The word troubles has been used as a synonym for violent conflict for centuries, appearing in the English Act of free and general pardon of 1660 to describe the Wars of the Three Kingdoms, yet it was not until the late 1960s that the term became the defining label for the ethno-nationalist struggle in Northern Ireland. This conflict, which lasted for about 30 years from the late 1960s to 1998, began as a campaign by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association to end discrimination against the Catholic-nationalist minority by the Protestant-unionist government and local authorities. The government attempted to suppress the protests, and the police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, were overwhelmingly Protestant and known for sectarianism and police brutality. The campaign was also violently opposed by Ulster loyalists, who believed it was a front for republican political activity. Increasing tensions led to the August 1969 riots and the deployment of British troops, in what became the British Army's longest operation. Peace walls were built in some areas to keep the two communities apart. Some Catholics initially welcomed the British Army as a more neutral force than the RUC, but soon came to see it as hostile and biased, particularly after Bloody Sunday in 1972. The conflict was not a religious war, despite the division between Protestants and Catholics, but a political and nationalistic struggle fuelled by historical events, with a strong ethnic and sectarian dimension, fought over the status of Northern Ireland. Unionists and loyalists, who for historical reasons were mostly Ulster Protestants, wanted Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom. Irish nationalists and republicans, who were mostly Irish Catholics, wanted Northern Ireland to leave the United Kingdom and join a united Ireland. Although the Troubles mostly took place in Northern Ireland, at times violence spilled over into parts of the Republic of Ireland, England, and mainland Europe. More than 3,500 people were killed in the conflict, of whom 52% were civilians, 32% were members of the British security forces, and 16% were members of paramilitary groups. Republican paramilitaries were responsible for 60% of total deaths, followed by loyalist paramilitaries at 30% and security forces at 10%. Loyalists were responsible for 48% of all civilian deaths, however, followed by republicans at 39% and security forces at 10%.
The Roots Of Division
In 1609, Scottish and English settlers, known as planters, were given land escheated from the native Irish in the Plantation of Ulster, setting the stage for centuries of conflict between the native Catholics and the planters. This resulted in two bloody religious conflicts known as the Irish Confederate Wars from 1641 to 1653 and the Williamite war from 1689 to 1691, both of which resulted in Protestant victories. Anglican dominance in Ireland was ensured by the passage of the Penal Laws that curtailed the religious, legal, and political rights of anyone who did not conform to the state church, the Anglican Church of Ireland. As the Penal Laws started to be phased out in the latter part of the 18th century, there was more competition for land, as restrictions were lifted on the Irish Catholic ability to rent. With Irish Catholics allowed to buy land and enter trades from which they had formerly been banned, tensions arose resulting in the Protestant Peep o' Day Boys and Catholic Defenders. This created polarisation between the communities and a dramatic reduction in reformers among Protestants, many of whom had been growing more receptive to democratic reform. Following the foundation of the republican Society of the United Irishmen by Presbyterians, Catholics, and liberal Anglicans, and the resulting failed Irish Rebellion of 1798, sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants continued. The Orange Order, founded in 1795, with its stated goal of upholding the Protestant faith and loyalty to the heirs of William of Orange, dates from this period and remains active to this day. With the Acts of Union 1800, which came into force on the 1st of January 1801, a new political framework was formed with the abolition of the Irish Parliament and incorporation of Ireland into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The result was a closer tie between Anglicans and the formerly republican Presbyterians as part of a loyal Protestant community. Although Catholic emancipation was achieved in 1829, largely eliminating official discrimination against Roman Catholics, the Repeal Association's campaign to repeal the 1801 Union failed. In the late 19th century, the Home Rule movement was created and served to define the divide between most nationalists, usually Catholics, who sought the restoration of an Irish Parliament, and most unionists, usually Protestants, who were afraid of being a minority under a Catholic-dominated Irish Parliament and who tended to support continuing union with Great Britain. Unionists and Home Rule advocates were the main political factions in late 19th- and early 20th-century Ireland. By the second decade of the 20th century, Home Rule, or limited Irish self-government, was on the brink of being conceded due to the agitation of the Irish Parliamentary Party. In response to the campaign for Home Rule which started in the 1870s, unionists, mostly Protestant and largely concentrated in Ulster, had resisted both self-government and independence for Ireland, fearing for their future in an overwhelmingly Catholic country dominated by the Roman Catholic Church. In 1912, unionists led by Edward Carson signed the Ulster Covenant and pledged to resist Home Rule by force if necessary. To this end, they formed the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force. In response, nationalists led by Eoin MacNeill formed the Irish Volunteers in 1913, whose goal was to oppose the UVF and ensure enactment of the Third Home Rule Bill in the event of British or unionist refusal. The outbreak of the First World War in 1914, and Ireland's involvement in the war, temporarily averted