Conflict in Northern Ireland

Emma Evans

Is there sufficient evidence from sources D to J to explain why the troubles broke out in Northern Ireland in 1969?

For centuries there has been conflict in Northern Ireland, the disagreement between Irish Catholics and the Irish Protestants still continues to this day. In this piece of coursework I will be looking at the cause of ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland.

In 1916 a group led by James Connolly and Patrick Pearse decided to form an Irish Republic. In 1916 they lead the Easter. There was fighting for a week before a rebellion was crushed and many of the leaders were shot and Connolly was executed. This rising created more support for the idea of home rule as the British Government treated the rebels so harshly. Sinn Fein, a political party fighting for Irish independence started not long after in 1917. It intended to campaign for an independent Irish republic, replacing the two existing states. It is now known as an political party. The IRA became Sinn Fein’s para-military section and more attacks became common.

After the War Of Independence, in 1919, Ireland was divided into two parts; The North, or Ulster, was a large Protestant Majority, living in six Ulster counties, each had their own parliament and their
own government. The South, or Eire, was largely occupied by Catholics who opposed the idea of dividing Ireland for political or religious reasons.

But in 1921 a group of Protestants and Unionist members signed a treaty with the British, accepting the division of Ireland. However, Catholics and Sinn Fein had wanted a united and Independent Ireland, so resentment grew between the groups.

In the 1930s there was a worldwide economic depression, due to the 'Wall Street Crash' in America. Both Catholics and Protestants were affected; the economic depression lasted 20 years. Catholics faced another problem, when it came round to election time, most Catholics would probably vote a Catholic representative to speak on behalf of the Catholic people. However, the Protestants 'fixed' the elections to favour the Protestants It was made sure that no Catholics could be voted into Parliament to speak up for their fellow people. This was known as 'Gerrymandering'. The Unionists controlled the Catholic areas, this was a huge disadvantage to the Catholic people, and they had no political power. Catholics were not given job opportunities, if a Protestant and a Catholic applied for the same job, no matter how qualified the Catholic was, the Protestant would always get the job. This meant that many Catholics were unemployed and could often not afford to feed their families. Catholic children were put in the worst schools, whilst the Protestant children were put in the very best schools. Catholic children were not taught anything about Catholicism, they were only taught about Protestant history. Children grew up believing that Catholics were evil and the Protestant religion was the way forward.

During the late 1960’s the situation got that bad that Jack Lynch, the Irish Prime Minister, wanted troops to be sent to Northern Ireland to calm down the violence. Harold Wilson, the British Prime Minister, sent in the troops. On 12 August 1969, the Catholic and Nationalist population in the Bogside area of Derry, Northern Ireland took to the streets to confront the Royal Ulster Constabulary, in a protestant. The riots, which came to be known as the ‘Battle of the Bogside’, continued for almost 3 days and saw over 1,000 people injured. The battle ended when, British troops were deployed into Derry. The British troops took revenge on people and their property; this helped to increase IRA support. The British government then suggested a partition. This increased tension between Catholics and Protestants. This decision, by the British Government in Westminster, was to shape the future of Northern Ireland for over thirty years.

The sources

Source D

In source D we can see that religion plays a large part in schools. The school that Bernadette Devlin went to was very patriotic and ran by Roman Catholics - this could have meant that it was a convent. The vice-principal Mother Benignus had strong views against the English because all her family had suffered at the hands of the British forces.

She didn’t hate Protestants but her view was that they weren’t Irish.

Source D states that the interpretations we were given were very ...

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The sources

Source D

She didn’t hate Protestants but her view was that they weren’t Irish.

Source D states that the interpretations we were given were very different from Protestant history books. She was very keen about Irish culture and Irish history, this means that the Catholics were learning a different curriculum. This implies segregation from early days and that there was different understandings causing distrust built up. The problems with Source D are that it is a secondary source and is only about 1 school so we don’t know if it is typical of other schools.

This source is biased it only shows the catholic view and not the protestant view.

The author had reasons to hate the English therefore the views aren’t balanced.

Source E

Source E is a cartoon and shows that the Catholic religion ruled over the country; this posed as a problem to the Protestants because at the time there was a large home rule movement and if the Catholics gained home rule they would have been the most powerful group in Ireland. Protestants feared that that they would bring about the Rome rule. Protestants wanted a different type of government for Ireland this caused religious tension. In the source the priest is well dressed and represents the church whereas the woman is in rags and is meant to represent Ireland. The problems with this source are that it is a cartoon. It is also biased toward the protestant view and doesn’t show the catholic point of view.

Source F

Source F is a map showing ‘Gerrymandering’ in Derry during 1966. It shows partition and discrimination against the Catholics. The catholic population was double that of the Protestants at the time - this didn’t show in the results of the voting. Catholics felt unfairly treated because they didn’t have the same rights. The city was unfairly divided by Protestants. More councillors allocated to protestant areas. The voting was rigged in the Protestant's favour to 1 vote per householder. Poorer catholic families shared houses this meant that they had fewer votes.

