A brief intro to N. Ireland

Below is an edited and extended version of something I wrote in 1998. It is now written from a 2017 perspective and improved and the part about how NI was created is new. I'm not sure it's still "brief" but if you are unfamiliar with NI this will give you a lot of the background that is relevant to following current events there today.



Northern Ireland: A Struggle for Democracy and Self-Determination

By Tom Shelley
Students for Justice in N. Ireland

"Peace is not merely the absence of tension, but the presence of justice"
- Martin Luther King Jr.

The situation in N. Ireland (NI) has changed greatly in the last 20 years, which could signal a new period of sustainable peace and justice. If this will happen, many things need to be addressed. Certainly one such area is the origins of the recent conflict (which lasted from about 1969 to about 2005). For political reasons, the British government, much of the media, and others who more or less make excuses for British imperialism in Ireland, have put forward the image of a conflict between "terrorists" and the security forces with little political context.

Between it's creation in 1920 and about 1998 or 2005, the statelet of NI was based on sectarianism (bias towards people based on their religion, in this case, against Catholics). The area was given a devolved parliamentary system which was autonomous from London. It's first Prime Minister explicitly described it as "a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people." From the very beginning, up until around 1998 or 2005, there was a central theme to politics, economics, and other areas of society- that Nationalists (those who identify as Irish (around 90% of Catholics and roughly 5% of Protestants)), were disloyal. On one hand, this was largely true, as practically all (to one degree or another) wanted to live in a 32-county Ireland (26 counties in the "South," 6 in NI) and quite reasonably viewed the the British state as both foreign and hostile. On the other hand, this contributed an excuse (along with other motivations such as simple bigotry and capitalist goals) for Unionists (those who identify as British (about 95% of Protestants and about 10% of Catholics) and support NI remaining in the UK) to marginalize and repress (until about 1998 or 2005) about 35-45% of the population.

How N. Ireland Was Created

After about two and a half years of anti-British guerrilla warfare by the IRA, in 1921 a treaty between the Irish and the British was negotiated.

A year earlier, the 1920 Government of Ireland Act was passed by the British Parliament.The part about the  26 county “South” of Ireland was meaningless because in that area British rule had largely collapsed. Then there was the 6 county “Northern Ireland” area that would remain part of the UK and is still part of the UK. The boundary was designed so that the UK could retain as much of Ireland as they could with the requirement that the area would have a semi-permanent Protestant/pro-british majority- it was gerrymandered. The ancient province of Ulster, throughout which the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) was organized, has 9 counties, three of which had large Catholic majorities and were left behind because they were ungovernable. Two counties with small Catholic majorities (Fermanagh and Tyrone) were included, partly because they had very good farmland and partly because the UUP would leave behind no more Protestants. Also, the second largest city (Derry), with a Catholic majority, which was right on the border, was included (as was another, smaller, such city).

In an online debate about N. Ireland among socialists many years ago someone said that the British Prime Minister at the time of the partition of Ireland simply out-negotiated the Irish Republican leader Michael Collins, as if that settled it. During the talks in 1921, the British threatened “immediate and terrible” war if the Treaty was not accepted.

One of the key issues associated with the Treaty was the boundary of N. Ireland. A key part of the Treaty was a Boundary Commission (BC) to evaluate and if necessary adjust the border. The Republicans negotiating the Treaty believed that the BC would transfer large parts of NI to the South, and one source I read said that without those areas (including counties Tyrone and Fermanagh) NI might not be economically viable. In general, a less unreasonable drawing of the border probably would have increased the likelihood of the Treaty being a stepping stone to complete independence for all of Ireland and at the very least it would have spared hundreds of thousands of Catholics from what ended up happening to Catholics in N. Ireland.