possible civil war in Ireland and delayed the resolution of the question of Irish independence. Home Rule, although passed in the British Parliament with Royal Assent, was suspended for the duration of the war. The Irish Volunteers split, with a majority, known as the National Volunteers, supporting the war effort, and some of them joining Irish regiments of the New British Army. Many of those who stayed were radical nationalists, among them Irish Republican Brotherhood infiltrators. From these ranks came those who launched the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916, led by Patrick Pearse and James Connolly. Two-and-a-half years after the executions of sixteen of the Rising's leaders, the separatist Sinn Féin party won the December 1918 general election in Ireland with 47% of the vote and a majority of seats, and set up the 1919 First Dáil, the Irish Parliament, in Dublin. Their victory was aided by the threat of conscription for First World War service. The Irish War for Independence followed, leading to eventual independence in 1922 for the Irish Free State, which comprised 26 of the 32 Irish counties. In Ulster, particularly in the six counties which became Northern Ireland, Sinn Féin fared relatively poorly in the 1918 election, and unionists won a majority. The Government of Ireland Act 1920 partitioned the island of Ireland into two separate jurisdictions, Southern Ireland and Northern Ireland, both devolved regions of the United Kingdom. This partition of Ireland was confirmed when the Parliament of Northern Ireland exercised its right in December 1922 under the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 to opt out of the newly established Irish Free State. A part of the treaty signed in 1922 mandated that a boundary commission would sit to decide where the frontier of the northern state would be in relation to its southern neighbour. After the Irish Civil War of 1922 to 1923, this part of the treaty was given less priority by the new Dublin government led by W. T. Cosgrave, and was quietly dropped. As counties Fermanagh and Tyrone and border areas of Londonderry, Armagh, and Down were mainly nationalist, the Irish Boundary Commission could reduce Northern Ireland to four counties or fewer. In October 1922, the Irish Free State government established the North-Eastern Boundary Bureau, a government office which by 1925 had prepared 56 boxes of files to argue its case for large areas of Northern Ireland to be transferred to the Free State. Northern Ireland remained a part of the United Kingdom, albeit under a separate system of government whereby it was given its own parliament and devolved government. While this arrangement met the desires of unionists to remain part of the United Kingdom, nationalists largely viewed the partition of Ireland as an illegal and arbitrary division of the island against the will of the majority of its people. They argued that the Northern Ireland state was neither legitimate nor democratic, but created with a deliberately gerrymandered unionist majority. Catholics initially composed about 35% of its population. A total of 557 people, mostly Catholics, were killed in political or sectarian violence from 1920 to 1922 in the six counties that would become Northern Ireland, both during and after the Irish War of Independence. The result was communal strife between Catholics and Protestants, with some historians describing this violence, especially that in Belfast, as a pogrom, although historian Peter Hart argues that the term is not appropriate given the reciprocity of violence in Northern Ireland. A marginalised remnant of the Irish Republican Army survived the Irish Civil War. This would come to have a major impact on Northern Ireland. Although the IRA was proscribed on both sides of the new Irish border, it remained ideologically committed to overthrowing both the Northern Ireland and the Free State governments by force of arms to unify Ireland. The government of Northern Ireland passed the Special Powers Act in 1922, giving sweeping powers to the government and police to intern suspects without trial and to administer corporal punishment such as flogging to re-establish or preserve law and order. The Act continued to be used against nationalists long after the violence of this period had come to an end. Various unionist militias were also incorporated into state structures, including the Ulster Special Constabulary, which Allen Feldman argues emulated the state's fusion of repressive and ideological apparatuses. In 1920, in local elections held under proportional representation, nationalists had won control over many local governments, including the County Councils of Fermanagh and Tyrone, and the Londonderry Borough Council governing Derry City. In response, in 1922, the new unionist government re-drew the electoral boundaries to give its supporters a disproportionate majority and abolished proportional representation in favour of first past the post voting. This resulted in control by unionists of areas such as Derry City, Fermanagh, and Tyrone, where they were actually a minority of voters. The two sides' positions became strictly defined following this period. From a unionist perspective, Northern Ireland's nationalists were inherently disloyal and determined to force unionists into a united Ireland. This threat was seen as justifying preferential treatment of unionists in housing, employment, and other fields. The prevalence of larger families and thus the potential for a more rapid population growth among Catholics was seen as a threat. Unionist governments ignored Edward Carson's warning in 1921 that alienating Catholics would make Northern Ireland inherently unstable. After the early 1920s, there were occasional incidents of sectarian unrest in Northern Ireland. These included severe rioting in Belfast in the 1930s and 1950s, and the IRA's brief Northern Campaign in the 1940s and Border Campaign between 1956 and 1962, which did not enjoy broad popular support among nationalists. After the IRA called off its campaign in 1962, Northern Ireland became relatively stable for a few years.
