
W10 L19- The ‘Troubles’ in Northern Ireland
• 1998 Good Friday peace agreement with Northern Ireland
• Nationalists brought in
• Brought in a role for Southern Ireland (as and independent
representative)
• Made political system represent more diverse views
• Ideas of peaceful coexistence
• Why did the troubles start? (30 years of armed conflict – many dead), why did
it go on for so long? Why did it end?
• To understand the troubles you cannot start in 1968/9 – you have to look back
to the 1920s (or some say even further back)
• Britishness/ Irishness
• How did the civil rights movement turn into armed conflict?
• 1968-98- ‘the long war’
• Many horrible events occurred on both sides
• E.g. Bombings and murders
Bloody Sunday
• Peace? No armed conflict, but the issues had not gone away
• All happening in what is legally a part of the U.K.
• Some think there seems to be different rule in Northern Ireland to the
rest of the U.K.
= A nationalist grievance
• About religion?
• Religion and idenitiy
• Division based on religious lines
• But not based on ideological difference
• Because the theological differences between protestants and Catholics
are not too great
• Based on ethical and national identity
• Most Catholics were nationalists
• Most Protestants were loyalists/ unionists- wanted to stay a part of the
U.K.
• Good Friday agreement – tries to accommodate both sides of the debate – as
well as many other things
• Nationalists keep their Irish identity
• But they stay a part of the U.K.
• Final stage in working out the ‘Irish question’
• Long history to the issue – based in the colonisation f Ireland by Britain in
Norman times
• The two Irelands:
• Government of Ireland Act 1920
• Irish Free state: Catholic and Gaelic
• Northern Ireland: a ‘protestant Parliament and Protestant State’- Sir
James Craig 1934
• The factory of grievances
• WWII
• Plato’s cave
• 6 counties in Northern Ireland, 26 in southern Ireland
• Government of Ireland Act 1920
• Still the legal basis of government in Northern Ireland
• Two states going different ways:
• Gaelic and Catholic – Irish free state