Northern Ireland

• 1. Introduction

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  Northern Ireland sits in the north-east corner of the island of Ireland, and it has never been easy to agree on what to call it. At the 2021 census, just over 1.9 million people lived there, making up around 3% of the United Kingdom's population. Some call it a country. Some call it a province. Some call it a region. The choice of word is rarely neutral. It tends to reveal the speaker's politics before they have said anything else.

  The territory was created in 1921, carved from six of Ulster's nine counties under the Government of Ireland Act 1920. From the start, two communities with incompatible visions of the future were placed inside the same border. One wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom; the other wanted a united, independent Ireland. The argument between them would define Northern Ireland's first century.

  What followed was not simply a political dispute. It produced decades of violence, a period known as the Troubles that killed more than 3,500 people and injured 50,000 others. It also produced the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, one of the most studied peace deals of the modern era. And it left behind a society still navigating the distance between its two communities, still debating its own name, still asking who belongs and on what terms.

• 2. Plantation and the Making of Two Communities

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  Before any of the modern arguments began, the region that would become Northern Ireland was home to Irish-speaking Gaelic kingdoms within the province of Ulster. English authority spread across much of Ireland after 1169, but Ulster's major Gaelic kingdoms, including the Uí Néill, largely kept their autonomy for centuries.

  The decisive break came at the end of the Nine Years' War, which ran from 1593 to 1603. An alliance of Gaelic chieftains led by Hugh Roe O'Donnell and Hugh O'Neill resisted English rule, won early victories, and received support from Spain. They were ultimately defeated. In 1607, many Ulster nobles fled to mainland Europe in what became known as the Flight of the Earls. Their departure changed everything. Their lands were confiscated and handed to English-speaking Protestant settlers from Britain in what was called the Plantation of Ulster.

  This was not the last wave of migration. Many more Scots Protestants crossed to Ulster during the Scottish famine of the 1690s, deepening the Protestant community's roots. By the early 18th century, the Anglican Protestant ruling class had enacted a series of Penal Laws designed to suppress Catholicism and, to a lesser extent, Presbyterianism. Between 1717 and 1775, roughly 200,000 Ulster Presbyterians emigrated to the American colonies, where their descendants became known as Scotch-Irish Americans.

  Sectarian tensions did not stay quiet. In the late 18th century, the Protestant Peep o' Day Boys and the Catholic Defenders clashed repeatedly in Ulster, culminating in the Battle of the Diamond in 1795. That confrontation led directly to the founding of the Protestant Orange Order, an organisation whose annual marches still mark the calendar in Northern Ireland today.

• 3. The Home Rule Crisis

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  By the late 19th century, a disciplined bloc of Irish Nationalist MPs at Westminster had pushed the Liberal Party toward granting Ireland self-government within the United Kingdom. The Government of Ireland Bill 1886 and the Government of Ireland Bill 1893 were both defeated. But by 1912, Home Rule looked almost certain to pass.

  In September 1912, more than 500,000 unionists signed the Ulster Covenant, pledging to oppose Home Rule by any means necessary. This was not merely a petition. In 1914, unionists smuggled thousands of rifles and rounds of ammunition from Imperial Germany for use by the Ulster Volunteer Force. Irish nationalists responded by forming their own paramilitary organisation, the Irish Volunteers, which also smuggled weapons into Ireland. Ireland appeared to be edging toward civil war.

  The crisis was interrupted, abruptly, by the outbreak of the First World War in August 1914. The UK government abandoned its amendment bill and passed the Suspensory Act 1914, placing Home Rule in suspension for the duration of the war. The question of how much of Ulster should be excluded from any future Irish government remained unanswered.

  By the war's end, the political ground had shifted entirely. The 1916 Easter Rising had taken place. The pro-independence Sinn Féin party won the overwhelming majority of Irish seats in the 1918 general election. Those elected members refused to take their seats in Westminster, founded a separate Irish parliament called Dáil Éireann, and declared an independent Irish Republic covering the whole island. The Irish Republican Army then began attacking British forces, starting the Irish War of Independence.