Catholics also felt unfairly treated because they didn’t have the same job opportunities or housing rights.

More Protestants than Catholics became boundary commissioners because Catholics refused to take part due to discrimination. Therefore the boundaries of the constituencies favoured Protestants. Catholics had more population but less votes. Only 8 nationalist councillors were elected whereas 12 unionist councillors were elected. This resulted in the troubles between the two groups as the Catholics felt that they were unfairly treated. The problems with this source are that we don’t know if it is correct and it doesn’t cover the whole of Ireland. We don’t know the authorship or why it was written; it could have been written to provoke Catholic sympathy. We also don’t know what it was like before the evidence was published.

Source G

Source G is an artist’s impression showing protestant women being attacked by Catholics. This gives the Catholics a bed reputation. This picture was produced in a protestant textbook therefore would teach the protestant children to hate the Catholics because of the way they have been treated in the past. This encourages revenge. The women are stripped as a symbolic thing it means that the souls of Protestants would be saved and they could go to heaven. This shows the Catholics being reasonable. Source G is used as an excuse to promote biased history because of segregation; this will cause conflict. The problems with source G is that we don’t know who drew it therefore it might be exaggerated. It only shows one side taken from the protestant view and doesn’t show the catholic view or if this type of behaviour was provoked.

Source H

Source H is a photo of police attacking the nationalist and not protecting them. The caption tells us that the protestant police are obstructing a catholic civil rights marcher and not protecting him as the police are supposed to do. In this source we don’t know who took the photo or why they took it. The caption doesn’t give any useful information. We don’t know what the man may have done to cause the situation or he is even a civil rights marcher. There is no eye witness statement this could mean that it is a set-up and that all the people in the photo are catholic but are trying to make the protestants look bad.

Source I

Source I is also a photo, it shows the violence and riots that took place in 1969. The slogan says that it is a loyalist ambush of civil rights marchers. Source I is difficult to use as propaganda against the B specials. The image is grainy and unclear. There is no eye witness statements and we don’t know who took the photo or who wrote the caption. This source might be biased.

For example, problems begun in the 1500 are with the English/Protestant settlement. In the 1800’s the act of union was passed. This act united the parliament of Dublin with that of the United Kingdom. This meant that Britain controlled Ireland from Westminster. This still caused problems because the protestants wanted to remain being controlled by the British but the Catholics wanted home rule, this didn’t go down well on either side causing more conflict.

Other Information

The Easter Rising 1916

The Easter Rising took place on 24 April 1916 and was run by a man called Patrick Pearse and, head of para-military Irish Citizens Army, James Connolly. Almost all the revolutionary leaders were members of the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood. Rebels looked to Germany this time instead of France and Germany had promised to send arms. In addition to the small Irish Citizens Army there were thousands of volunteers. Like the UVF, the Volunteers carried out a successful gunrunning exploit, landing arms at Howth, near Dublin, a few days before war was declared. The Volunteers had been infiltrated by members of the IRB, which had secretly fixed Easter Sunday as the date for the rising. The Volunteers' leader, Eoin MacNeill, only discovered the plan on 20 April. Two days later, he learned that a German ship bringing arms had been scuttled. Realising that a rising was doomed to failure, he cancelled all Volunteer manoeuvres. Despite this setback, and knowing that their forces would be limited to a modest number of Dublin Volunteers as well as the ICA, Pearse and Connolly decided that a rising must take place, if only as a 'blood sacrifice' to arouse the Irish people that Britain was at war. The army and police had suffered greater casualties than Pearse's men. On 3 May, an announcement was made that Pearse and two others of the republican proclamation had been tried in court and shot. By 12 May the total executions had reached fifteen including Connolly. Another seventy-five rebels had the death penalty, including Countess Constance Markievicz, who would later become the first woman elected to the Westminster parliament. In halting the executions, the government was responding to a wave of public revulsion, but the damage had been done. Ireland had a new gallery of martyrs. Of some 3, 400 arrested following the surrender, more than half were imprisoned or interned in England.

The War of Independence

The Irish War of Independence was a sporadic guerrilla campaign that lasted from January 1919 until July 1921. The Irish Republican Army attacked the forces of the British crown with the intention of breaking Britain's will to rule Ireland. This campaign paralleled the political efforts of Sinn Fein to create an independent Irish republic.

The war was prosecuted ruthlessly by the IRA. The British retaliated in kind, introducing two new irregular forces into Ireland, the Black and Tans and the Auxiliaries. In general, the fighting was conducted on a low-level, sporadic but none the less vicious basis. Fewer than 2,000 IRA volunteers were faced by over 50,000 crown forces. It was not a nation-wide contest: the IRA depended upon energetic local leaders. Where there were none, there was little fighting. The principal areas of conflict were counties Dublin, Cork, Limerick, Tipperary, Clare, Kerry and Longford.