There is little agreement on the exact date of the start of the Troubles, with different writers suggesting dates ranging from the formation of the modern Ulster Volunteer Force in 1966 to the deployment of British troops on the 14th of August 1969. The Northern Ireland Troubles Legacy and Reconciliation Act 2023, passed by the Parliament of the United Kingdom, defined the start of the Troubles as the 1st of January 1966 for the purposes of the act. In March and April 1966, Irish nationalists and republicans held parades throughout Ireland to mark the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising. On the 8th of March, a group of Irish republicans dynamited Nelson's Pillar in Dublin. At the time, the IRA was weak and not engaged in armed action, but some unionists warned it was about to be revived to launch another campaign against Northern Ireland. Loyalists, led by Ian Paisley, a Protestant fundamentalist preacher, founded the Ulster Constitution Defence Committee in April 1966. It set up a paramilitary-style wing called the Ulster Protestant Volunteers to oust Terence O'Neill, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland. Although O'Neill was a unionist, they viewed him as being too soft on the civil rights movement and opposed his policies. At the same time, a loyalist group calling itself the Ulster Volunteer Force emerged in the Shankill area of Belfast. It was led by Gusty Spence, a former British soldier. Many of its members were also members of the UCDC and UPV. In April and May 1966, the UVF petrol bombed a number of Catholic homes, schools, and businesses. A firebomb killed an elderly Protestant widow, Matilda Gould. On the 21st of May 1966, the UVF issued a statement declaring war against the IRA and anyone helping it. The UVF fatally shot a Catholic civilian, John Scullion, as he walked home on the 27th of May. A month later it shot three Catholic civilians as they left a pub, killing Peter Ward, a Catholic from the Falls Road. Shortly after, the UVF was proscribed by the Northern Ireland government. The UVF is still considered a terrorist organisation by the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. In the mid-1960s, a non-violent civil rights campaign began in Northern Ireland. It comprised groups such as the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, the Campaign for Social Justice, the Derry Housing Action Committee, and People's Democracy, whose stated goals were an end to job discrimination, an end to discrimination in housing allocation, one man one vote, an end to gerrymandering of electoral boundaries, reform of the police force, and repeal of the Special Powers Act. Some suspected and accused NICRA of being a republican front-group whose ultimate goal was to unite Ireland. Although republicans and some members of the IRA, then led by Cathal Goulding and pursuing a non-violent agenda, helped to create and drive the movement, they did not control it and were not a dominant faction within it. On the 20th of June 1968, civil rights activists, including nationalist Member of Parliament Austin Currie, protested against housing discrimination by squatting in a house in Caledon, County Tyrone. The local council had allocated the house to an unmarried 19-year-old Protestant, Emily Beattie, the secretary of a local UUP politician, instead of either of two large Catholic families with children. RUC officers, one of whom was Beattie's brother, forcibly removed the activists. Two days before the protest, the two Catholic families who had been squatting in the house next door were removed by police. Currie had brought their grievance to the local council and to Stormont, but had been told to leave. The incident invigorated the civil rights movement. On the 24th of August 1968, the civil rights movement held its first civil rights march from Coalisland to Dungannon. Many more marches were held over the following year. Loyalists, especially members of the UPV, attacked some of the marches and held counter-demonstrations in a bid to get the marches banned. Because of the lack of police reaction to the attacks, nationalists saw the RUC, which was almost wholly Protestant, as backing the loyalists and allowing the attacks to occur. On the 5th of October 1968, a civil rights march in Derry was banned by the Northern Ireland government. When marchers defied the ban, RUC officers surrounded the marchers and beat them indiscriminately and without provocation. More than 100 people were injured, including a number of nationalist politicians. The incident was filmed by television news crews and shown around the world. It caused outrage among Catholics and nationalists, sparking two days of rioting in Derry between nationalists and the RUC. A few days later, a student civil rights group, People's Democracy, was formed in Belfast. In late November, O'Neill promised the civil rights movement some concessions, but these were seen as too little by nationalists and too much by loyalists. On the 1st of January 1969, People's Democracy began a four-day march from Belfast to Derry, which was repeatedly harassed and attacked by loyalists. At Burntollet Bridge, the marchers were attacked by about 200 loyalists, including some off-duty police officers, armed with iron bars, bricks, and bottles in a planned ambush. When the march reached Derry City, it was again attacked. The marchers claimed that police did nothing to protect them and that some officers helped the attackers. That night, RUC officers went on a rampage in the Bogside area of Derry, attacking Catholic homes, attacking and threatening residents, and hurling sectarian abuse. Residents then sealed off the Bogside with barricades to keep the police out, creating Free Derry, which was briefly a no-go area for the security forces. In March and April 1969, loyalists bombed water and electricity installations in Northern Ireland, blaming them on the dormant IRA and elements of the civil rights movement. Some attacks left much of Belfast without power and water. Loyalists hoped the bombings would force O'Neill to resign and bring an end to any concessions to nationalists. There were six bombings between the 30th of March and the 26th of April. All were widely blamed on the IRA, and British soldiers were sent to guard installations. Unionist support for O'Neill waned, and on the 28th of April he resigned as prime minister. On the 19th of April, there were clashes between NICRA marchers, the RUC, and loyalists in the Bogside. RUC officers entered the house of Samuel Devenny, 42, an uninvolved Catholic civilian, and beat him along with two of his teenage daughters and a family friend. One of the daughters was beaten unconscious as she lay recovering from surgery. Devenny suffered a heart attack and died on the 17th of July from his injuries. On the 13th of July, RUC officers beat another Catholic civilian, Francis McCloskey, 67, during clashes in Dungiven. He died of his injuries the next day. On the 12th of August, the