Jonathan Bardon - Irelands Partition: A Brief History

Jonathan Bardon

Irelands Partition: A Brief History

It is worth being reminded that human beings had been living in Australia for some forty years before the very first people set foot in Ireland. The oldest known habitation site, discovered in 1972, in Mount Sandel, near Coleraine, which suggests that the first intrepid Mesolithic arrivals came from Scotland over nine thousand years ago. Thereafter this aboriginal gene pool was steadily topped up by people moving westwards from the European continent. Ireland, however, was spared invasion by both the Romans and Germanic tribes; this enabled a Gaelic civilisation, Christianised in the fifth century, to come into full flowering in the early Middle Ages. It is misleading to regard the Gaels as a separate race, as so many Irish did until recently: their ties with the rest of western Europe were strong, and their culture was a compound of languages, beliefs and customs brought by successive incomers.

Until the early seventeenth century, Ulster was separated from the rest of Ireland to some degree by natural defences, in particular the largest drumlin belt in Europe, stretching from Donegal Bay across to Strangford Lough. Densely wooded and separated by treacherous wetlands, these low hills formed a frontier of some significance. This barrier, never completely impenetrable, should not be overemphasised, but it does explain in part why Ulster remained the most Gaelic province in Ireland until the reign of James I.

Ireland was thrown on the defensive by Viking raids from the end of the eighth century, but the north proved less attractive than the east and the south, where the Northmen made impressive settlements at Dublin, Waterford, Limerick, and elsewhere. In the eleventh century the Normans conquered England thoroughly and swiftly after the Battle of Hastings. By contrast, they overran only the fertile lowlands in Ireland a century later. Ulster was the least affected province: from 1177 John de Courcy, and those Anglo-Normans who came after him, took only the Down and Antrim coastlands. From 1300 onwards the English Crowns authority began to decline, eventually contracting to a few ports and an area around Dublin known as the Pale. By 1500 the Gaelic Irish had recovered all of Ulster save Carrickfergus, parts of Lecale, and the tip of the Ards peninsula. Ulster, in short, was beyond the Pale.

Tudor Conquest and Stuart Plantation

In the sixteenth century, England became a great European power. During a period when international tensions were aggravated by religious bitterness, the Crown could not afford to let a hostile power unite with disaffected Irish and use the island as a base from which to threaten England from the west.

By the time Elizabeth came to the throne in 1588, much of Ireland had been recovered, but Ulster largely remained beyond the Crowns grasp. Heading a formidable coalition of all the Gaelic lords of the north, Hugh ONeill of Tyrone for several years inflicted severe defeats on the English in the 1590s. Spanish help, caused Elisabeth to spare no expense, and eventually, a few days after the Queens death in 1603, ONeill capitulated. The final stages of this conquest were terrible: by burning corn and seizing cattle the English commanders caused mass starvation in Ulster and left bitter memories among the survivors.

James Is solution to the problem of Ulster was to settle Protestant English and Inland Scots in the newly conquered territory. Piecemeal colonisation of the counties of Antrim and Down from 1603 onwards was strikingly successful. The Plantation of Ulster-an ambitious scheme to colonise confiscated land in the rest of the province with the exception of Country Monaghan was launched in 1610.

For the future the tragedy was that Ulster was conquered and colonised at a time of intense religious division in Europe. In a sense, that conflict was neither a complete success nor a total failure. Not enough land was left for the native Irish, and yet the colonists did not come over in sufficient numbers to be able to manage their estates without Irish help. The incoming British felt deeply insecure, while the dispossessed Irish resented the intrusion of settlers with an alien language, alien customs, and alien religion.

Rebellion and International Conflict

Political instability across the Irish Sea on the English Civil War gave the Gaelic natives in Ulster the opportunity they sought. In 1641 they rose in furious rebellion and slaughtered great numbers of settlers. Soon after, the Scots and later Cromwells forces a fearful revenge in blood: the horrors of these times were etched into the folk memory of both sides.

After a period of peace and recovery under Charles II, Ireland was again dislocated by a bout of political turmoil. For a time the island became the cockpit of western Europe as England and the Netherlands attempted to halt Louis XIVs bid for domination. The forces of France and the Catholic King James II at first the country but then were routed at Derry and Enniskillen in 1689, at the Boyne in 1690, and most decisively at Aughrim on 12 July 1691, when seven thousand Irishmen were killed in an afternoon. These victories ensured the survival of the Plantation of Ulster, which began to attract a new influx of British settlers.