O’Neill

In 1960 Terence O’Neill became the new leader of the unionist party and Prime Minister of Northern Ireland .he tried to build a friendship with Catholics and the republic. Electors gave his policies, of creating jobs and developing industry, massive support.

The living and working conditions of many protestant working class people were dreadful. Housing problems and rising unemployment affected both Protestants and Catholics. Some unionists were concerned that the pace of O’Neill’s reforms was too fast.

Many unionists had become increasingly unhappy with O'Neill's reforms which they saw as concessions to nationalists and they felt he was taking Northern Ireland closer to a United Ireland. He had major critics, Faulkner, Craig and Chichester-Clark within his own Party, who disagreed with him over his reforms and resigned from his government. O'Neill was also heavily criticised by nationalists for his reluctance to bring in reforms such as "One Man, One Vote" and for his Government's handling of the civil rights marches in October 1968 and January 1969 when marchers had been attacked.

His growing unpopularity was clearly revealed by the limited support shown for pro-O'Neill candidates in the February election of 1969. Following some UVF explosions at water pumping stations in the spring of 1969, O'Neill decided to resign.
He aimed to end sectarianism and to bring Catholics and Protestants into working relationships

The Catholic Irish were beginning to lose faith and trust in their politicians, they felt that O'Neill was not keeping his promise of a 'fairer deal for Catholics', they were beginning to feel they needed to take the law into their own hands. As tensions grew, segregation became more likely.

Partition

In 1921 the British Government suggested that Ireland be partitioned into two, both with separate governments in Dublin and Belfast.

Most unionists didn’t want the partition they wanted the whole of Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom. Even nationalists and republicans in Ireland didn’t want the partition. They wanted all of Ireland to be independent of Britain.

Unionists feared that Home Rule would result in Rome Rule. They also believed that parliament in Dublin run by Catholic farmers would be bad for Protestant business. It was not until 1912-14 that they pressed for partition accepting that Home Rule was inevitable.

The possibility of Home Rule stemmed the campaign for an independent Ireland but the 1916 Easter Rising changed this. By 1918 Home Rule was no longer acceptable to most nationalist opinion.

In the General Elections of that year the pro-independence Sinn Fein won virtually every seat outside of Ulster.

Another significant social problem at the time for Catholic people was that they were placed in the worst housing. If a Catholic family were in need of a home, they would become second class citizens to a single Protestant girl; the girl would have a better chance of acquiring the house than the needy Catholic family. Many children had inadequate diets that resulted in many children dying of malnutrition. Many of the children's parents could not afford to pay doctor's bills. There was an outbreak of Tuberculosis.

Unionist discrimination against Catholics in housing and employment help explain why Northern Ireland's one party state collapsed in violence 50 years later.

Discrimination against Catholics

The Police in Northern Ireland were 99.9% Protestant and extremely biased and violent towards Catholics, they would attack innocent Catholics for no reason whatsoever. The Police even led the Catholic marchers into a trap, here they were met by violent Protestant Unionists, the outcome was inevitable, violence. The 'B-Specials' were created - this was a unit within the police, that were 99.9% Protestant. They were called in by the Unionists, to act like a police force/army. These too were violent to the Catholics, Catholic marches were banned. Student demonstrations ended up in violence. This angered the Catholics; they felt that if the Protestants should get to march they why shouldn't they. Housing conditions were appalling for Catholics, they marched and campaigned about their unfair housing, yet again nothing was done.

Catholics were becoming increasingly angered by the lack of equal opportunity in Northern Ireland.

Conclusion

When I compared the source material to that of other information found in texts and on the internet I concluded that there was not enough valid information in the sources to explain why the troubles broke out in Northern Ireland and who was responsible. In some sources the views are possibly biased or too politically autobiographical and do not give a balanced opinion or full story. The sources are unreliable and lots of crucial information is missing.

Some so called ‘factual sources’ such as maps, photos, eye witness accounts can easily be seen as genuine at first sight, but without further documents or historical data many of these items could be taken out of context and therefore they should not be relied upon. Many items have large chunks of information missing from them; for example Source H has no captions, eyewitness accounts or supporting photos to provide context or any basic facts.

Many sources are unreliable because of the political message they are trying to prove through propaganda used within the sources. Source G is typical of this form of propaganda. There is no evidence that this event took place, it is a drawing with a political message and appears in a protestant textbook. This source may not be considered neutral in its findings/conclusions, and should therefore be ignored unless all other data supports the evidence.

A valid conclusion can only be found when every piece of evidence is examined from each aspect of the ‘troubles’. I believe that it would be almost impossible to provide a conclusion due to the complex relationship between the two sides, protestant and catholic, and the various problems affecting the groups. These include social, economic, cultural, political and above all religious aspects, each one affecting the groups in different ways and providing lots of different facts and evidence that can be used to support all of the various propaganda beginning as early as the 1500’s and included the Act of Union, famine, Home Rule, Easter Rising, partition and civil rights. The sources do not provide sufficient information on why the troubles broke out; they miss out on information and crucial long-term factors.