Why didn’t this happen? There are about seven small reasons and one big one. First, the BC had a representative from the Southern Ireland "Free State" one from the N. Ireland state (or statelet, known as Stormont), and one, the Chair, from the UK state. The idea that the Chair was somehow neutral is ridiculous. It was two to one and then the Judicial Committee of the British Privy Council (a part of the British state) decided that the BC could function with only 2 members. Shortly before the BC reported in 1925, the Southern Ireland representative quit in protest of an ostensible plan to take valuable land from the South and give it to the North in exchange for unimportant strips of land in the North (it’s believed that this was a (successful) ruse intended to force the South to confirm the border as it was in order to avoid losing any territory). In the early 1920s in Belfast and to some degree elsewhere in the North there was a high level of violence against the Nationalist community from both the security forces and other unionists. This may have had an effect on the ability of Nationalists to demonstrate their opposition to Stormont and was used to pressure the IRA to cease activity in the Six Counties- activity that might have highlighted, in the border areas, opposition to Stormont as the BC was meeting (the beginning of the Civil War in the South may have been more responsible for the end of IRA activity in N. Ireland, but according to Michael Farrell on page 61 of his book “Northern Ireland: The Orange State” the pro-Treaty (pro-compromise) Southern "Free State" attacked their political opponents because the British (and Stormont) pressured them to stop IRA attacks in the North; This was in exchange for stopping the pogroms in Belfast). In general, the North was turned into an armed camp with about 50,000 in the locally recruited security forces and 16 battalions of the British Army (the population would have been about 1.25 million and NI is 5,460 square miles).

The big reason was the set-up of local gov’t in N. Ireland. In 1920, under the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, local gov’t elections were held using proportional representation, something the British put in the law to protect minorities. Out of nearly 80 local gov’t bodies, Nationalists controlled 25, including counties Fermanagh and Tyrone and Derry city. Many of them declared their allegiance to the underground Irish gov’t in Dublin. 14 of these bodies, including Fermanagh and Tyrone, were dissolved and replaced by Unionist-appointed commissions. The N. Ireland law about elections to local gov’t was changed so that PR was done away with and all councilors had to make a declaration of allegiance to the Crown and the gov’t. When the new boundaries were drawn without PR, it was done  by a single unionist who invariably accepted unionist submissions (he didn’t do anything with the corporations (i.e. Belfast) or urban councils). The result was that after elections in 1924 (just months before the BC started working) Nationalists controlled only 2 local government bodies. This was partly because in protest of the new boundaries and the required declaration of allegiance many Nationalists boycotted the elections.

Here and there you could say that the British and/or the unionists, in different negotiations, did out-negotiate Michael Collins. But that doesn’t change the very serious concerns, then and since then, about the treatment of the Catholic and Nationalist minorities; or the right to national self-determination of the Irish people. Crucially, when the Treaty was signed, the Government of Ireland Act of 1920 said there would be proportional representation, and the boundaries for local gov’t elections had been drawn fairly, and there was no requirement for local councilors to declare allegiance to the Crown and the gov’t. If it had been otherwise, the republican negotiators would have addressed it. As it was, it made sense for them to assume that the BC would transfer about 1/4-1/3 of the Six-County population to the South.

“A Protestant Parliament for a Protestant People”

The Treaty which created NI stipulated that elections to the Belfast parliament should be on the basis of Proportional Representation (PR). This allowed the Nationalist Party (moderate Catholics) to minimize electoral conflict with the N. Ireland Labour Party. The largest party, the Ulster Unionist Party, (which was in every government, practically always without coalition partners, during the 50 years of devolved government) always won about 80% of the parliamentary seats. After two elections with PR, the UUP instituted a single-member district system explicitly because they wanted a two-way contest between them and the Nationalists which they would almost always win. This had the effect of creating three-way conflicts among the opposition, between the Nationalists, Labour, and (occasionally) Sinn Fein (which usually had little interest in elections and had a policy of abstaining if elected). Local government elections in the UK were based on the ownership of property (if you didn't own a house you didn't vote; if you owned a certain kind of business, you got more votes). In 1946, this was abolished in the rest of the UK, but was actually strengthened in NI. This system, which was aimed mostly at Catholics (but also of course affected poor Protestants), continued until the very early 1970s. Discrimination in the allocation of public housing (which ended at roughly the same time) combined with the widespread poverty among Catholics to disenfranchise many of them at the local level (and it was incredibly common for multiple Catholic families to live in the same small home). Early on the Unionists also started a practice of gross gerrymandering that lasted until the very early 1970s. As a result, almost all local and county governments were controlled by the UUP, even in areas where Nationalists were the clear majority (including two of the six counties, and the second largest city, Derry).

