De Valera steered Ireland through the dangerous days of the Emergency, but he was not the one to cut Ireland’s last ties to England. In 1948, after sixteen years of Fianna Fáil dominance, Fine Gael joined with the Labour Party and a radical Nationalist group called Clann na Poblachta (klan-na po-blah-ta) to create a coalition government.
It was a strange coalition: the moderates, leftists, and nationalists of the three parties could agree on little more than a common desire to unseat Fianna Fáil. The taoiseach in charge of this new government was John Costello, a Dublin lawyer who had served with Fine Gael for years.
In a meeting with the prime minister of Canada in 1948, Costello revealed that Ireland intended to declare itself a republic. The following year, with a unanimous vote of the Cabinet, Ireland officially removed itself from the British Commonwealth. Ireland was now officially the Republic of Ireland. It has continued in this form to the present day.
Parliament responded with the Ireland Act of 1949, which stated that Northern Ireland was still part of the United Kingdom and would remain so until the people of Northern Ireland consented to leave. This act directly contradicted the constitution of Ireland, which claimed Northern Ireland as part of the nation. In addition, the United Kingdom guaranteed to the people of Northern Ireland that their social security benefits would not be allowed to fall behind Britain’s.
The effect of the Ireland Act was to seal the partition between Northern Ireland and the Republic more solidly than ever before. Politicians on both sides recognized this fact, and many criticized Costello’s government for making an essentially symbolic gesture that ruined any chances of undoing Partition.
But what was done was done. The island of Ireland was now home to a British state and an independent republic, both looking anxiously across the border and wondering how they ended up so far apart.
By 1950, Ireland had finally resolved its long-standing questions about its government and its relationship with England. In the following years, the Irish government focused increasingly on economics. The country was still one of the poorest in Europe, and despite its political claims to independence, the Irish economy was heavily dependent on England for both import and export markets. These economic realities were underlined by Ireland’s high rate of emigration. The Irish population had continued to drop in every census since the Great Famine of the 1840s.
Fianna Fáil regained power from Fine Gael in 1951 and held on to it for most of the next fifty years. Both parties, however, agreed on the basic solution to Ireland’s economic problems: foreign investment, foreign loans, and a planned economy. The plan was to use foreign capital to build industries that would relieve Ireland’s chronic unemployment.
The plans were successful. Ireland benefited from American Marshall Plan funds, and American and English businesses showed enthusiasm for investing in Ireland. The economy slowly developed, and by the 1960s the Irish standard of living was creeping toward the standard of Western Europe. The rate of emigration slowed down. The 1966 census showed, for the first time in more than 100 years, an increase in population.
Ireland eagerly took part in the developing multinational organizations of the postwar years. The Republic joined the UN in 1955 and the European Economic Community in 1972.
88 { Trouble in the North
While the Republic of Ireland worked out its path of independent development, Northern Ireland embraced its role as a loyal province of the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland’s industries successfully pursued further economic ties with England, and the standard of living in the North continued to outpace that of the South.
Northern Ireland’s image as a peaceful and prosperous British province, however, concealed a tension beneath the surface. There were still Irish Nationalists who wanted to undo Partition. Fianna Fáil maintained that Northern Ireland was part of Ireland, as shown by territorial claims in the 1937 constitution. The Protestant politicians of Northern Ireland staunchly denied these claims. In 1954 they passed the Flags and Emblems Act, which made it illegal to fly the tricolor Irish flag in Northern Ireland. Although politicians in the Republic often spoke of reuniting their country, the majority of them realized that, in practical terms, their claims were little more than rhetoric.
During the years when King Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth I extended English control over most of Ireland, the northern counties of Ulster were regarded as the most “savage” part of the island. In the early 1600s, King James I decided to cure Ulster of its Catholicism by displacing the Irish and settling English and Scottish Protestants there. This settlement became known as the Ulster Plantation.
As a result, the northern and southern regions of the island developed along different lines. While the predominantly Catholic population in the rest of Ireland continued in the traditional Irish jobs of farming and animal husbandry, the largely Protestant population in Ulster embraced the industrial revolution. Belfast became a center of the shipbuilding and linen textile industries. By the nineteenth century, the average person in Ulster was considerably wealthier than his or her southern counterparts.
The prosperity of the north, however, was mostly prosperity for Protestants. The Scots and English who had settled there were keenly aware that their land had been seized from the Irish, and they never lost their anxiety that the previous inhabitants might try to take it back. As in the Protestant Ascendancy, they enforced a social and legal code designed to repress Catholics. Even after O’Connell’s reforms had begun to liberate Ireland’s Catholics, the people of Ulster dutifully maintained an unofficial system of repression.
Ulster Protestant anxieties rose as the Irish Nationalist movement grew. Unionists in the north blocked the passage of a series of home rule bills, and they formed a variety of organizations, such as the United Orangemen and the Ulster Volunteers. The havoc of the Anglo-Irish War and the Irish Civil War further polarized the Protestant stance.
