by Neil Hegarty
The final main player was the Irish state: throughout the Troubles, the rhetoric of successive Irish governments continued to espouse the ideal of national unity, while at the same time political energy was principally channelled towards the preservation of stability in the Republic itself. The Irish state was obliged to bolster the position of Northern nationalists: the upsurge of violence in the late 1960s, for example, had been followed extensively in the Southern media; the presence of refugees from this violence in the Republic led to expressions of solidarity and material support in the form of money and accommodation; and the matter was raised at international level – for example, at the UN Security Council. The Irish state was also obliged to maintain its independence of action in this matter – in particular, by resisting overt British attempts to extract support for its security policies. The result was a disconcerting oscillation between periods of close cooperation between the two governments and spectacular quarrels, of which a series of bitter conflicts over the question of extradition of terrorist suspects were the most public.
This was a conflict, then, bound up with a tortured history – but one that was also fed by the strains inherent in a series of contemporary relationships: between the communities in Northern Ireland itself; between the two constituent parts of the island of Ireland; and between the British and Irish states. Any solution would be obliged to address all of these strands: it was perhaps little wonder that such a solution took time to present itself.
The troops that appeared on the streets of Northern Ireland in 1969 were greeted initially with a certain relief in working-class Catholic districts of Belfast and Derry: better to deal with British soldiers, it was widely felt, than with those elements in the police – the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) – who had long since forfeited the trust of Northern nationalists. The IRA was obliged to accept such a state of affairs – but only temporarily: within months the relationship between the army and the Catholic community had frayed as a result of the imposition of curfews and by vigorous and often violent sweeps through these districts in search of hidden IRA arms. The Northern Ireland government was pressing for an end to those nationalist ‘no-go’ areas of Derry and Belfast where a police presence was not tolerated; and all remaining trust was torn away in the shocked aftermath of Bloody Sunday. In the face of mounting disorder and amid fears of actual civil war, the Northern Ireland government was first suspended and then dissolved; and direct rule from London was applied to the province.
The first serious attempt to create a new settlement in Northern Ireland (as opposed merely to managing the crisis) came as early as December 1973. In that month, the Sunningdale Agreement – named after the well-heeled Berkshire commuter town where the deal, rather incongruously, was thrashed out – provided for a new power-sharing executive in the province, together with a Council of Ireland that would allow Southern observations on the governance of the North. The agreement encompassed the Ulster Unionist Party together with the SDLP and the small, middle-class and non-sectarian Alliance Party. The architects of the accord, however, had not allowed for the bitterness felt by many mainstream unionists who were not yet reconciled to their loss of power in the province. They had also not counted on the absolute opposition expressed both by extreme loyalist factions who could not stomach the notion of Southern interference in the affairs of the North and by the IRA, for which Sunningdale was simply not enough. In May 1974, a widely observed strike managed by loyalist groups brought large areas of Northern Ireland to a standstill; by the end of the month, the power-sharing executive had collapsed.
Nothing on the lines of Sunningdale would be attempted for years to come: instead, Northern Ireland continued to be governed directly from London. Violence persisted: although its scale gradually decreased, loyalist terrorists continued their sectarian killings of Catholics, while the IRA and smaller republican groups carried on their campaigns against members of the RUC and part-time police reserve. The political tension was ratcheted up once more in March 1981, when IRA inmates of the Maze prison outside Belfast renewed a hunger strike in order to assert that they were political prisoners rather than mere convicts.* The demands that their status be recognized – political prisoners were entitled to wear their own clothes, for example – were denied by the new British government led by Margaret Thatcher. Bobby Sands was the first prisoner to go on hunger strike; in April, he won a Westminster by-election in the delicately balanced rural constituency of Fermanagh and South Tyrone. But Thatcher refused to budge: in May, Sands died inside the Maze; and by October, nine more prisoners had followed him.
The hunger strikes were accompanied by widespread and severe civil unrest and deaths. But while Thatcher’s firm response certainly won her allies in some quarters, the episode did little to enhance British prestige abroad; and, indeed, the prisoners’ demands were later quietly conceded. The episode handed a substantial propaganda boost to the IRA; paradoxically, it also indicated to elements in the organization’s political wing, Sinn Féin, the possible advantages of participation in electoral politics. From this time, therefore, the party opted to contest all elections in Northern Ireland, though it abstained from taking its seats at Westminster. This, of course, was a policy of considerable symbolic vintage: it could be traced back to Arthur Griffith’s original Sinn Féin, which had in its turn taken a cue from those Hungarian nationalists who had declined to attend the imperial Austrian parliament in Vienna. Sinn Féin’s new direction would slowly bear fruit: the party developed a highly effective grassroots structure and daunting fundraising abilities; and in time it eclipsed the SDLP as the pre-eminent voice of Northern nationalism.