loyalist Apprentice Boys of Derry were allowed to march along the edge of the Bogside. Taunts and missiles were exchanged between the loyalists and nationalist residents. After being bombarded with stones and petrol bombs from nationalists, the RUC, backed by loyalists, tried to storm the Bogside. The RUC used CS gas, armoured vehicles, and water cannons, but were kept at bay by hundreds of nationalists. The continuous fighting, which became known as the Battle of the Bogside, lasted for three days. In response to events in Derry, nationalists held protests at RUC bases in Belfast and elsewhere. Some of these led to clashes with the RUC and attacks on RUC bases. In Belfast, loyalists responded by invading nationalist districts, burning houses and businesses. These sectarian attacks were characterised as the worst assaults on Catholic districts since the 1920s. There were gun battles between nationalists and the RUC and between nationalists and loyalists. A group of about 30 IRA members was involved in the fighting in Belfast. The RUC deployed Shorland armoured cars mounted with heavy Browning machine guns capable of firing up to 600 rounds per minute. The Shorlands opened fire on a block of flats in a nationalist district, killing a nine-year-old boy named Patrick Rooney who was shot in the head while asleep in bed by a bullet that passed through two walls. RUC officers opened fire on rioters in Armagh, Dungannon, and Coalisland. During the riots, on the 13th of August, Taoiseach Jack Lynch made a television address. He condemned the RUC and said that the Irish Government can no longer stand by and see innocent people injured and perhaps worse. He called for a United Nations peacekeeping force to be deployed and said that Irish Army field hospitals were being set up at the border in County Donegal near Derry. Lynch added that Irish re-unification would be the only permanent solution. Some interpreted the speech as a threat of military intervention. After the riots, Lynch ordered the Irish Army to plan for a possible humanitarian intervention in Northern Ireland. The plan, Exercise Armageddon, was rejected and remained classified for thirty years. On 14 to the 15th of August, British troops were deployed in Operation Banner in Derry and Belfast to restore order, but did not try to enter the Bogside, bringing a temporary end to the riots. Ten people had been killed, among them Rooney, the first child killed by police during the conflict, and 745 had been injured, including 154 who suffered gunshot wounds. 154 homes and other buildings were demolished and over 400 needed repairs, of which 83% of the buildings damaged were occupied by Catholics. Between July and the 1st of September, 505 Catholic and 315 Protestant families were forced to flee their homes. The Irish Army set up refugee camps in the Republic near the border. Nationalists initially welcomed the British Army, as they did not trust the RUC. On the 9th of September, the Northern Ireland Joint Security Committee met at Stormont Castle and decided that on the 10th of September, the British Army started construction of the first peace wall. It was the first of many such walls across Northern Ireland, and still stands today. After the riots, the Hunt Committee was set up to examine the RUC. It published its report on the 12th of October, recommending that the RUC become an unarmed force and the USC be disbanded. That night, loyalists took to the streets of Belfast in protest at the report. During violence in the Shankill, UVF members shot dead RUC officer Victor Arbuckle. He was the first RUC officer to be killed during the Troubles. In October and December 1969, the UVF carried out a number of small bombings in the Republic of Ireland.
The Year Of Blood
Despite the British government's attempt to do nothing that would suggest partiality to one section of the community and the improvement of the relationship between the Army and the local population following the Army assistance with flood relief in August 1970, the Falls Curfew and a situation that was described at the time as an inflamed sectarian one, which is being deliberately exploited by the IRA and other extremists meant that relations between the Catholic population and the British Army rapidly deteriorated. From 1970 to 1972, an explosion of political violence occurred in Northern Ireland. The deadliest attack in the early 1970s was the McGurk's Bar bombing by the UVF in 1971. The violence peaked in 1972, when nearly 500 people, just over half of them civilians, were killed, the worst year in the entire conflict. By the end of 1971, 29 barricades were in place in Derry, blocking access to what was known as Free Derry; 16 of these were impassable even to the British Army's one-ton armoured vehicles. Many of the nationalist or republican no-go areas were controlled by one of the two factions of the Irish Republican Army, the Provisional IRA and Official IRA. There are several reasons offered for why violence escalated in these years. Unionists say the main reason was the formation of the Provisional IRA and Official IRA, particularly the former. These two groups were formed when the IRA split into the Provisional and Official factions. While the older IRA had embraced non-violent civil agitation, the new Provisional IRA was determined to wage armed struggle against British rule in Northern Ireland. The new IRA was willing to take on the role of defenders of the Catholic community, rather than seeking working-class ecumenical unity across both communities. Nationalists point to a number of events in these years to explain the upsurge in violence. One such incident was the Falls Curfew in July 1970, when 3,000 troops imposed a curfew on the nationalist Lower Falls area of Belfast for two days as part of a weapons search, in which four civilians were killed and the army faced sporadic riots and gun battles with the Official IRA, firing over 1500 rounds of ammunition in total. Another was the introduction of internment without trial in 1971, of 350 initial detainees, none were Protestants. Moreover, due to poor intelligence, very few of those interned were actually republican activists at the time, but some internees became increasingly radicalised as a result of their experiences. In August 1971, eleven civilians were shot dead in the Ballymurphy massacre in Belfast. They were innocent and the killings were unjustified, according to a 2021 coroner's inquest. Nine victims were shot by the British Army. The Bogside massacre, colloquially known as Bloody Sunday, was the shooting dead of thirteen unarmed men by the British Army at a proscribed anti-internment rally in Derry on the 30th of January 1972, a fourteenth man died of his injuries some months later, while fifteen other civilians were wounded. The march had been organised by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association. The soldiers involved were members of the 1st Battalion, Parachute Regiment, also known as 1 Para. This