racist term.
The children had to witness violent behaviour and hear obscene threats aimed at both themselves and their parents. The dispute got so fierce that the young girls had to be escorted through Ardoyne Road by police and troops, 'but at some points the parents and the protestors came within a few feet of each other.' This cause great friction and elevated the fearful situation and the Catholic children were left scared and traumatized by the extreme circumstances. The police and troops took the situation very seriously as the Red Hand Defenders are known to be aggressive and the, 'organisation has carried out scores of pipe-bomb and shooting attacks.'
The Protestants argued that their reasons for the dispute were justified. They claimed that, 'Protestant homes have been attacked over the summer' and that, 'known republicans mixed provocatively with those taking the children to school.' They believed that their community was under siege and felt that their community was being encroached by Catholics and the Catholics were taking liberty of the situation. They insisted that the blockade had been the only way to get a message across.
'The school's problem is that it is in the wrong place, situated in a Protestant district just outside the confines of nationalist Ardoyne...The result is a classic self-inflicted Protestant public relations disaster.'
The Protestant were viewed in a very grim way and are accused of subjecting the Catholic children to cruel abuse. As a consequence of the protest the Protestant loyalists were viewed by many as supporting, 'bigotry and anti- Catholicism.
History GCSE
Modern World Study: Assessment Objective 2
To explain a current situation in the light of past events
b) Explain how past events have caused the problem(s) outlined in the newspaper article. Try to link your explanation directly to the events in the article.
The article gives an example of the on-going conflict between the Protestant and Catholic community. This conflict goes back many years and the roots of the situation can be seen in the history of the country.
The article is about how pupils from Holy Cross Catholic Girls Primary School in Ardoyne, Belfast have to go to school in a predominantly Protestant area. As a consequence, the local Protestant loyalists have started a heated campaign to prevent the Catholic school children from using Ardoyne Road as a route to their school. The loyalists argued that their reasons for the dispute were justified. They claimed that, 'Protestant homes have been attacked over the summer' and that, 'known republicans mixed provocatively with those taking the children to school.' The loyalists accusations and behaviour were met with a negative response as the, 'parents felt this would be like handing victory to the loyalists by giving in to their intimidation.' As a result the Protestant loyalists launched a far more aggressive campaign in which the children were spat at and called unkind names such as 'Fenian scum'. This term was once viewed as a favourable name for Catholics, but today in is seen as a racist term.
This hatred between the Protestant and Catholic community is just one example of how their bitter past has placed a huge strain on their relationship and how the continuing dispute between the two communities only adds to the fearful past causing more reason for conflict. Their dispute is not just about an inadequate route to school but about the shocking events throughout history that have remained in the minds of Protestants and Catholics.
An example of a long-term cause that has contributed to the conflict that can be seen today dates back to 1558 when Elizabeth I ...
This is a preview of the whole essay
This hatred between the Protestant and Catholic community is just one example of how their bitter past has placed a huge strain on their relationship and how the continuing dispute between the two communities only adds to the fearful past causing more reason for conflict. Their dispute is not just about an inadequate route to school but about the shocking events throughout history that have remained in the minds of Protestants and Catholics.
An example of a long-term cause that has contributed to the conflict that can be seen today dates back to 1558 when Elizabeth I became queen. She tried to end years of religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants by insisting that the Church of England should be only moderately Protestant, so that it included as many people as possible. To reward her Protestant supporters she gave them land taken from the Catholic Irish rebel leaders. By the end of Queen Elizabeth's reign, military conquest had established English rule over most of Ireland, with the exception of the northern region of Ulster. After a long and damaging campaign, Ulster was eventually brought under English control. The Catholics land was confiscated and distributed to colonists from Britain. By 1703, less than 5 per cent of Ulster was still in the hands of the Catholic Irish. As a consequence of this event, Catholics feel that the Protestants have stolen their land away from them. This began a long history of religious struggle between Protestants, who lived mainly in the north and Catholics, who lived mainly in the south. This event has added to the conflict between the two communities and can be seen as a long-term cause of the present situation.