In the aftermath of the hunger strikes, it appeared on the surface as though nothing much had changed in Northern Ireland. The economy puttered along sluggishly: this, however, was a society now kept afloat by British subsidies and one in which the state sector was wholly dominant, providing jobs and thus a high degree of financial stability. Indeed, it was a fact – though one seldom remarked on – that the prevailing political uncertainty and civic abnormality kept house prices low and living conditions high. Northern Ireland never experienced much in the way of economic boom conditions, but neither was it exposed to severe recession; and life – at least for the province’s socially conservative middle class – progressed reasonably smoothly. For the Protestant working class, by contrast, economic conditions became progressively worse: as Belfast had shared the boom of the industrial revolution with Glasgow and the cities of northern England, so it shared too in the decline of the United Kingdom’s manufacturing base; the guaranteed jobs provided by the city’s cherished shipyards, for example, were now a thing of the past.
The political situation continued along sectarian and profoundly dysfunctional lines: while the violence had declined to what one British minister called ‘acceptable’ levels, the situation appeared frozen without hope of a breakthrough. Many Unionist politicians actually preferred it that way: full integration of the province into the United Kingdom was politically impossible; any move in the opposite direction, however, would present the disagreeable prospect of a renewed Irish government stake in Northern affairs. And yet, despite this abiding air of political stasis, change was on the horizon. As early as the spring of 1980, Thatcher had met the new taoiseach, Charles Haughey, in Dublin – and the meeting had paid dividends: both for Thatcher, who was given a silver eighteenth-century Irish teapot; and for the Anglo-Irish relationship as a whole, in the form of an agreement to explore the ‘totality of relationships between these islands’. Joint studies were commissioned to explore matters of common interest, including security and economic cooperation.
The hunger strikes had followed on the heels of this initiative; but in 1983 the Irish government (now headed by Garret FitzGerald) convened the New Ireland Forum, consisting of the three largest parties in the Republic and the SDLP in the North. In May 1984 the forum concluded that a united Ireland was the best basis for a stable and lasting peace, althoug
h there were alternatives: either a federal state in Ireland, or joint British-Irish authority over Northern Ireland. But in November of that year (a matter of weeks after the IRA had attempted to kill her and her cabinet at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton), Thatcher had declared at a press conference that all three alternatives were ‘out…out…out’. It was a deeply humiliating moment for FitzGerald – and for Hume, whose party held a considerable stake in the forum deliberations.
FitzGerald nevertheless persevered with his efforts to find a way forward; in addition – and perhaps decisively – the Reagan administration in Washington, which had followed sympathetically the work of the forum, put pressure on Thatcher to move on the Northern Ireland issue. The result was the Anglo-Irish Agreement, signed at Hillsborough Castle in November 1985. This accord enshrined the right of the Irish government to be consulted on Northern issues. It guaranteed too the principle of consent: that the people of Northern Ireland itself would have the final say on their constitutional status. For the British authorities, the accord brought the prospect of increased Irish government cooperation in security issues; for the Irish government, it addressed the sense of isolation felt by Northern nationalists, for there was now an explicitly pan-Irish dimension to the governance of the North; and it also promised to bring stability to an unruly corner of the island – and thus to Ireland as a whole.
In Northern Ireland itself Sinn Féin, having been barred from the deliberations of the forum, now rejected the Agreement too. The leadership of the SDLP, on the other hand, could justly feel pleased with the new arrangement: the party’s long-standing political philosophy was branded on the fabric of the Agreement. But for Unionists, the Agreement was wholly unacceptable. Their supporters were once more urged on to the streets – and several days later, a crowd some two hundred thousand strong gathered in central Belfast. This time, however, to no avail: just as Thatcher had declined to bend in the face of pressure from the hunger strikers, so now she refused to concede to Unionist demands. The Treaty remained in force, and there was a surge in loyalist killings. The attitudes of such groups towards the RUC now underwent a fundamental shift: tasked as it was with maintaining the peace in a changing province, the force and its members became the target of loyalist attacks, and many police families were forced to leave their homes as a result of loyalist intimidation. Paisley’s DUP showed its willingness to probe the limits of constitutionality by consorting with the loyalist fringe; the party’s deputy leader, Peter Robinson, even staged an ‘invasion’ of the Republic, which led to his spending a night in a County Monaghan police cell.
By the early 1990s, however, it was evident to all observers of the Northern Ireland scene that the cycles of violence, revenge killings, bombings and destruction of property held no prospect of ultimate victory for any side; this was a war that was ultimately unwinnable. As early as 1988 Hume and his Sinn Féin counterpart, Gerry Adams, were engaged in secret exploratory talks in a west Belfast monastery. Hume, whose courage and political vision formed a consistent thread running through the years of the Troubles, understood that without the presence of Sinn Féin, any negotiation process on the future of Northern Ireland would be ultimately pointless. There was a great deal at stake for both men: Hume knew that, by drawing Sinn Féin into the constitutional mainstream, he risked the sidelining of the SDLP itself (as indeed subsequently happened); Adams, though eager to pursue a constitutional path – his party had, for example, already abandoned its policy of abstention in the Dáil – also understood the peril that might come from a split in the ranks of Sinn Féin. The talks continued in fits and starts, in the face of scathing criticism and against a background of continuing violence; and at length they bore fruit, with Adams conceding that the principle of consent must underpin the future shape of Ireland.