was one of the most prominent events that occurred during the Troubles as it was recorded as the largest number of civilians killed in a single shooting incident. Bloody Sunday greatly increased the hostility of Catholics and Irish nationalists towards the British military and government while significantly elevating tensions. As a result, the Provisional IRA gained more support, especially through rising numbers of recruits in the local areas. Following the introduction of internment, there were numerous gun battles between the British Army and both the Provisional and Official IRA. These included the Battle at Springmartin and the Battle of Lenadoon. Between 1971 and 1975, 1,981 people were interned: 1,874 were Catholic and republican, and 107 were Protestant and loyalist. There were widespread allegations of abuse and even torture of detainees, and in 1972, the five techniques used by the police and army for interrogation were ruled to be illegal following a British government inquiry. The Provisional IRA, or Provos as they became known, sought to establish themselves as the defender of the nationalist community. The Official IRA began its own armed campaign in reaction to the ongoing violence. The Provisional IRA's offensive campaign began in early 1971 when the Army Council sanctioned attacks on the British Army. In 1972, the Provisional IRA killed approximately 100 members of the security forces, wounded 500 others, and carried out approximately 1,300 bombings, mostly against commercial targets which they considered the artificial economy. Their bombing campaign killed many civilians, notably on Bloody Friday on the 21st of July, when they set off 22 bombs in the centre of Belfast, killing five civilians, two British soldiers, a Royal Ulster Constabulary reservist, and an Ulster Defence Association member. Ten days later, nine civilians were killed in a triple car bombing in Claudy. The IRA is accused of committing this bombing but no proof for that accusation is yet published. In 1972, the Official IRA's campaign was largely counter-productive. The Aldershot bombing, an attack on the barracks of the Parachute Regiment in retaliation for Bloody Sunday, killed five female cleaners, a gardener and an army chaplain. The Official IRA killed three soldiers in Derry in April, but Joe McCann was killed by the Parachute Regiment in Belfast during the same month. The Official IRA called off its campaign in May 1972. British troop concentrations peaked at 1 to 50 of the civilian population, the highest ratio found in the history of counterinsurgency warfare, higher than that achieved during the Malayan Emergency to which the conflict is frequently compared. Operation Motorman, the military operation for the surge, was the biggest military operation in Ireland since the Irish War of Independence. In total, almost 22,000 British forces were involved. In the days before the 31st of July, about 4,000 extra troops were brought into Northern Ireland. Despite a temporary ceasefire in 1972 and talks with British officials, the Provisionals were determined to continue their campaign until the achievement of a united Ireland. The UK government in London, believing the Northern Ireland administration incapable of containing the security situation, sought to take over the control of law and order there. As this was unacceptable to the Northern Ireland Government, the British government pushed through emergency legislation, the Northern Ireland Temporary Provisions Act 1972, which suspended the unionist-controlled Stormont parliament and government, and introduced direct rule from London. Direct rule was initially intended as a short-term measure; the medium-term strategy was to restore self-government to Northern Ireland on a basis that was acceptable to both unionists and nationalists. Agreement proved elusive, however, and the Troubles continued throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and the 1990s within a context of political deadlock. The existence of no-go areas in Belfast and Derry was a challenge to the authority of the British government in Northern Ireland, and the British Army demolished the barricades and re-established control over the areas in Operation Motorman on the 31st of July 1972.
The Long War Strategy
In June 1973, following the publication of a British White Paper and a referendum in March on the status of Northern Ireland, a new parliamentary body, the Northern Ireland Assembly, was established. Elections to this body were held on the 28th of June. In October 1973, mainstream nationalist and unionist parties, along with the British and Irish governments, negotiated the Sunningdale Agreement, which was intended to produce a political settlement within Northern Ireland, but with a so-called Irish dimension involving the Republic. The agreement provided for power-sharing, the creation of an executive containing both unionists and nationalists; and a Council of Ireland, a body made up of ministers from Northern Ireland and the Republic that was designed to encourage cross-border co-operation. Unionists were split over Sunningdale, which was also opposed by the IRA, whose goal remained nothing short of an end to the existence of Northern Ireland as part of the UK. Many unionists opposed the concept of power-sharing, arguing that it was not feasible to share power with nationalists who sought the destruction of the state. Perhaps more significant, however, was the unionist opposition to the Irish dimension and the Council of Ireland, which was perceived as being an all-Ireland parliament-in-waiting. Remarks by a young Social Democratic and Labour Party councillor Hugh Logue to an audience at Trinity College Dublin that Sunningdale was the tool by which the Unionists will be trundled off to a united Ireland also damaged chances of significant unionist support for the agreement. In January 1974, Brian Faulkner was narrowly deposed as UUP leader and replaced by Harry West, although Faulkner retained his position as Chief Executive in the new government. A UK general election in February 1974 gave the anti-Sunningdale unionists the opportunity to test unionist opinion with the slogan Dublin is only a Sunningdale away, and the result galvanised their support: they won 11 of the 12 seats, winning 58% of the vote with most of the rest going to nationalists and pro-Sunningdale unionists. Ultimately, the Sunningdale Agreement was brought down by mass action on the part of loyalist paramilitaries and workers, who formed the Ulster Workers' Council. They organised a general strike, the Ulster Workers' Council strike. This severely curtailed business in Northern Ireland and cut off essential services such as water and electricity. Nationalists argue that the British Government did not do enough to break this strike and uphold the Sunningdale initiative. There is evidence that the strike was further encouraged by MI5, a part of their campaign to disorientate British prime minister Harold