Oppression, Peace and Prosperity

A typical tolerant Dutch Protestant, William III was overruled nevertheless by landlords in both the Dublin and Westminster parliaments. Further land confiscations were authorised, and a series of statutes enacted between the 1690s and 1720s, known as the Penal Laws, severely curbed Catholic rights. This code was designed to weaken the Catholic elite to prevent further rebellion; it was only partly effective, because (assuming that land was the sole source of wealth) it failed to prevent the rise of a new Catholic commercial middle class. In Ulster, however, Catholics were confined overwhelmingly to the lower rungs of society, with the exception of the town of Newry.

The Protestant victory was so decisive that the island was largely at peace for a century. Contrary to popular opinion, Ireland enjoyed increasing prosperity and was able to benefit from Britains expanding colonial trade. In the seventeenth century Ulsters extensive sessile oak forests offered a quick cash return, but these were so ruthlessly plundered that in 1780 the bark from a single oak tree on the Conway estate was sold for 40. As the most northerly province, with much high ground and waterlogged soil, Ulster did not seem well placed for successful commercial agriculture. However, settlers from the north of England, Quakers in particular, established a flourishing domestic linen industry in south central Ulster. Smallholders supplemented their income by spinning and weaving in their own homes and sold their webs in Lurgan, Armagh, Dungannon and Lisburn. This area became a cradle of the first industrial revolution as drapers harnessed water to power wash mills, rub boards and beetling engines to finish the cloth for an expanding market.

The Newry Canal (the first in Ireland or Britain) and the Lagan Navigation helped this trade and directed it away from Dublin to the flourishing ports of Newry and Belfast.

Sectarian Conflict, Rebellion and the Union

It was among the farmer weavers of the Linen Triangle in mid Ulster that sectarian conflict revived from the 1780s onwards. In fierce competition to gain access to scraps of land close to the markets, the weavers fought at fairs and in the countryside, Protestants calling themselves Peep o Day Boys and Catholics naming themselves Defenders. The real border then was the Bann: east of the river, Protestants were numerous enough to feel secure. Influenced by the American and French Revolutions and determined to break the power of the ruling elite, the Protestant Ascendancy, the Presbyterian middle class of Belfast founded the Society of United Irishmen in 1791.

Meanwhile the sectarian warfare west of the Bann reached a crescendo, and in September 1795 the Peep o Day Boys routed Defenders at the Battle of the Diamond and founded the Orange Order at Loughgall immediately afterwards. The United Irish were strongest in Belfast, Lisburn and Ballymena and won the support of Presbyterian farmers in Antrim and Down. These Protestants became revolutionaries in 1795 and sought the assistance of the French. After the Diamond, Defenders joined the United Irishmen wholesale and, being driven from County Armagh by the Orangemen, spread the revolutionary fire southwards.

When rebellion came in 1798 it was strongest in Leinster. The Orangemen kept mid Ulster cowed while the Crown forces defeated the Protestant farmers easily at Antrim and Ballynahinch. The operation to crush the Leinster insurgents was on a much larger scale and may have left as many as forty thousand dead. Thoroughly frightened by belated French involvement, the Westminster government cajoled and bribed the thoroughly unrepresentative Irish Parliament into voting itself out of existence in 1800.

The Union: Poverty or Prosperity?

In the eighteenth century, Dublin was the second largest city in the British Empire. After the Union the citys textile industry found it increasingly difficult to compete with the power driven mills and factories of northern England. For the same reason the domestic linen industry in mid Ulster and west Cork, and the domestic woollen industry throughout the rest of Ireland, suffered catastrophic decline. A rapidly rising population depended ever more heavily on what the overworked soil could produce. The potato, the staple food of about half the inhabitants, was destroyed by blight in the 1840s; about a million people died from hunger and famine fever, and about million people emigrated.