Discrimination was institutionalized. The Unionist-controlled governments almost exclusively hired Protestant staff. Even in Nationalist-majority areas, like Derry and counties Fermanagh and Tyrone, Catholic workers were vastly under-represented in the public sector. When it came to “non-manual” employees of local government in 1951, only 11% were Catholics while about 34% of the general population was Catholic. In the private sector, Unionists openly and explicitly encouraged discrimination against Catholics. This was especially used as a tactic to divide Catholic and Protestant workers. For example, in 1932 unemployed Catholics and Protestants joined together to successfully strike for more public assistance. In the years afterwards, Unionists (including the man who was Prime Minister from 1946-1963) made speeches encouraging business owners (most UUP leaders were wealthy employers themselves) to only hire Protestants. One clear sign of this was that in 1971, official figures showed that Catholics were twice as likely to be unemployed as Protestants were.

In order to deal with any threats to the statelet, and to generally repress the Catholic population, Stormont always had many repressive tools available to it. The Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) was, unlike it's English/Welsh/Scottish counterparts, always armed and the all-Protestant and notorious B-Specials (possibly a cross between the National Guard and the State police in the US) were even worse. The NI Minister for Home Affairs always had the power to ban organizations, publications, marches, to intern without charge, to conduct warrant-less searches, etc. His power was the public envy of his counterpart in S. Africa under Apartheid. In the 1950s the display of the Irish flag was banned.

It was in these conditions that roughly a third of the population (Catholics) lived for about 47 years before the civil rights movement. Over the years there had been various protest efforts, there were a few unsuccessful IRA campaigns, but mostly Nationalists were demoralized and made little effort to effectively challenge the Unionist State. This all changed in the mid-/late-sixties. A number of historical, political, and economic factors created a situation where Nationalists rose up to demand their rights. The greatest influence was the civil rights movement taking place in the American South.

Initially, they demanded reforms designed to democratize the NI statelet, and their tactics were entirely non-violent. However, as soon as the movement took off, the Unionist State went into operation to defend itself. Civil rights marches were blocked or attacked by the RUC (the police) and/or unionist gangs. Reforms were offered, but were entirely too little, too late. In August 1969, in response to the growing confidence of nationalists, the RUC and a Unionist mob launched a determined attack on the Catholic Bogside ghetto in Derry. The area was successfully defended by local youths over 2-3 days, and the "Battle of the Bogside" sparked off similar confrontations in Belfast. There, where Catholics were more vulnerable, unionist mobs (led by the RUC) unleashed a wave of terror- in one night alone, 650 Catholic families were burnt out of their homes (in general, 83% of the homes and buildings either destroyed or needing re-building were occupied by Catholics; many of the Protestant victims were attacked by the same mobs as their Catholic neighbors were attacked by; but some were forced out in retaliation by Catholics (the odds are that the Catholic-occupied homes and buildings contained more families than the Protestant-occupied homes and buildings)).

In the early Sixties, the IRA had largely abandoned it's arms and turned to political action (it was very involved in the civil rights movement). When the situation turned violent in August 1969, the IRA was unable to effectively defend Nationalist areas. Where Unionists and the RUC were repelled, it was due more to the courage of youth throwing stones than to armed IRA members.