Northern Ireland was created in 1921 as a semiautonomous state, still tied to the British Empire — this was part of the agreement that Michael Collins and other Irish Nationalists made with the British. Northern Ireland ruled itself through an independent administration at Stormont, outside Belfast. For nearly fifty years the region remained largely peaceful, but just beneath the orderly veneer the coals of deep-seated resentment smoldered.
Northern Ireland’s approximately 550,000 Catholics never shared equally in the state’s prosperity. They officially had all the rights guaranteed by the British Constitution, but unspoken rules kept them a distinct underclass — many companies wouldn’t hire Catholics, and many landlords wouldn’t rent to them. Most of them worked in low-paying, unskilled jobs. Although Catholics made up 31 percent of the labor force, they only accounted for 6 percent of mechanical engineers, 8 percent of university teachers, and 19 percent of doctors.
Protestants dominated the local government and the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) — the police. Northern Ireland received millions of pounds a year from the British government to invest in infrastructure, but a disproportionate amount of this money went to Protestant areas.
One group that did not accept Northern Ireland’s status was the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Remnants of this organization had existed ever since the Civil War, even though the Free State had outlawed it. From 1956 to 1962, IRA terrorists in the Republic waged a guerrilla war across the border against Northern Ireland’s police force and soldiers. The conflict claimed nineteen lives. In the end, however, the IRA ceased the effort after it acknowledged that it had no support from the people of either the Republic or Northern Ireland.
In the late 1960s, the Catholic minority of Northern Ireland was kept as an underclass by an entrenched system of discrimination in employment, housing, and education. Anger at the continuing inequality would spark a wave of civil rights protests. These protests set in motion the bloody conflict known as the Troubles.
For more than three decades, the Troubles have raged in Northern Ireland. By 1999, they had claimed the li
ves of 3,636 people and injured 36,000 more. Most of those people were civilians. The recent success of the peace process, however, suggests that Ireland may be ready to leave tragedy behind.
89 { Sunday, Bloody Sunday
In the late 1960s, a population of young, educated, and unemployed Catholics looked west and saw the success of the Civil Rights movement in the United States. They created the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA), intending to use peaceful protest to bring attention to discrimination in employment and housing.
One of NICRA’s first efforts at peaceful protest was the Derry March of 1968, which many people consider the start of the Troubles. The protesters planned to march from Belfast to Derry, imitating Martin Luther King’s 1966 march from Selma to Montgomery. The 600 marchers proceeded peacefully for four days, but when they reached Derry, a mob of Protestants attacked them with stones, nails, and crowbars. The RUC escort — which was composed primarily of Protestants — did little to protect them. Riots broke out in the Catholic Bogside neighborhood, which the RUC put down brutally.
The Derry March was an inauspicious beginning to the Unionist-Republican debate. It established an unfortunate precedent of mass violence between the sides, and it told the Catholic population that it could not trust the RUC to look after its safety. When Protestant paramilitary groups subsequently launched campaigns of arson and intimidation against them, the Catholics turned to a group that was more than willing to fight back — the IRA.
The IRA had kept calling for a united Ireland since the War of Independence, although its agitation hadn’t been taken seriously for years. The outbreak of violence in Derry was exactly what its members had been looking for: an excuse to strike back at the Unionists and the police forces, which the IRA saw as the agents of British imperialism.
The IRA took on the role of police and defense force for Northern Ireland’s Catholics. If someone sold drugs in a Catholic neighborhood, he could be maimed or even killed by the IRA. If Unionist paramilitaries burned down a Catholic house, the IRA would bomb a Protestant pub.
A stream of guns and bombs started flowing into the neighborhoods of Belfast and Derry.
The Unionist paramilitaries, meanwhile, were waging their own campaign of terror. Groups like the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and the Red Hand Commandoes used the same tactics of murder and bombing. The UDA’s attacks were generally meant to intimidate activist Catholics or to retaliate for IRA killings, which were usually in retaliation for UDA murders, which were generally retaliations for earlier IRA murders . . . and so on.
Of the paramilitary groups, the IRA always received the lion’s share of news coverage. There were two reasons for this. First, Irish descendants in other countries have tended to sympathize with the IRA cause, even while condemning its methods. The news plays to them. Second, the IRA chose the United Kingdom as its enemy, whereas the UDA targeted neighborhoods and individuals. When the British government tried to control the Troubles, it moved against the group that had targeted it — the IRA. This led to increasing coverage of the IRA’s role in the conflict, and it also led many Catholics to perceive that the British government was biased against their side. This perception of British bias grew much worse after one of the most notorious events of the Troubles — Bloody Sunday.
To control the increasing power of the IRA, the British government sent its army into Northern Ireland and began a policy of internment. This meant that police or soldiers could seize a suspected terrorist without formal charges and hold him or her indefinitely. By 1972, hundreds of Irish Catholics were being detained on these terms.
NICRA protested internment by holding a march through Derry’s Bogside neighborhood on January 30, 1972. The local RUC chief recommended that the march be allowed to proceed as planned. An unnamed authority, however, decided instead to use the event to send in British paratroopers to arrest IRA members.