There was a flight from the land, and those without the resources to go abroad often ended up in Belfast, which became the fastest growing urban centre in the United Kingdom. At first growth depended on cotton produced by steam and water powered machines. Finding it difficult to compete with Manchester, the mill owners transferred to the power production of linen yarn in the 1830s and 1840s and the power weaving of cloth in the 1850s and 1860s. During the American Civil War (when supplies of cotton wool were closed off) Belfast became the world centre of the linen industry.

The linen industry stimulated the growth of engineering firms (such as Mackies, making textile machinery) and encouraged the Harbor Board to cut a deep channel at the mouth of the Lagan; the mud from this cut formed Queens Island, and here Edward Harland began making vessels from riveted iron plates. The partnership of Harland and Wolff flourished in collaboration with the White Star Line, building ocean going passenger liners. Wolff set up ropeworks nearby that soon became the largest in the world.

Belfast became a city in 1888 (it was then the largest in Ireland), and by 1900 it was one of the great cities of the Empire, with the biggest shipyard in the world launching the largest ships in the world, the biggest linen mill, the biggest tobacco factory, the biggest tea machinery works, the biggest ropeworks, the biggest aerated waters factory, and the biggest gasometer in the worldbut it was a city with severe problems.

Sectarian Conflict in the Nineteenth Century

In the eighteenth century the Protestants of Belfast were noted for their liberalism and tolerance (they paid for the first Catholic chapel in 1785 and attended the opening). In part this was because Catholics, few in number, posed no threat. In the nineteenth century an entirely new urban population emerged as Protestants and Catholics poured in from the surrounding Ulster countryside. These immigrants brought with them folk memories of past conflicts, massacres, and dispossession; they chose where they lived with care, clustering with their co religionists in distinct districts. Protestant ones included Sandy Row, the Shankill, the Village, and most of east Belfast; Catholic ones included in order of creation the Markets, Short Strand, Hercules Lane (now Royal Avenue), the Pound Loney, the Falls, and the Bone; and these ghettos were separated by invisible frontiers.

The rapid growth of Belfast and the changing of frontiers between districts led of ferocious sectarian rioting. The worst were in 1857, 1864, 1872 and1886. Much the same happened in Derry: the walled Protestant city expanded and Catholics settled in the suburbs, notably the Bogside. Riots ensued, though on a smaller scale than in Belfast.

The sectarian riots got worse, even though the proportion of Protestants in Belfast rose to 75 per cent in the early twentieth century. This was due in part to the growing importance of the national question.

The Clashing of Aspirations, 1841 1941

Led by Daniel OConnell, Irish Catholics campaigned peacefully for emancipation (achieved in 1829) and for repeal of the Act of Union, that is, the restoration of a parliament in Dublin subservient to Westminster (this failed in the 1840s, partly of the Famine).

Parliamentary reforms in 1832, 1867 and 1872 made Westminster more representative of the people, now able to vote in secret. By 1886, 86 out of 100 Irish MPs were nationalists, seeking Home Rule, that is, devolution a parliament in Dublin but with Ireland staying in the British Empire. In 1886 the Liberal government supported the nationalists and put forward the first Home Rule Bill. This failed to pass the Commons because of some desertions from the Liberal Party on the issue.

A second Home Rule Bill in 1893 passed the Commons but was defeated by the unrepresentative peers in the House of Lords. The return of Conservative governments put

the question into cold storage.

In 1906 the Liberals returned to power and in 1911 in a constitutional crisis virtually destroyed the power of the Lords (they could only delay the passing of a bill by two years).

The Road to Partition, 1912 21

As nationalist passion spread across Europe in the nineteenth century it became ever clearer that those who regarded themselves as district nationalities were not neatly from each other. The lands of the Crown of St Stephen, for example, claimed by Hungarians, included substantial Slovak, Romanian, Croat, Serb and Slovene minorities.

In Ireland, particularly in Ulster, Protestants and Catholics increasingly believed that they formed two separate nations. Certainly they had profoundly divergent aspirations.

Nearly all Irish Catholics wanted national selfdetermination either in the form of Home Rule or complete separation. Some Protestants, drawn largely from the intelligentsia, shared this aspiration, but the great majority were growing stronger in their determination to remain in the United Kingdom. Nationalists had the support of three quarters of the Irish people and believed they had the right not only to decide their own destiny but also to rule the whole island. Unionists saw themselves as Britons (though perhaps with their own regional characteristics), and, in any case, the Gaelic Revival made them feel aliens in their own land. Northern unionists demonstrated that the prosperous industrial north east was tied in with the British Empire, the source of raw materials and the market for ships, ropes and other manufactured products: they feared that this prosperity would be threatened by a Dublin parliament determined to impose protective tariffs or to tax northern industry to subsidise impoverished farmers in the west and south.