Wilson's government. Faced with such opposition, the pro-Sunningdale unionists resigned from the power-sharing government and the new regime collapsed. Three days into the UWC strike, on the 17th of May 1974, two UVF teams from the Belfast and Mid-Ulster brigades detonated three no-warning car bombs in Dublin's city centre during the Friday evening rush hour, resulting in 26 deaths and close to 300 injuries. Ninety minutes later, a fourth car bomb exploded in Monaghan, killing seven additional people. Nobody has ever been convicted for these attacks and the bombings were the greatest loss of life in a single day during the Troubles. Even as his government deployed troops in August 1969, Wilson ordered a secret study of whether the British military could withdraw from Northern Ireland, including all 45 bases, such as the submarine school in Derry. The study concluded that the military could do so in three months, but if increased violence collapsed civil society, Britain would have to send in troops again. Without bases, to do so would be an invasion of Ireland; Wilson thus decided against a withdrawal. Wilson's cabinet discussed the more drastic step of complete British withdrawal from an independent Northern Ireland as early as February 1969, as one of various possibilities for the region including direct rule. He wrote in 1971 that Britain had responsibility without power there, and secretly met with the IRA that year while leader of the opposition; his government in late 1974 and early 1975 again met with the IRA to negotiate a ceasefire. During the meetings, the parties discussed complete British withdrawal. Although the British government publicly stated that troops would stay as long as necessary, widespread fear from the Birmingham pub bombings and other IRA attacks in Britain itself increased support among MPs and the public for a military withdrawal. The failure of Sunningdale and the effectiveness of the UWC strike against British authority were more evidence to Wilson of his 1971 statement. They led to the serious consideration in London of independence until November 1975. Had the withdrawal occurred, which Wilson supported but others, including James Callaghan, opposed, the region would have become a separate dominion. According to the secret plan, codenamed Doomsday, Britain would have had as little to do with the new Ulster Dominion as possible, with financial subsidies ending within five years. It would not have been an associated state, with Britain in control only of foreign relations, because a war between Ulster and the Republic would involve Britain. The dominion would also not have been a member of the British Commonwealth. The Northern Ireland Office cited the 1948 Newfoundland referendums in which the island voluntarily joined Canada, its larger neighbor, as an example that divided Ireland might hopefully follow. The British negotiations with the IRA, an illegal organisation, angered the Republic's government. It did not know what was discussed but feared that the British were considering abandoning Northern Ireland. Irish Foreign Minister Garret FitzGerald discussed in a memorandum of June 1975 the possibilities of orderly withdrawal and independence, repartition of the island, or a collapse of Northern Ireland into civil war and anarchy. The memorandum preferred a negotiated independence as the best of the three worst case scenarios, but concluded that the Irish government could do little. The Irish government had already failed to prevent a crowd from the burning of British Embassy, Dublin in 1972. It believed that Ireland could not enlarge the country's small army of 12,500 men without negative consequences. A civil war in Northern Ireland would cause many deaths there and severe consequences for the Republic, as the public would demand that it intervene to protect nationalists. FitzGerald warned Callaghan that the failure to intervene, despite Ireland's inability to do so, would threaten democratic government in the Republic, which would jeopardise British and European security against Communist and other foreign nations. Wilson's aides had in 1969 come to a similar conclusion, telling him that removing Northern Ireland from the United Kingdom would cause violence and a military intervention by the Republic that would not allow the removal of British troops. Loyalist leader Glen Barr said in 2008 that a British withdrawal would have caused civil war, as Loyalists would have expected the Republic to invade Northern Ireland. Peter Ramsbotham, British Ambassador to the United States, warned of a hostile American reaction. Wilson's desire to extricate the British government from Northern Ireland was ultimately stymied by the fear that doing so might lead to catastrophe. The Irish government so dreaded the consequences that FitzGerald refused to ask Britain not to withdraw, as he feared that openly discussing the issue could permit the British to proceed, and other members of government opposed the Irish Cabinet even discussing what FitzGerald referred to as a doomsday scenario. He wrote in 2006 that Neither then nor since has public opinion in Ireland realised how close to disaster our whole island came during the last two years of Harold Wilson's premiership; in 2008, he said that the Republic was more at risk then than at any time since our formation. In February 1974, an IRA time bomb killed 12 people on a coach on the M62 in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Merlyn Rees, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, lifted the proscription against the UVF in April 1974. In December, a month after the Birmingham pub bombings killed 21 people, the IRA declared a ceasefire; this would theoretically last throughout most of the following year. The ceasefire notwithstanding, sectarian killings escalated in 1975, along with internal feuding between rival paramilitary groups. This made 1975 one of the bloodiest years of the conflict. On the 7th of August 1974, a 24 year old man from Limehill near Pomeroy, County Tyrone was shot in the back and killed by a member of the British Army, First Battalion, Royal Regiment of Wales. At the first inquest the soldier was cleared of all charges but in 2020 another inquest was ordered by the Attorney General. The Coroner ruled that the killing of Paddy McElhone was unjustified with a judge stating an innocent man shot in cold blood without warning when he was no threat to anyone. The McElhone family issued a statement reading in part: Our family always knew that Paddy was an innocent young man, taken from his home and shot by a British soldier for no reason. The statement also said that their parents went to their graves broken-hearted knowing that their innocent son had been killed, without justification, explanation or apology. On the 5th of April 1975, Irish republican paramilitary members killed a UDA volunteer and four Protestant civilians in a gun and bomb attack at the Mountainview Tavern on the Shankill