Another long-term cause of the present problem was the events leading up to and after the Battle of Boyne where the result was a Protestant monarchy. The battle happened at the River Boyne, a few miles west of Drogheda. James II was a Roman Catholic and had lost the throne of England in the "Glorious Revolution" of 1688. William was Prince of Orange and became king at the request of parliament. He was a Protestant and was married to James's daughter Mary. When William became King, James decided join forces with Louis XIV of France. Louis saw this as an opportunity to attack William through Ireland and so he provided James with officers and weapons. The lord deputy, the Earl of Tyrconnell, was a Catholic and very loyal to James. His Irish army controlled most of the island. James quickly assembled a parliament that was largely Catholic. They tried to regain Catholic land that Protestant settlers had acquired through plantation. In September 1688, while James was still king, the city gates of Londonderry were closed. This was to prevent the entry of a Catholic regiment under Lord Antrim. By April 1689, the city was still refusing to surrender to James's army. The Protestants of Enniskillen defended their city successfully and won a number of victories over the Catholic troops. Eventually, James withdrew from the northern province.
William could not ignore the threat from Ireland. In March 1690, seven thousand French soldiers strengthened the Jacobite army, but Louis demanded over five thousand Irish troops in return. The Williamites were reinforced by Danish mercenaries and by English and Dutch regiments. William was able to gather an army of thirty-six thousand men. He began the march towards Dublin and the Jacobites soon withdrew to the south bank of the River Boyne. The battle was fought on 1st July 1690 four miles west of Drogheda. William's army was stronger by at least ten thousand men and by mid-afternoon the Jacobite army was in retreat.
Following William's success at the Battle of Boyne the Protestant William III of England defeated James II and he was forced to give up his throne. William III's victory began a long period of harsh English rule over the Irish Catholics.
Another long-term cause is the Orange Order. Protestants in County Armagh, Ireland, formed the Orange Order in 1795. It works to continue British rule and Protestant domination in Ireland. It was named after King William III of England, known as William of Orange, who destroyed the political power of Irish Roman Catholics. In 1885 the British Prime Minister William Gladstone declared in favor of Irish home rule. This meant the Orange Order gained many new supporters. The society celebrates the anniversary of the Battle of Boyne, on July 12th in which William III won control of Ireland. This is a very significant cause of the present situation and shows a demonstration of how the Protestants still keep their history alive and use I to keep their claim to Northern Ireland active.
A very significant middle-term cause of the current disturbances that can be seen in Northern Ireland was the partition of Ireland.
In 1800 the Act of Union marked the end of any form of Irish Independence. Resistance to British rule grew steadily through the nineteenth century and was increased by the events concerning the potato famine in 1845. By the early twentieth century, many people wanted full independence. Some Protestants took the nationalist side and demanded Home Rule, which aimed to get its supporters elected as MPs in the British Parliament. Unionists who wanted to keep the union with Britain believed that Home Rule meant 'Rome Rule'. This meant that the Catholic Church ruled it. Home Rulers wanted a separate Irish parliament but their campaign was defeated by a number of groups, including Irish unionists, who wanted to remain under British rule. However despite Unionists protests, Britain promised Home Rule just before World War I, and over one hundred and fifty thousand Irish went off to serve with the British army. However nationalists saw this as an opportunity to strike for full independence. At Easter 1916, Patrick Pearce led armed volunteers to seize public buildings in Dublin and declared an Irish Republic. However they were hopelessly outmatched and a few weeks later the leaders were executed. This ignited huge amounts of sympathy for the revolutionaries and in the 1918 elections, Sinn Fein, the nationalist party, won the majority of the seats allocated to Ireland at Westminster.