Unionists feared that their Protestant liberties (the control of schools, for example) would be endangered by a Catholic dominated parliament. In addition, unionists were convinced that Home Rule was only a staging post on the road to full Irish independence.

In gratitude for the support of Irish nationalists, the Liberal government put forward a third Home Rule Bill in 1912. The issues that emerged were very similar to those that crystallised in the 1840s and that remain central in Ireland today.

Unionists had the support of the Conservative opposition at Westminster, but the third Home Rule Bill could only be delayed, non stopped: it was certain to become law some time in 1914. Unionists decided to resist Home Rule by unconstitutional means if necessary. On 28 September 1912 unionists signed a Convenant pledging themselves to resist Home Rule for all of Ireland by all means which may be found necessary In 1913 the Ulster Volunteer Force was formed, and in April 1914 a huge consignment of German arms was smuggled in.

Ireland was brought to the brink of civil war when nationalists formed the Irish Volunteers in November 1913.

I have never heard that orange bitters will mix with Irish whiskey, T.G.Agar Robartes, a Liberal backbencher, had observed at an early stage in the Home Rule debate. His amendment to exclude the four most Protestant counties of Ulster from the bills operation was decisively rejected. By the autumn of 1913, however, the government reconsidered and proposed an amendment to allow Ulster counties to opt out for six years. Irish nationalists can never be assenting parties to the mutilation of the Irish nation, the nationalist leader John Redmond declared. Fortunately for Redmond, the Unionists demanded the permanent exclusion of all nine counties, which the government refused to consider. The partition of Ireland, however, had become a real possibility by the Great War had broken out in 1914.

Most of both the unionist and nationalist paramilitaries in Ireland agreed to fight with Britain in its war with Germany. Protected by the Royal Navy and too far away for Zeppelin raids, Ireland was rarely so peaceful and never before so prosperous. Factories, mills, shipyards and farms worked flat out to meet the insatiable demands of the British war machine.

A minority of Irish nationalists believed that Britains difficulty was Irelands opportunity. Organised by the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood, a rebellion broke out in Dublin on Easter Monday 1916. This was a conspiracy and not a popular insurrection (fewer than two thousand took part), and it was crushed in less than a week. But thereafter nationalist opinion began to shift because of the execution of republican leaders and because Home Rule had been put into cold storage. A new separatist party, Sinn Fein (meaning ourselves), was launched in 1917 to obtain full independence. A blundering suppression and an attempt to impose conscription in 1918 increased support for Sinn Fein.

During this period northern unionists decided that partition was the only solution. In June 1916 the Ulster Unionist Council voted to seek the exclusion of the six north eastern counties (to the dismay of unionists who had signed the Covenant in Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan). The following year unionist delegates from the north pressed this demand at the Irish Convention, to the consternation of southern unionists. The general election of 1918 the first in which there was one man one vote and some women voters shattered the Irish Parliamentary Party: it was not only a triumph for Sinn Fein, now with 73 seats, but also for the Unionists, who increased their representation from 18 to 26. The balance of power had shifted significantly in favour of the Unionists, for not only did Sinn Fein abstain from Westminster but also Lloyd Georges coalition was overwhelmingly Conservative: more than half the MPs were members of the Conservative Party.

While the Dail voted for a republic and Volunteers of the Irish Republican Army waged their guerrilla war, the British government prepared what was in effect a fourth Home Rule Bill. The cabinet committee was chaired by Walter Long, a strong supporter of the Ulster Unionists. The bill, which became law as the Government of Ireland Act in December 1920, gave Home Rule to two parts of the island the twenty six southern counties and the six north eastern counties with devolution (a local parliament) in Dublin and Belfast; both parts were still to send some MPs to Westminster, and both parliaments were to send representatives to the Council of Ireland to discuss common concerns.