Road, Belfast. The attack was claimed by the Republican Action Force believed to be a covername used by Provisional IRA volunteers. On the 31st of July 1975 at Buskhill, outside Newry, popular Irish cabaret band the Miami Showband was returning home to Dublin after a gig in Banbridge when it was ambushed by gunmen from the UVF Mid-Ulster Brigade wearing British Army uniforms at a bogus military roadside checkpoint on the main A1 road. Three of the bandmembers, two Catholics and a Protestant, were shot dead, while two of the UVF men were killed when the bomb they had loaded onto the band's minibus detonated prematurely. The following January, eleven Protestant workers were gunned down in Kingsmill, South Armagh after having been ordered off their bus by an armed republican gang, which called itself the South Armagh Republican Action Force. This resulted in 10 fatalities, with one man surviving despite being shot 18 times. These killings were reportedly in retaliation to a loyalist double shooting attack against the Reavey and O'Dowd families the previous night. The violence continued through the rest of the 1970s. This included a series of attacks in Southern England in 1974 and 1975 by Provisional IRA active service unit the Balcombe Street Gang. The British Government reinstated the ban against the UVF in October 1975, making it once more an illegal organisation. The Provisional IRA's December 1974 ceasefire officially ended in January 1976, although it had carried out several attacks in 1975. The Provisional IRA had lost the hope it had felt in the early 1970s that it could force a rapid British withdrawal from Northern Ireland, and instead developed a strategy known as the Long War, which involved a less intense but more sustained campaign of violence that could continue indefinitely. The Official IRA ceasefire of 1972, however, became permanent, and the Official movement eventually evolved into the Workers' Party, which rejected violence completely. However, a splinter from the Officials, the Irish National Liberation Army, continued a campaign of violence beginning in 1974. By the late 1970s, war-weariness was visible in both communities. One sign of this was the formation of the Peace People, which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976. The Peace People organised large demonstrations calling for an end to paramilitary violence. Their campaign lost momentum, however, after they appealed to the nationalist community to provide information on the IRA to security forces. In February 1978, the IRA bombed La Mon, a hotel restaurant in Comber, County Down. The decade ended with a double attack by the IRA against the British. On the 27th of August 1979, Lord Mountbatten, while on holiday in Mullaghmore, County Sligo, was killed by a bomb planted on board his boat. Three other people were also killed: Lady Brabourne, the elderly mother of Mountbatten's son-in-law; and two teenagers, a grandson of Mountbatten and a local boatman. That same day, eighteen British soldiers, mostly members of the Parachute Regiment, were killed by two remote-controlled bombs in the Warrenpoint ambush at Narrow Water Castle, near Warrenpoint, County Down. It was the British Army's largest loss of life in a single incident in Operation Banner. Successive British Governments, having failed to achieve a political settlement, tried to normalise Northern Ireland. Aspects included the removal of internment without trial and the removal of political status for paramilitary prisoners. From 1972 onward, paramilitaries were tried in juryless Diplock courts to avoid intimidation of jurors. On conviction, they were to be treated as ordinary criminals. Resistance to this policy among republican prisoners led to more than 500 of them in the Maze prison initiating the blanket and dirty protests. Their protests culminated in hunger strikes in 1980 and 1981, aimed at the restoration of political status, as well as other concessions. In the 1981 Irish hunger strike, ten republican prisoners, seven from the Provisional IRA and three from the INLA, died of starvation. The first hunger striker to die, Bobby Sands, was elected to Parliament on an Anti-H-Block ticket, as was his election agent Owen Carron following Sands's death. The hunger strikes resonated among many nationalists; over 100,000 people attended Sands's funeral mass in West Belfast and thousands attended those of the other hunger strikers. From an Irish republican perspective, the significance of these events was to demonstrate potential for a political and electoral strategy. In the wake of the hunger strikes, Sinn Féin, which had become the Provisional IRA's political wing, began to contest elections for the first time in both Northern Ireland, as abstentionists, and in the Republic. In 1986, Sinn Féin recognised the legitimacy of the Irish Dáil, which caused a small group of members to break away and form Republican Sinn Féin. The IRA's Long War was boosted by large donations of arms from Libya in the 1980s, partly due to Muammar Gaddafi's anger at British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's government for assisting the Reagan government's 1986 bombing of Libya, which had allegedly killed one of Gaddafi's children. Additionally, it received funding from supporters in the Republic of Ireland and the United States and elsewhere throughout the Irish diaspora. Loyalist paramilitaries also received significant funding and arms from supporters in Canada and Scotland. In July 1982, the IRA bombed military ceremonies in London's Hyde Park and Regent's Park, killing four soldiers, seven bandsmen, and seven horses. The INLA was highly active in the early and mid-1980s. In December 1982, it bombed a disco in Ballykelly, County Londonderry, frequented by off-duty British soldiers, killing 11 soldiers and six civilians. In December 1983, the IRA attacked Harrods using a car bomb, killing six people. One of the IRA's most high-profile actions in this period was the Brighton hotel bombing on the 12th of October 1984, when it set off a 100-pound time bomb in the Grand Brighton Hotel in Brighton, where politicians including Thatcher were staying for the Conservative Party conference. The bomb, which exploded in the early hours of the morning, killed five people, including Conservative MP Sir Anthony Berry, and injured 34 others. On the 28th of February 1985 in Newry, nine RUC officers were killed in a mortar attack on the police station. It was planned by the IRA's South Armagh Brigade and an IRA unit in Newry. Nine shells were fired from a mark 10 mortar which was bolted onto the back of a hijacked Ford van in Crossmaglen. Eight shells overshot the station; the ninth hit a portable cabin which was being used as a canteen. It was the RUC's largest loss of life during the Troubles. On the 8th of May 1987, eight IRA members attacked an RUC station in Loughgall, County Armagh, using a bomb and guns. All were killed by the SAS, the most IRA members killed in a single incident