The march went on as planned and was relatively uneventful until around 4 P.M., when the soldiers arrived. They moved past the barricades and opened fire on the crowd. The march immediately dispersed in panic, and the troops followed to pursue the “arrest operation.” The precise order of events that followed has been disputed for the last three decades, but the indisputable fact is that the soldiers shot thirteen civilians dead on the spot and injured another man who later died of his wounds.
After the troops had moved out, British authorities immediately issued statements that the men killed were IRA members who had fired on the soldiers. But in the days that followed, these claims were retracted. Subsequent investigations determined that none of the men killed were carrying weapons. Investigations also failed to establish that there was any concentrated IRA presence at the scene or that the soldiers had been fired on first. What is clear is that not a single soldier was injured during the operation.
Bloody Sunday was the first time in the Troubles that British soldiers had opened fire at unarmed civilians. People throughout Ireland were outraged by the atrocity; on February 2, a mob attacked and burned the British embassy in Dublin, and in Australia, dockers refused to unload British cargo ships. The British government appointed Lord Widgery, lord chief justice of England, to investigate. Widgery determined that none of the victims could be proved to have had weapons and that while some of the soldiers might have acted irresponsibly, they did not act illegally. In compiling this report, Widgery reviewed the reports of soldiers and RUC officers but ignored the statements collected from more than 500 civilians at the scene. No soldiers were punished. The Widgery report was met with outrage — some even refer to it as the “Widgery Whitewash.”
Bloody Sunday ignited Catholic fears of government bias. The British government decided that the situation in Northern Ireland had gone beyond the local government’s ability to control. It suspended the Northern Ireland Parliament in Stormont and imposed direct rule from London. The fifty-year experiment in home rule was over.
90 { The Peace Process
By 1972, Northern Ireland was in chaos: the body count from paramilitary violence was rising daily, British soldiers were patrolling the streets, and the entire state was divided along seemingly unbridgeable social lines. The British government, faced with governing this mess, began proceedings to restore Northern Ireland home rule on more stable grounds.
It was a gargantuan political puzzle. Negotiators had to bring together Catholic and Protestant politicians who were increasingly at each other’s throats.
The negotiators ironed out an agreement in December 1973 in Sunningdale, England. The principal point was the restoration of Northern Ireland home rule, with power shared between Catholics and Protestants. It called for the creation of a Council of Ireland to promote cooperation between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The English agreed to release political prisoners and reform the RUC, while the Irish agreed to suppress the IRA and to scale back their claims to Northern Ireland. People hoped that the compromise agreement would allow for lasting peace.
Sadly, it was not to be. Unionist groups felt that the arrangement ceded too much to Catholics. The Ulster Workers’ Council, a working-class Loyalist group, called a general strike in Belfast that lasted for thirteen days. The strike — and the paramilitary violence that accompanied it — brought Northern Ireland to a standstill. The local government decided to withdraw from the Sunningdale Agreement. The United Kingdom concluded that if it couldn’t reform Northern Ireland, it would try to contain it. For the next two decades, Britain treated the Troubles as primarily a security problem with the IRA.
In the following decades, the Troubles remained a source of pain and dismay for rational people throughout the world. The cycle of killing, retaliation, and counterkilling continued despite all attempts to stop it. Britain discovered that it could patrol the streets and throw thousands in jail, but as long as there was an angry young Catholic with a gun or a bomb, the violence would continue. The Catholic minority learned that they could talk to the politicians all they wanted, but as long as the
Protestant working class wanted to maintain its position of superiority, the intimidation would continue. A shadow had fallen over Northern Ireland.
One of the more notorious episodes of the Troubles was the so-called Dirty Protest of IRA prisoners. The IRA prisoners wanted to be treated like prisoners of war, which would allow them to wear their own clothes, but the British insisted that they were common criminals. To protest, the prisoners refused to wear prison clothes or to clean their cells. For months, they huddled under blankets, wallowing in filth. International journalists called their conditions appalling, but British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher replied that if they chose to live in squalor, that was their problem.
In 1981, after it became clear that the dirty tactics wouldn’t work, the prisoners adopted a more extreme approach. Bobby Sands, a charismatic twenty-seven-year-old prisoner, announced that he would not eat until he received prisoner-of-war status. Every ten days, a fellow prisoner joined him on the hunger strike. The British thought he was bluffing; Prime Minister Thatcher refused to give in to the moral blackmail tactics. The IRA’s Gerry Adams pleaded with Sands to call off the strike, as did the Catholic bishop of Derry. While Sands wasted away, he won an election for Parliament as a Sinn Féin candidate.
But he never took his seat in Westminster. After sixty-six days without food, Bobby Sands, MP (member of Parliament), died. Riots struck throughout Belfast, and 100,000 people attended his funeral procession.
In the following months, nine more hunger strikers died. Finally, the prisoners called off the strike — they had decided not to lose any more lives in a futile gesture. Three days later, Britain granted the IRA prisoners most of their demands.
91 { The Good Friday Agreement
The Myths, Legends, and Lore of Ireland Page 16