The Dail and the IRA rejected this solution, and the fighting continued. The Ulster Unionists, in spite of some public grumping, found this arrangement suited them perfectly. Six counties, rather than the nine of historic Ulster, would give them a comfortable majority; and a Belfast parliament would, they believed, protect them from the day when a Liberal or Labour government (less friendly to Unionists) would take power at Westminster.

The IRA suffered some severe defeats in the spring of 1921, and Britain was tiring of the expense of the campaign. A truce was agreed in July 1921 and eventually negotiations between the British government and representatives of the Dail began in autumn. On 6 December 1921 the Anglo - Irish Treaty was signed: the twenty six counties would become the Irish Free State, a dominion similar in status to Canada (virtual independence), Britain would retain naval bases, and the frontier would be revised by a Boundary Commission. Sir James Craig (later Lord Craigavon), the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, was furious and declared that he would yield not an inch of the regions territory.

It is worth observing that partition was a solution applied elsewhere by the peacemakers after the First World War, with boundary commissions in Silesia (to decide the frontier between Poland, Germany and Czechoslovakia in that province) and Schleswig Holstein (to determine the border between Denmark and Germany).

The Creation of Northern Ireland and the Boundary Commission

The irony was that the only part of Ireland to resist Home Rule was the only part to get it: the Government of Ireland Act, 1920 gave Northern Ireland a local parliament subservient to Westminster. Elections for this parliament in Belfast (it generally met in the City Hall) took place in May 1921; Ulster Unionists won 40 seats, the Nationalists 6 seats, and Sinn Fein 6 seats.

On 22 June 1921 King George V came in person to Belfast to open the Northern Ireland Parliament, and there he made an appeal to all Irishmen to pause, to stretch out the hand of forbearance and conciliation. A truce between the IRA and the British government was made in July, and negotiations on the future began in London.

Northern Ireland came to life during a period of violence far worse than any experienced in the nineteenth century. As the political future of the island hung in the balance, sectarian warfare began in Londonderry (from June1920) and Belfast (from July 1920). Characterised by rioting, burning, shooting and assassination, the violence got worse after the 1921 Truce and reached a peak of intensity during the first six months of 1922. Between July 1920 and July 1922 the death toll in the six counties was 557: 303 Catholics, 172 Protestants and 82 members of the security forces.

The Northern Ireland governments response to the violence and to the IRA campaign in particular was to adopt a Special Powers Act to give the Minister for Home Affairs authority to detain suspects and set up courts with exceptional jurisdiction. An armed police force was created, and the Ulster Special Constabulary (formed by the British government in 1920) was greatly expanded.

The outbreak of the Irish Civil War in June 1922 (between those for and against the 1921 Treaty) gave the Northern Ireland government the breathing space to restore order on its own terms. The Civil War delayed the re drawing of the border; fighting stopped in May 1923 (with defeat for the republicans), and it was the end of 1924 before the commission began work. Only minor adjustments to the frontier were recommended, and after details had been leaked to the press in November 1925, the Dublin and London governments agreed to suppress the commissions findingsand so the border remained without alternation.

The Northern Ireland Problem

The British government by now assumed that the Irish question had been solved and turned their attention elsewhere. Though Northern Ireland seemed remarkably peaceful (there was not sectarian murder between 1923 and 1933), major problems remained problems in part inherited from previous centuries. The Catholics, one third of the population, felt they were worse off than when all of Ireland was in the UK. They were now ruled by their political opponents (with a permanent majority) and wanted to be in the Irish Free State. The Protestants, two thirds of the population, had a comfortable majority but feared that the Catholics, with southern help and perhaps with British government approval, would one day get all of Ireland placed under a Dublin government. Catholics for a time refused to send MPs to Belfast or take part in local government. The Unionists used this opportunity to re draw local government boundaries to their advantage, to make sure that most public appointments were in their own hands, and to use the special powers and police to stifle dissent. The situation has been described as one where the Unionists were governing without consensus.

Economic Problems

The financial arrangements in the over complex constitutional relationship between Belfast and Westminster had been worked out during the postwar boom. When that boom ended, the Northern Ireland government found it extremely difficult to make ends meet. Northern Ireland suffered an acute depression between the two world wars. Why? Political instability probably discouraged new light industries from being set up, but the real reasons had nothing to do with politics.