• 4. Partition and Its Violence

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  The Government of Ireland Act 1920 divided the island into two self-governing territories. The six north-eastern counties would form Northern Ireland, governed from Belfast. The other twenty-six counties would form Southern Ireland, governed from Dublin. The act came into force on the 3rd of May 1921, formally partitioning Ireland.

  The six counties chosen were Antrim, Down, Armagh, Londonderry, Tyrone, and Fermanagh. Unionists had settled on six rather than all nine Ulster counties because six gave them the largest territory they believed they could reliably dominate. Fermanagh and Tyrone were included even though both had nationalist majorities in the 1918 Irish general election.

  Partition arrived with violence. In 1920 and 1921, sectarian conflict broke out in Belfast and Derry. There were mass burnings of Catholic property in Lisburn and Banbridge. Belfast saw what contemporaries described as savage and unprecedented communal violence: rioting, gun battles, bombings, and the expulsion of people from workplaces and neighbourhoods. More than 500 were killed and more than 10,000 became refugees, most of them Catholics. The British Army was deployed and the Ulster Special Constabulary was formed, an almost wholly Protestant force whose members were also involved in reprisal attacks on Catholic civilians.

  A truce between British forces and the IRA was established on the 11th of July 1921. The Anglo-Irish Treaty, signed on the 6th of December 1921, set out the process for creating the Irish Free State. Under its terms, Northern Ireland could opt out of the new state, which the Parliament of Northern Ireland promptly did the following day. The Irish Boundary Commission, intended to settle the exact border, was delayed by the outbreak of the Irish Civil War. When it finally reported in 1925, it recommended only minor adjustments. The three governments suppressed the report and accepted the existing border.

• 5. Fifty Years of Unionist Government

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  Northern Ireland's first devolved government met on the 7th of June 1921, headed by Ulster Unionist Party leader James Craig. For the next fifty years, the Ulster Unionist Party held power without interruption. Every prime minister and almost every minister during this period were members of the Orange Order, as were all but 11 of the 149 Ulster Unionist Party MPs elected across those decades.

  The police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, was almost entirely Protestant and lacked operational independence, responding directly to government ministers. Its reserve force, the Ulster Special Constabulary, was characterised by the National Council for Civil Liberties in 1936 as nothing but the organised army of the Unionist party. The Special Powers Act, passed in 1922 and made permanent in 1933, allowed arrests without warrant, internment without trial, unlimited search powers, and bans on meetings and publications. It was not repealed until 1973.

  Local electoral boundaries were deliberately redrawn to ensure Unionist control in areas where unionists were a minority. Cities with nationalist majorities, including Derry, Enniskillen, Omagh, and Armagh, were gerrymandered. Public housing allocation, public sector employment, and policing all showed, in the words later used by UUP First Minister David Trimble himself, that Northern Ireland had been a cold house for Catholics.

  A system called plural voting remained in place until 1969. Under it, property and business owners could vote in multiple constituencies, which consistently advantaged wealthier Protestant voters. The Nationalist Party, the main opposition, often responded by having its elected members abstain from the parliament entirely.

• 6. The Troubles

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  The civil rights campaign that began in the late 1960s was modelled on the US civil rights movement. From 1967 to 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association led a campaign against anti-Catholic discrimination in housing, employment, policing, and electoral procedures. Many unionists regarded the campaign as an Irish republican front. The violent reaction to it triggered a thirty-year conflict.

  The Troubles produced 3,254 deaths and over 50,000 casualties. From 1969 to 2003, there were over 36,900 shooting incidents and over 16,200 bombings or attempted bombings. The Provisional IRA campaign ran from 1969 to 1997 and aimed at ending British rule and creating a united Ireland. The Ulster Volunteer Force, formed in 1966, represented the loyalist paramilitary response. State security forces, including the British Army and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, were also involved in the violence.