From Civil Rights to National Liberation

After 2-3 days of intense rioting with around 5-6 deaths of Catholic civilians, the British Army came onto the streets of Belfast and Derry. It's difficult to say what this meant. For most people at the time, especially the besieged Nationalists, the Army had kept the situation from becoming an all-out war, and had stopped a possible slaughter of Catholics. In Derry for example, the B-Specials were approaching the Bogside when the Army arrived. To some extent they also stopped the anti-Catholic pogroms in Belfast, although there were charges that they aimed their guns at the victims not the attackers and arrested many of those few Catholics with guns. Bernadette Devlin, a republican-socialist MP who had been at the Battle of the Bogside, argued that Nationalists should oppose the Army, that their imperialist history would lead them to repress Nationalists. It's also certain that there were ulterior motives for deploying the Army. In Derry, until the Army arrived, the Nationalists were driving the police back, and might have liberated a large piece of the city (London didn't want that or a massacre by the B-Specials). Also, the RUC/Unionist violence, especially in Belfast, had the potential to strengthen the republican argument, and London didn't want that. The Army and other interventions by London were used partly to restore the authority of a moderately (at best) reformed Stormont and stop the growth of militancy.

Nevertheless, for around 8-10 months Nationalists welcomed the presence of the Army and the involvement of the British Home Secretary. Most (with the exceptions of many republicans, Devlin, and similar radicals) saw London's intervention as a victory over Stormont- they had based their campaign on the American South's Civil Rights Movement, and believed that the "Federal" authorities would put the locals in their place. To some extent this happened, but only because the Labour Party was in power.

The Army-Nationalist relationship turned ugly in the Summer of 1970. This involved several Orange marches in Belfast. Right-wing Unionist Protestant groups hold annual marches throughout NI. Many go through Nationalist areas and are considered celebrations of Protestant supremacy (for why this is a civil rights issue, see this). Those are unwelcome and always require at least a small security escort, usually the RUC. But in 1970 (and during the Troubles in general) it was often partly the Army. London had been forcing some reforms on Stormont, but the Unionists would not compromise on marches.

In June 1970 a general election brought in a Tory government. Shortly afterwards, during a night of Orange marches throughout Belfast, an isolated Nationalist enclave was attacked by Unionists. The Army wouldn't defend the area, but five Provisional IRA (PIRA) members held off the Unionists. After this (defensive) use of arms by the PIRA, the Tories greatly increased security measures. A Nationalist area of Belfast was cordoned off, flooded with CS gas, and put under curfew for 2 days as brutal house-to-house searches were conducted; at least 4 civilians were killed. It wasn't until February 1971 that a soldier was killed by the PIRA.

Until the Spring of 1972, when Stormont was suspended, London and the Army propped up Stormont (as London had, in different ways, since NI was created), which showed few signs of genuine change. For most Nationalists, the Army had just replaced the RUC. This alienation increased with the one-sided anti- Catholic/Nationalist/Republican use of internment without charge or trial (which started in Aug. 1971) and climaxed with Bloody Sunday when the Army killed 14 civil rights demonstrators in Derry on Jan. 30th, 1972. For most Nationalists, anything less than a united Ireland was unacceptable. The changed situation, and the failure of the old leadership of the IRA (called the Official IRA after the split that produced the PIRA) led to the rapid growth of the PIRA. In general, the Nationalist consensus had shifted from reforming the State, to ending the State.

Today, many people think that the violence was the only problem. Certainly on the Unionist side, all they wanted was stability, the status quo (or a return to Stormont), and an end to violence. But republican violence didn't erupt in 1970 in a vacuum. It wasn't as if some lunatics formed the PIRA because they enjoyed killing people. The Provisional IRA was formed in a long tradition of Irish resistance to British rule, and more immediately, in response to the violence, sectarianism and authoritarianism of the Unionist State. It is important to remember this background when judging the current situation in N. Ireland.