The economic climate had completely changed during the First World War. Other countries developed new export industries that competed with Ulsters staple industries. Northern Ireland was dangerously dependent on a limited range of export products: ships, textile engineering, linen, aerated waters and tobacco. There was a world surplus of ships: Japan, Sweden, the United States and others now had their own shipbuilding firms; cotton (and later artificial fibres) competed effectively with linen; states imposed import duties on aerated waters; and the prices obtained by farmers for their food went down throughout the world. In addition, the colonies and dominions formerly good customers experienced severe economic difficulties in these years.

Unemployment, which became more acute in the early 1930s, averaged at least 25 per cent for men between the two world wars. In the 1920s Irish Free State governments did not attempt to create the siege economy advocated by Sinn Feins founder, Arthur Griffith, mainly because they did not see how smuggling could be controlled. In the 1930s, however, de Valera introduced his own brand of autarky during the Economic War with Britain, and high protective tariffs were to remain until the Anglo Irish Free Trade Area Agreement of 1965.

Partition Reinforced

Policies of protection by Dublin, together with the partial abandonment of free trade by London, helped to make partition more deeply felt as a day to day reality. Grave economic difficulties in districts north and south of the Border were aggravated by the dislocation of trade, despite new opportunities for profitable smuggling. De Valera campaigned vigorously against partition, but his trade policies reinforced it.

De Valeras decision to keep the Republic neutral ensured that the Second World War was a starkly contrasted experience for people living on the same island but divided by a political frontier into citizens of two states. The Republic suffered no more than a few air raids and a fall in living standards. By contrast, Belfast lost more lives in one air raid by the Germany than any other city in the United Kingdom except London. Northern Ireland had a strategic role as a base against the U boats and then as the first toe hold for the Americans preparing for the Normandy landings. Living standards rose in the North as the regions industries and farms strove to feed the Allied war machine.

The Labour government elected in 1945 introduced an all embracing welfare state, and the bill for additional expenditure was lifted by central government; this was the beginning of the annual subvention that today plays such a big in Northern Irelands economy. The result was a vast improvement in educational, health care, and living standards. Though unemployment black spots reappeared in places like Derry, generally the prospects for the future looked bright.

Intercommunal divisions remained stubbornly alive and came to the surface in 1949 when the Republic left the Empire. The British government gave its famous promise repeated in the 1985 Anglo Irish Agreement and the 1993 Joint Declaration that Northern Ireland would remain part of the United Kingdom as long as the majority there wished in to be.

Lord Brookeborough, Prime Minister of Northern Ireland for twenty years, faced an IRA campaign between 1954 and 1962. It had little support and mainly affected border areas. Internment in both the Republic and Northern Ireland reduced the IRA to a relatively powerless movement.

Brookeborough refused most demands for reform from constitutional nationalists. Terence ONeill replaced him as Prime Minister in 1963 and immediately made improvement in community relation a central part of his programme. He sought to bring the benefits of modernisation to everyone in the region and not just to the Protestant majority. In the 1960s traditional industries declined rapidly, but, helped by a sustained boom in the western world, the Unionist government was very successful in attracting multinational companies such as Goodyear, Grundig and synthetic fibre firms to set up in Northern Ireland. ONeill went out of his way to visit Catholic schools and hospitals, and invited the Taouseach, Sean Lemass, to Stormont in 1965.

Ian Paisley, founder and moderator of the Free Presbyterian Church, denounced ONeills conciliatory approach to the Catholic minority and gained growing support for his ONeill must gocampaign. ONeill raised Catholic expectation with his bridge building gestures, but the small crop of practical reforms caused mounting frustration. There were ominous indications of future trouble: vicious riots in Divis Street, Belfast, in 1964, a petty dispute over the naming of a bridge across the Lagan and clashes with Paisley led demonstrations in 1966, the revival of the UVF and the murder of Peter Ward, a Catholic, in Malvern Street, Belfast, in June 1966, and the formation of organisations seeking civil rights.

From Civil Rights to Civil Strife

The problems and divisions within the region had their origins long before the creation of Northern Ireland. The increase in living standards and in educational opportunities after the Second World War helped to create a new Catholic middle class (especially at student level at this stage), ready to lead a challenge to the status quo. The vast improvement in international communications brought pictures of events overseas into everyones living room.