At the same time the IRA began war against the police and British army, which continued until 1921. After the death of the Mayor of Cork, Terrence MacSwiney the whole country, apart from the Unionists now supported an independent republic. The British knew that they could never win back Irish support and so London sued for peace. They did this to split the country in two. A treaty was agreed in December 1921 by which six of Ulster's counties stayed linked to the United Kingdom, with their own parliament in Belfast, while the other twenty-six counties became the Irish Free State. In 1920, the Government of Ireland Act split Ireland in two, and in 1937 the state changed its name to Eire when its written constitution was adopted and it left the British Commonwealth in 1949 and southern Ireland became independent.
After partition, the North became truly a 'Protestant State for a Protestant People'. Privileges were handed out to Protestants in the form of jobs and houses. In cities like Derry, Catholics formed sixty three percent of the population and the unionists controlled the local council. This is a major event in Irish history and the distress caused to the people involved has remained in the thoughts of Protestants and Catholics today. The partition of Ireland is one of the reasons why the events concerning Holy Cross Catholic Girls Primary School in Ardoyne, Belfast has occurred in such a raged manner.
Another middle-term cause of today's conflict is discrimination. After the partition of Ireland, Catholics were finding it a lot harder to get local authority jobs and Catholic areas were granted fewer services. In some cases they received almost none. The housing points system was made to replace the set-up where local councillors decided among themselves who got housed and who did not. This meant that they did not have to take into account anything other than their own prejudices. Catholics are much more likely to be unemployed than are Protestants, more than twice as likely in the case of males and the problem of violence remains as persistent as ever. Everywhere it was made clear that the interests of the Protestant workers lay with the Protestant bosses. These owned the factories and made sure that only Protestants were employed in them. Protestants were given nearly all the jobs in the Unionist run civil service. Catholics fought against Protestant domination in Northern Ireland. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) supported the Catholics and began a terrorist campaign for a united Ireland. To oppose this, the Protestants formed the Ulster Defence Force.
The result of all this discrimination was a large number of civil rights protests against any form of discrimination in Ireland and Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association was formed in January 1967 as a response to four decades of Unionist discrimination against Catholics. It was created in the O'Neill era, the period from 1963-69 when Captain Terence O'Neill became Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. The association demanded that each man got one vote in council elections, there was fair allocation of public housing, there was a predominantly Protestant auxiliary police force, there was an end to gerrymandering of electoral boundaries, there was machinery to prevent discrimination by public authorities and to deal with complaints and the abolition of the Special Powers Act and disbanding of B Specials. O'Neill angered Protestants when he became the first Prime Minister to visit a Catholic convent school and shake hands with a nun.
These public demonstrations of reconciliation did not deliver what Catholics wanted, which was civil rights and equal sharing in Northern Ireland. Instead they decided to take matters into their own hands for civil rights and the civil rights campaign politically mobilised Catholics for the first time since the formation of the Northern Ireland. Unionists had gerrymandered the official boundaries in Londonderry and this power was challenge for the first time on 5th October 1968 when NICRA staged its second civil rights march there. The Minister for Home Affairs who accused the civil rights movement of being a political front for the IRA had banned the march. During the protest a camera caught pictures of the RUC beating the marchers. These pictures were broadcast around the world and the Catholic community's confidence in the RUC was severely damaged. Following this shocking event more civil rights marches were organised. Protestants began to fear the Catholic and believed they were involved in a conspiracy to undermine their political authority. Ian Paisley, the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, exploited these fears, which provoked riots between civil rights marchers and Protestants.
This is another reason why neither side will ever give in. Too much has happened over the years and the Protestant and Catholic communities still look back on these events with an extreme grudge. A short-term cause of the present problems is the Battle of the Bogside. The Bogside is in the city of Londonderry, the second city of Northern Ireland. It is a prodominantly nationalist and Catholic area of Londonderry but Catholics had regularly been discriminated against in terms of political power. It was an Apprentice Boys parade in Derry that led to the mobilisation of British troops in Northern Ireland, after what became known as "The Battle of the Bogside". In 1969 a full-scale riot erupted when thousands of Apprentice Boys insulted and taunted Catholics at the Bogside. That night the erection of barricades on the edge of the Bogside began.