  The UK Government's stated position was that its forces were neutral, upholding law and order. Republicans pointed to collusion between state forces and loyalist paramilitaries. A subsequent investigation by the Police Ombudsman for Northern Ireland, known as the Ballast investigation, confirmed that the RUC had colluded with loyalist paramilitaries, was involved in murder, and had obstructed justice when allegations were investigated. The extent of that collusion remains disputed.

  In 1973, Northern Ireland held a referendum on whether to remain in the United Kingdom. The result was 98.9% in favour of the status quo, but only around 57.5% of the total electorate voted in support, after a boycott organised by the Social Democratic and Labour Party. Approximately 1% of Catholics voted. In 1981, the deaths of 10 men during the Irish hunger strike at HM Prison Maze drew worldwide attention to republican prisoners.

• 7. The Good Friday Agreement and After

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  The 1998 Good Friday Agreement was signed in Belfast and ratified simultaneously by referendums in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. It established a devolved power-sharing government, the Northern Ireland Assembly, located on the Stormont Estate. The Assembly must include both unionist and nationalist parties. The Constitution of Ireland was amended in 1999, replacing earlier articles that claimed sovereignty over the entire island.

  On the 28th of July 2005, the Provisional IRA declared an end to its armed campaign and decommissioned what is believed to be all of its arsenal. The Independent International Commission on Decommissioning oversaw this final act, with two external church witnesses present. The main loyalist paramilitary groups, the Ulster Defence Association, the UVF, and the Red Hand Commando, subsequently decommissioned their own arsenals, witnessed by former archbishop Robin Eames and a former senior civil servant.

  Devolved government returned on the 8th of May 2007, when Democratic Unionist Party leader Ian Paisley and Sinn Féin deputy leader Martin McGuinness took office as First Minister and deputy First Minister respectively. The pairing was remarkable: Paisley had spent decades as the most uncompromising voice of unionism; McGuinness had been a senior figure in the IRA.

  On the 3rd of February 2024, Michelle O'Neill was sworn in as First Minister, becoming the first ever Irish nationalist, republican, or Catholic to hold that position. In her acceptance speech at Stormont, she broke with republican tradition by using the term Northern Ireland, and pledged to represent all communities. In November 2024, she became the first senior Sinn Féin figure to take part in an official Remembrance Sunday ceremony, laying a laurel wreath at the Belfast Cenotaph at City Hall.

• 8. Identity, Economy, and Everyday Life

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  At the 2021 census, residents were able to choose more than one national identity. The results showed 42.8% identifying as British, 33.3% as Irish, and 31.5% as Northern Irish. In 2007, a survey found that 36% of the population defined themselves as unionist, 24% as nationalist, and 40% defined themselves as neither. A 2015 opinion poll found that 70% expressed a preference for Northern Ireland remaining in the United Kingdom, while 14% preferred a united Ireland.

  For the first time in Northern Ireland's history, the 2021 census recorded more people from a Catholic background than from a Protestant background. Catholics now hold a slight majority in the population. Irish became an official language on the 6th of December 2022, when the Identity and Language (Northern Ireland) Act 2022 came into law, officially repealing legislation from 1737 that had banned Irish in courts.

  The economy was heavily industrial at the time of partition, with shipbuilding, rope manufacture, and textiles as its base. Unemployment peaked at 17.2% in 1986, a consequence of both industrial decline and the years of conflict. Since the late 1990s, the economy has grown substantially, with services accounting for 53% of GVA by 2019. Belfast has become the UK's second largest tech hub outside London, with more than 25% of jobs technology-related. Companies including Fujitsu, SAP, IBM, and Microsoft have a presence there.

  Northern Ireland's geographic position after Brexit gave it a distinctive economic status: it can sell goods to both the rest of the United Kingdom and to the European Union tariff-free, free from customs declarations and non-tariff barriers. In 2021, sales to the UK totalled £12.8 billion while exports to the Republic of Ireland reached £5.2 billion. That unusual dual-market access, a product of the Northern Ireland Protocol, is one of the most concrete economic consequences of the peace architecture built around the Good Friday Agreement.