The Black civil rights campaign in the United States, the demonstrations against the Vietnam war, the student uprising in Paris in 1968 and the passive resistance to Soviet tanks in Prague in the spring of 1968 set powerful examples of action.

The main argument put by the civil rights movement was that full British standards were not being applied in Northern Ireland. The Cameron Report, commissioned by the Unionist government in 1969, was to substantiate this view. What had happened was that Westminster governments had failed to keep a close watch on political developments in Northern Ireland after 1922.

Indeed London was grateful for the regions crucial support during the war, and Northern Ireland seemed to be a strategic asset at the height of the Cold War. Nationalists in the north had expended their energies futilely railing against partition. The Civil Rights movement was more challenging to the Unionist hegemony because it sought reform within Northern Ireland and attracted mass support.

In 1968 69 Northern Ireland moved rapidly from an apparent easing of tension to violence so intense that in news coverage throughout the world it vied with reports of the Vietnam war. In August 1969, British troops were put on active service in the streets Derry and Belfast as people began to die, and Westminster desperately sought expedients and solution while ancient hatreds welled to the surface and the issue of partition moved in from the wings towards centre stage. The Provisional IRA and other republican militants had as their primary aim the ending of British rule, while loyalist paramilitaries saw themselves as being front line defenders of the Union.

Partition remained, but the turmoil, killing and destruction of less than three years shattered the elaborate constitutional arrangement of 1920.

On 30 January 1972 paratroopers killed thirteen men in Derry during a demonstration against internment; this immediately became known as Bloody Sunday. Some terrible IRA atrocities followed, while loyalist paramilitaries paraded openly in force. On 24 March 1972 Edward Heath, the British Prime Minister, told Faulkner that Westminster was taking over control of security.

The Unionist government resigned. The Northern Ireland Parliament was suspended, and fifty years of devolved government came to an end.

Direct rule: the Seventies

The British government sought to control the violence and in co-operation with the Dublin government to find a constitutional compromise, which included the sharing of power by Protestant and Catholic elected representatives.

At the end of 1973, following a conference at Sunningdale in Berkshire, Faulkner led a power sharing government, including Gerry Fitt and Members of the Social Democratic and Labour Party. A Westminster election soon after showed that most unionists opposed this arrangement, and In May 1074 a loyalist strike paralysed much of Northern Ireland and forced the break up of the power sharing administration.

Several other attempts by the British government to get local assemblies to work failed completely. Violence continued at a high level, the worst day being Bloody Friday, 21 July 1972, when in 65 minutes the IRA detonated twenty bombs in Belfast. The Peace People in 1976 ran a well publicized campaign to get the paramilitaries to stop killing. But the killing went on: Earl Mountbatten and two boys were killed at Mullaghmore, County Sligo, and eighteen soldiers were killed at Warrenpoint, Country Down, on one day, Monday 27 August 1979.

Towards the Anglo Irish Agreement, 1979 85

In spite of appalling incidents, the level of violence was much reduced in the 1980s. Internment was phased out, and those imprisoned on terrorist charges were henceforth treated like other prisoners. IRA prisoners responded by refusing prison clothes and by smearing excrement in their cells; then in March 1981 Bobby Sands refused all food. He died, after being elected MP for Fermanagh South Tyrone, on 5 May. The Conservative government still refused to grant the prisoners political status. By 20 August 1981 ten prisoners had starved themselves to death. There was a huge upsurge of feeling in the Catholic community.

Both the London and Dublin governments were alarmed by the increase in Sinn Feins support: 13.4 per cent of the electorate by June 1983. Both governments were anxious to bolster the constitutional SDLP. A New Ireland Forum in the Republic (1983 - 84) recommended a choice constitutional solutions. At first Margaret Thatcher, the Prime Minister, seemed to reject the choice offered her, but, of the bombing of the Conservative Party conference in Brighton by the IRA on 12 October 1984, she was persuaded to make an agreement by the Taoiseach, Garret FitzGerald.

The Anglo Irish Agreement was announced at Hillsborough on 15 November 1985. It included an intergovernmental conference to promote cross border co-operation and created a secretariat of Northern Ireland and Republic civil servants at Maryfield just outside Holywood, County Down.