As thousands of Apprentice Boys and their supporters marched past Waterloo Place on the edge of the Bogside, lines of RUC men faced Nationalist youths. Riots erupted in Belfast after the Civil Rights Association called on Catholics to take pressure off the Bogside by stretching police resources. Five Catholics and one Protestant were killed on 14th August. That night a Protestant mob burnt almost every Catholic house in Bombay Street. That same afternoon the new Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, James Chichester-Clarke, called the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and asked for troops to be sent to Derry. Rioting quickly spread across other Catholic areas in Northern Ireland, continuing on a wide scale for two days. Shortly after 4.00 p.m., the British Army marched into Waterloo Place and the Battle of the Bogside had ended.
The Catholics views of the British Army had changed from being protectors to being the enemy. The IRA was able to take advantage of the situation, and in Belfast; for example, the Catholic community formed what was called the Citizen's Defense Community, representing seventy-five thousand Catholics. In Belfast there was a large Protestant and Unionist majority as the Protestants had been in control from 1603. This caused Catholics in Belfast to feel as if they were second-class citizens. What started as a small battle in a Catholic community became a battle that spread Northern Ireland and became a turning point in Irish conflict.
Following the Battle of the Bogside was Bloody Sunday. This is another short-term cause that has contributed to the hatred between the two communities. 'Bloody Sunday' refers to the events that took place in Derry on the afternoon of Sunday 30th January 1972. A Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) march had been organised to protest against Internment without trail in Northern Ireland. An estimated twenty thousand men, women and children took part in the march that took place in the predominantly nationalist city of Londonderry. Members of the British Army prevented the march from entering Londonderry center. The protestors then moved to 'Free Derry Corner' to attend a rally but some men began throwing stones at soldiers in William Street. Soldiers of the Parachute Regiment, an elite regiment of the British Army, moved into the Bogside in an arrest operation. Within thirty minutes the soldiers had shot dead thirteen men and had shot and injured a further thirteen people. The soldiers responsible for the deaths and injuries that day insisted that they had been attacked by members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and only fired at people in possession of weapons. However people who had witnessed the shootings provided evidence that none of those killed or injured had any guns or bombs. The killings provoked outrage and were exposed as "another Sharpeville". As a consequence The British Embassy in Dublin was burned down and the Home Bernadette Devlin, an MP, attacked Secretary Reginald Maudling in the House of Commons.
Edward Heath, the Prime Minister appointed the Lord Chief Justice of England, Lord Widgery, to conduct an inquiry. In April 1972, he concluded that the soldiers had been fired on first yet there was no evidence that the dead or wounded had been shot while handling weapons. However not everyone shared his controversial verdict, the Londonderry Coroner, Major Hubert O'Neill said that what had occurred was, "sheer unadulterated murder". On the twentieth anniversary of the killings an independent inquiry was launched. The Prime Minister, John Major's conclusion was that those killed could be regarded as innocent. This result did not satisfy the relatives of the dead and injured. Since Bloody Sunday the mayhem committed by terrorist groups from the Bog Side have kept the death toll rising.
The situation in Northern Ireland is very complex and identifying the exact roots to the problem is very difficult. The events that have happened throughout history have all contributed to the current situation. For example plantation, which created the situation where the two groups were aiming for different things, one wanted to be united with Britain and the other wanted to be their own country. In my opinion the roots of the present situation in Northern Ireland can be found mainly in the events of the last thirty years. Events such as the Battle of the Bogside and Bloody Sunday have remained in the minds of Protestants and Catholics throughout Ireland. This is a reason why neither side will ever step down from what they believe is theirs. The violent events of the more recent past have created the situation where neither side will back down or compromise because there has been too much suffering in the fight so far. Too much has happened over the years and the Protestant and Catholic communities still look back on these events with an extreme grudge. This grudge can be seen in the recent events in Belfast where innocent children are suffering the consequences of the long campaign of hatred.
Johanna Clarke 28th October, 2001