Late in 1993 the British prime minister, John Major, declared explicitly what everyone already knew to be the case: that Britain had no ‘selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland’. The Irish government signalled a willingness to look again at its long-standing territorial claim on Northern Ireland; while American pressure, in the form of direct contact with the new president, Bill Clinton, also played its part in thawing the province’s long political freeze. In August 1994, the IRA declared a ceasefire: it was broken in spectacular style in February 1996 with a deadly bomb attack on London’s financial district; but resumed in July 1997, in the face of a fresh political climate in both London and Dublin. New and stable governments were in place in both capitals; in the White House, Clinton remained engaged in this new political push to secure peace in the province; and a process of intense and often deeply fraught negotiations began.
The result was the Belfast (or Good Friday) Agreement, concluded in April 1998, and hailed by many as signifying the end of the Troubles. The principal Northern architects of the accord were the Ulster Unionists and the SDLP; and the result of their talks envisaged a new power-sharing executive in Northern Ireland, together with an assembly and a number of new cross-border bodies to regulate everything from transport to internal waterways. Certain clauses provided for the release of paramilitary prisoners and the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons – but these were left deliberately vague, a reflection of the fact that on some issues common ground could simply not yet be found. The Republic agreed to relinquish its territorial claim to the North: and the following month, the accord was ratified in referenda north and south of the Irish border – in the former by 71 per cent of the electorate, with the Unionist vote split; in the latter by a full 94 per cent of those who voted, though on a turn-out of a mere 55 per cent. The Republic had now given up definitively its constitutional aspirations to Irish unity.
The Agreement was an immensely complicated document, locked and interlocked so as to provide balance and parity of esteem between the two communities in the North. It was also an imperfect document: for one thing, the province’s sectarian divide – to many commentators, its abiding curse – became the very keystone of the proposed new dispensation; the executive and assembly were predicated on the notion of two camps bound into a working relationship. For another, those manifold issues ‘parked’ for the time being would eventually have to be addressed – and in the years that followed they were addressed, not always successfully. The IRA, for example, insisted on decommissioning its arms at its own pace – regardless of the political difficulties this created for the Ulster Unionists. For example, the assembly was suspended – ‘our weak-kneed parliament / which, unlike Rome, we gained in a day / And then lost, spectacularly, several days later’ – and suspended again; and as election followed election, the Ulster Unionists and SDLP were elbowed into the political shadows by Sinn Féin and Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party.1 The SDLP had, over a period of years, allowed itself to be outflanked and outspent by its younger and more nimble nationalist rivals, who could boast a host of activists at grass-roots level; Unionist opinion, meanwhile, had never in any case been solidly behind the Good Friday Agreement; and the question of arms decommissioning, combined with the replacement of the RUC in 2001 by a new Police Service of Northern Ireland, proved to be pills too bitter for many Unionists to swallow.
Ian Paisley had bitterly opposed the Agreement from its inception – but in the slow unfolding of history he ended by embracing its terms, and a long and vitriolic public career culminated in May 2007 with his appointment as the province’s First Minister. The DUP may have specialized in appealing for decades to the margins of Unionism, but it possessed a pragmatic wing too: now that the Ulster Unionists had been vanquished, the DUP could focus on winning over the moderate, middle-class ‘garden centre’ Unionists, who had in the past disdained the party. In addition, Paisley unexpectedly revealed his own pragmatic side: he was now nearly eighty-one years old; his health was delicate; and he very much wished to crown his career by climbing to the summit of Northern Ireland politics. Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness – who had formerly held a central position in the I
RA – was his deputy: the duo became known as the ‘Chuckle Brothers’, their improbably cordial relationship observed unsmilingly by many in Northern Ireland. Shortly after his appointment to the top job, Paisley travelled south for a symbolically significant conducted tour of the site of the Battle of the Boyne: this had recently been remodelled as a lavish visitor attraction, complete with a formal walled garden, a ha-ha and an interpretative centre; the vista from the battle site was completed with a distant glimpse of the iconic modern bridge carrying the new Belfast to Dublin motorway over the river valley.
By 2010, Northern Ireland had reached a tentative equilibrium. The findings of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry were recognized as profoundly significant, though also inevitably imperfect. It was tacitly understood, for example, that the notion of the prosecution of British soldiers was highly fanciful; rather, the inquiry had been an element in that greater arrangement of checks, compromises and balances that had come to define political progress in the province. Dissident terrorist activity – carried on, for example, by the Real IRA, which consisted of members who had broken away from the IRA following the pre-Good Friday ceasefire – remains a persistent feature of life. And there are other issues: the continuing segregation of education and to a large degree of housing too; and the abiding disaffection of a large Protestant underclass that perceives itself to be abandoned by mainstream politicians. Northern Ireland continues to be a profoundly unusual society, and one poised between a disturbing history and a future as yet uncharted.