in the Troubles. On the 8th of November 1987 in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh, a Provisional IRA time bomb exploded during a Remembrance Sunday ceremony for UK Commonwealth war casualties. The bomb went off near a cenotaph that was at the heart of the parade. Eleven people, ten civilians and one serving member of the RUC, were killed and 63 were injured. Former school headmaster Ronnie Hill was seriously injured in the bombing and slipped into a coma two days later, remaining in this condition for more than a decade before his death in December 2000. The unit that carried out the bombing was disbanded. Loyalist paramilitaries responded to the bombing with revenge attacks on Catholics, mostly civilians. Another bomb had been planted at nearby Tullyhommon at a parallel Remembrance Day commemoration but failed to detonate. In March 1988, three IRA volunteers who were planning a bombing were shot dead by the SAS at a Shell petrol station on Winston Churchill Avenue in Gibraltar, the British Overseas Territory attached to the south of Spain. This became known as Operation Flavius. Their funeral at Milltown Cemetery in Belfast was attacked by Michael Stone, a UDA member who threw grenades as the coffin was lowered and shot at people who chased him. Stone killed three people, including IRA volunteer Kevin Brady. Stone was jailed for life the following year, but was freed 11 years later under the Good Friday Agreement. British Army corporals, David Howes and Derek Wood, who were in plain clothes, drove their car into Brady's funeral cortege in Andersonstown. The crowd assumed the soldiers were loyalists intent on repeating Stone's attack; dozens of people surrounded and attacked their car. The soldiers were pulled out of their car, kidnapped and shot dead by the IRA. This became known as the Corporals killings. In September 1989, the IRA used a time bomb to attack the Royal Marine Depot, Deal in Kent, killing 11 bandsmen. Towards the end of the decade, the British Army tried to soften its public appearance to residents in communities such as Derry in order to improve relations between the local community and the military. Soldiers were told not to use the telescopic sights on their rifles to scan the streets, as civilians believed they were being aimed at. Soldiers were also encouraged to wear berets when manning checkpoints and later other situations rather than helmets, which were perceived as militaristic and hostile. The system of complaints was overhauled; previously, if civilians believed they were being harassed or abused by soldiers in the streets or during searches and made a complaint, they would never find out what action, if any, was taken. The new regulations required an officer to visit the complainants house to inform them of the outcome of their complaint. In the 1980s, loyalist paramilitary groups, the Ulster Volunteer Force, the Ulster Defence Association, and Ulster Resistance, imported arms and explosives from South Africa. The weapons obtained were divided between the groups, although some of the weaponry, such as rocket-propelled grenades, were hardly used. In 1987, the Irish People's Liberation Organisation, a breakaway faction of the INLA, engaged in a bloody feud against the INLA which weakened the INLA's presence in some areas. By 1992, the IPLO was destroyed by the Provisionals for its involvement in drug dealing, thus ending the feud.
The Sniper And The Peace
The IRA's South Armagh Brigade had made the countryside village of Crossmaglen their stronghold since the 1970s. The surrounding villages of Silverbridge, Cullyhanna, Cullaville, Forkhill, Jonesborough, and Creggan were also IRA strongholds. In February 1978, a British Army Gazelle helicopter was shot down near Silverbridge, killing Lieutenant Colonel Ian Corden-Lloyd. In the 1990s, the IRA came up with a new plan to restrict British Army foot patrols near Crossmaglen. They developed two sniper teams to attack British Army and RUC patrols. They usually fired from an improvised armoured car using a .50 BMG calibre M82 sniper rifle. Signs were put up around South Armagh reading Sniper at Work. The snipers killed a total of nine members of the security forces: seven soldiers and two constables. The last to be killed before the Good Friday Agreement was a British soldier, bombardier Steven Restorick. The IRA had developed the capacity to attack helicopters in South Armagh and elsewhere since the 1980s, including the 1990 shootdown of a Gazelle flying over the border between counties Tyrone and Monaghan by the East Tyrone Brigade; there were no fatalities in any of those incidents. Another incident involving British helicopters in South Armagh was the Battle of Newry Road in September 1993. Two other helicopters, a British Army Lynx and a Royal Air Force Puma were shot down by improvised mortar fire in 1994. The IRA set up checkpoints in South Armagh during this period, which were unchallenged by the security forces. On the 7th of February 1991, the IRA attempted to assassinate prime minister John Major and his war cabinet by firing a mortar at 10 Downing Street while they were gathered there to discuss the Gulf War. The shelling caused only four injuries, two of which were to police officers, while Major and the entire war cabinet were unharmed. A prolonged period of background political manoeuvring followed, during which the 1992 Baltic Exchange and 1993 Bishopsgate bombings occurred in London, both loyalist and republican paramilitary groups declared ceasefires in 1994. The year leading up to the ceasefires included a mass shooting in Castlerock, County Londonderry, in which four people were killed. The IRA responded with the Shankill Road bombing in October 1993, which aimed to kill the UDA leadership, but instead killed eight Protestant civilian shoppers and a low-ranking UDA member, as well as one of the perpetrators, who was killed when the bomb detonated prematurely. The UDA responded with attacks in nationalist areas including a mass shooting in Greysteel, in which eight civilians were killed, six Catholics and two Protestants. On the 16th of June 1994, just before the ceasefires, the Irish National Liberation Army killed three UVF members. The Northern Ireland peace process led to paramilitary ceasefires and talks between the main political parties, which resulted in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. This Agreement restored self-government to Northern Ireland on the basis of power-sharing and it included acceptance of the principle of consent, commitment to civil and political rights, parity of esteem between the two communities, police reform, paramilitary disarmament, and early release of paramilitary prisoners. There has been sporadic violence since the Agreement, including punishment attacks, loyalist gangs' control of major organised crime rackets, such as drugs supply, community coercion and violence, intimidation, and violent crime linked to dissident republican groups.