Since 1973 Northern Ireland has been divided into 26 districts, each with an elected council responsible for providing local services. The province had previously been divided into more than 80 smaller urban and rural districts. The British government reformed the system in 1973 in response to housing allocation and employment practice abuses by local councils, as well as to the gerrymandering of election boundaries in closely contested areas. These abuses contributed significantly to Catholic protests and the campaign of civil disobedience that began in the 1960s. Both Catholic- and Protestant-controlled councils were guilty of abuses, but Protestants controlled the great majority of councils.
The British government’s answer to the uprising of 1798 was to draw the whole of Ireland fully into the United Kingdom, by the Act of Union of 1800. The Union did not benefit Ireland as a whole. No longer a capital, Dublin declined, and the rural population grew to unsustainable levels before the potato blight and famine of 1845 to 1850 set the population trend into rapid reverse. Memory of the famine and mass emigration generated the bitterness that later underpinned nationalist fervour.
The British Parliament in 1949 affirmed the status of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom unless its own parliament decided otherwise. In 1955 the IRA began a terrorist campaign aimed at expelling British forces from Northern Ireland. Low-level terrorist acts continued through 1957 and 1958, but faded away by 1962. In 1962 the government of Ireland condemned terrorism as a means of achieving unification.
In the 1960s opposition to the government of Northern Ireland grew as Catholics witnessed the strategies and successes of the American civil rights movement on their televisions. Civil disobedience campaigns against discriminatory actions of Protestant-dominated local councils quickly found strong support in Catholic neighborhoods. This was accompanied by increased sectarian street violence. In October 1968 a peaceful civil rights march in Londonderry/Derry was violently broken up by police. Conflict between Catholics and Protestants escalated, first in Londonderry/Derry and then in Belfast. By the summer of 1969, the police force, which was inadequate in numbers, skills, and on occasion impartiality, was unable to control the violence. In August 1969 the government of Northern Ireland requested that the British government send in the army to support the police. As the British army gradually brought civil disorder under control, the IRA began to reemerge. Catholics, who had initially welcomed the army as protectors against the Protestants, came to see the large-scale presence of British troops in Catholic neighborhoods as a hostile British occupation. As curfews and house-to-house arms searches concentrated on Catholic neighborhoods, IRA recruiting rose. The government of Northern Ireland reformed the province’s system of local government, but the reforms failed to satisfy Catholic opinion and created an aggressive Protestant backlash that impeded further progress. In August 1971 the government introduced internment (imprisonment without trial), and 300 republicans were rounded up. The IRA campaigns continued to escalate. At the same time, recruitment rose in Protestant vigilante groups such as the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF, not directly linked with the 1912-1914 body of the same name), which targeted suspected IRA members.
In March 1972 the British government insisted on taking over control of security policy, knowing that the government of Northern Ireland would resign in protest. The province then came under the direct rule of the British Parliament, pending the negotiation of new political structures acceptable to Catholics as well as to Protestants.
The British government created the post of secretary of state for Northern Ireland, with a seat in the British Cabinet, and a team of British junior ministers took over direction of Northern Ireland’s governmental departments. From then until the early 1990s Northern Ireland’s legislation passed through the British Parliament by orders in council (ordinances technically issued directly from the British monarch in consultation with members of the Cabinet) rather than as fully debated legislation. In 1983 the number of Northern Irish representatives in the British Parliament increased from 12 to 17, and in 1997 to 18. In a 1973 referendum largely boycotted by Roman Catholics, the voters of Northern Ireland chose to retain ties with Britain rather than join the Republic of Ireland.