The Republic was given a consultative role.

Ulster Says No, 1985 90

Unionists of almost every persuasion were appalled by the agreement. They had not been consulted (the SDLP had); southern civil servants were in the North; the Republic could be consulted on Northern Ireland affairs; and it was seen as a first step towards the reunification of Ireland though the agreement repeated the promise that Northern Ireland would remain in the United Kingdom as long as the majority there wanted it.

Years of noncooperation and protest followed, but the British government stood firm; the agreement was designed to be immune to loyalist protest.

However, there was closer co-operation between Dublin and London on security matters, and Sinn Feins electoral support declined.

Towards the Join Declaration, 1990 93

Violence increased again in the early 1990s; the Provisional IRA got large consignments of arms and explosives from Libya, and loyalist paramilitaries got weapons from South Africa of the IRA were now the most experienced paramilitaries In Europe; their bombs were fewer but larger, doing severe damage in Belfast, provincial towns, and London.

Loyalists stepped up their long standing campaign of sectarian assassinations. Horrific incidents included eight men killed when their van was bombed by the IRA at Teebane, Country Tyrone, and the shooting dead of five Catholics in a betting shop on the Ormeau Road, Belfast, in early 1992.

The London and Dublin governments strove to reach a new agreement while the SDLP leader, John Hume, had secret talks with Gerry Adams, president of Sinn Fein. Two horrific atrocities impelled the two governments towards a new accord: the killing of ten people on the Shankill Road, Belfast, by an IRA bomb on 23 October 1993 and the killing of seven people in Greysteel, County Londonderry, on 30 October 1993.

On 15 December 1993 John Major and Albert Reynolds launched the Joint Declaration at Downing Street, which reaffirmed the constitutional guarantee to Northern Ireland, stated that Britain no longer had any selfish strategic or economic interest in Northern Ireland, acknowledged the right of self-determination but subject to the consent of a Northern majority, and held out the prospect of exploratory talks with Sinn Fein three months after an agreement to stop the IRA campaign of violence.

Appalling violence during the first half of 1994 seemed to indicate that the whole situation was strikingly altered by the republican and loyalist cease-fires in the autumn.

Whatever the political commentators might say, the people themselves quickly decided that the Troubles were over. On a Saturday afternoon in early December 1994, the day the new Lagan bridge was opened for pedestrians, this writer waited in a queue for a car park in central Belfast. Buses from Mayo and Galway were pulling in at Great Victoria Street, and there were car registrations from as far away as Waterford and Kerry. Overhead a buzzard soared over St Annes Cathedral, banked over the quays towards the City Hall, and reappeared over the vast flat roof of Castlecourt, quartering the heart of the city for prey. For the first time in a quarter of a century such a creature, wild as the wind, could hunt undisturbed: the helicopters had abandoned the sky.

The 1974 loyalist strike only succeeded because, except for blackspots, the provincial economy was still booming. Then came the OPEC oil crisis and resultant dislocation throughout the world. Several large multinationals closed their branches in Northern Ireland, and synthetic fiber production dependent on cheap oil contracted sharply. Meanwhile traditional industries such as shipbuilding continued to decline, and the region has become exceptionally dependent on public sector employment. Nevertheless Northern Ireland has come through the recession of the early 1990s in far better shape than many economists predicted.

No country or provinces should be judged by the worst moments in its history. How many would have predicted in 1945 that Germany would become a bastion of democracy with one of the strongest economies in the world? Ten years ago no prominent figure or pundit predicted the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the break up of the Soviet empire. Week by week we read of acts of violence here, but too many people have a vested interest in peace for Northern Ireland to slide into bloodletting on the scale perpetrated in Bosnia. There are many positive signs: the reclamation and reopening of the Erne Shannon waterway (as Sean Rafferty put it possible to travel from Enniskillen to New York by boat); some of the best public housing in Europe; the revitalization of the city centers in Belfast and Derry; developments along the lower Lagan, including a concert hall; the success of power sharing in Dungannon and other local authorities; Belfast City Council no longer the bear garden it was before; the opening of interpretative centers at Navan Fort and Benburb; as rich a life style for the middle classes as anywhere in the United Kingdom; and a growing realization that the natural beauty of so much of Northern Ireland is an asset beyond price.