Northern Ireland

D

Political Parties

Political affiliation in Northern Ireland largely divides along religious lines. The major Protestant political parties are the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP). The UUP is dedicated to maintaining the union between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom. The DUP has been more resistant to compromise with the Catholic community than the UUP and draws much of its support from Protestant fundamentalists and working-class Protestants.

The major Catholic parties are the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and Sinn Fein. The SDLP is progressive on most social issues, has fraternal links with the British Labour Party, and aspires toward the long-term goal of uniting Ireland by winning the consent of the majority of people in Northern Ireland. Sinn Fein is an Irish nationalist party whose goal has been to end the United Kingdom’s control over any part of Ireland and to create a unified Irish state. Sinn Fein has often been characterized as the political arm of the Irish Republican Army (IRA), a paramilitary organization. There are also a number of minor parties, representing labor, the women’s movement, Protestant paramilitary groups, and dissident republicans.

E

Policing and Security

Policing and security in Northern Ireland are the responsibility of the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), supported by the British army. Unlike police forces in the rest of the United Kingdom, the PSNI is an armed force. The police force—known as the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) until 2001—has never been as well-received in the Catholic community as it is in the Protestant community. When the RUC was founded in 1922, it had a Catholic membership of 21 percent, but that fell quickly. By 1970 it had slumped to 10 percent, and since then it has fallen further still. Several hundred policemen and members of the British army have been killed since the beginning of the troubles in 1969. Since 1970 membership of the RUC has not been compatible with living in a Catholic neighborhood. Following the Good Friday Agreement, a 1999 government report recommended wide changes in the RUC to make it acceptable to the Catholic community and to encourage significant Catholic recruitment.

The British army has been on active service in the province since 1969. At peak periods of civil disorder or paramilitary violence the number of troops in the province has approached 20,000, although it has normally been fewer. About 11,000 soldiers operated from more than three dozen bases and border outposts in July 2005. That month, Britain announced a two-year plan to reduce its military presence to a permanent military garrison of no more than 5,000 soldiers operating from 14 bases. However, the cutbacks were contingent on the IRA fulfilling a promise, made in 2005, to end its armed campaign and resume weapons decommissioning.

---

---

In 1969 an Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR) was created within the British army. This was intended to be a locally based and mainly part-time force that would attract Catholics as well as Protestants. In practice, it did not work well in the climate of segregation and violence created by the troubles. The UDR became as Protestant-dominated as its predecessor, the B Specials, and some UDR members were convicted of offenses in connection with Protestant paramilitary organizations. In 1992 the UDR was merged into an existing regular unit of the British army to form the Royal Irish Regiment.

VII

History

Northern Ireland is a modern term, brought into existence by the British Parliament’s Government of Ireland Act of 1920. Before 1920 the region was referred to as Ulster. The word Ulster derives from the Ulaid, the name of one of the Celtic dynasties of prehistory. The term is a contentious one. To Irish Catholics Ulster properly means the historic nine-county northern province of Ireland. The modern six-county territory of Northern Ireland has customarily been referred to as Ulster only by Protestants.

A

Gaelic Ulster

Little is known for certain about prehistoric Ireland. By around 500 bc the people of Ireland, including Ulster, were Celts, a group that dominated most of central and northern Europe in the 1st millennium bc. By the 8th century ad the inhabitants of Ireland described themselves as Gaels. According to tradition, Saint Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland from western Europe in the 5th century ad. Downpatrick and Armagh, the centers most closely associated with Saint Patrick, are both in Northern Ireland. Christianity developed in Ireland a century earlier than it did among the Anglo-Saxons in Great Britain. For some time Irish Christianity also developed independently of mainstream Christianity in the rest of Europe, especially in matters of church organization.

The first invasion of Ireland from Britain occurred in 1169, when French-speaking Anglo-Norman lords from Wales intervened in alliance with some Gaelic lords in the southeast of Ireland. After that the English presence never really disappeared from Ireland. However, for 400 years, as the English sought to govern Ireland from Dublin, Ulster remained the most independent and Gaelic region of the country, isolated as it was by watery, wooded, and mountainous terrain.

B

Plantation and Conflict

At the end of the 16th century the government of England, by that time a Protestant state, sought to consolidate its power over all of Ireland. A number of Gaelic chiefs rose up against English forces, notably Ulster’s Shane O’Neill and, later, Hugh O’Neill, 2nd earl of Tyrone. Hugh O’Neill’s forces annihilated an English army in 1598, but in 1603 he was forced to submit to English authority. English law was subsequently pronounced the sole law of Ireland. No longer able to act independently, O’Neill, Rory O’Donnell, 1st earl of Tyrconnell, and dozens of other chieftains fled Ulster in 1607. The British government then confiscated the earls’ lands and instigated an organized policy of encouraging English and Scottish farmers to resettle in Ulster, a process known as the Ulster Plantation. Counties Antrim and Down were not part of the official plantation, but they experienced immigration, especially from southern Scotland, on an even larger scale.

Ulster’s Gaelic population was small, and during the course of the 17th century the incoming Presbyterian Scots and Anglican English came to outnumber them. At first, those who suffered from this change were by and large the local Gaelic elite, who lost their estates and their status. The peasant farmers who worked the land were for the most part not dispossessed in the early 17th century. In 1641, however, native Irish Catholics rose up against the Protestants. Some Protestants were massacred by Catholics, but many historians believe that the number of victims was vastly exaggerated in the accounts that reached England. The 1641 uprising became for Protestants a symbol of Catholic treachery, brutality, and intent to expel Protestants. In 1649 English forces under the command of revolutionary leader Oliver Cromwell brutally subjugated the Catholic population.

Ireland played a key role in the English Revolution of 1688, in which Protestant English forces rose up against Catholic English king James II. James II fled to France and then Ireland to rally Catholic support. In 1690 the forces of Protestant ruler William of Orange (later William III), who had assumed the English throne, invaded Ireland and defeated James II at the Battle of the Boyne. English forces subsequently repressed Irish Catholics harshly. These episodes created lasting and differing impressions in the minds of Ulster’s Catholics and Protestants. Catholics became convinced the Protestants were treacherous, brutal, and intent on taking over Catholic land. Ulster’s Protestants, on the other hand, saw William of Orange’s victory at the Battle of the Boyne as the foundation of a Protestant, unionist state to last for all time in Ireland. English Protestant rulers subsequently institutionalized Catholic subjugation in the form of the Penal Laws of the early 1700s, which placed certain restrictions on the practice of Roman Catholicism, which were harsher in theory than in practice.

Despite the growing division between Ulster’s Catholics and Protestants, during the 1700s community relations were quite good in some districts where either Protestants or Catholics constituted a large local majority of the population. In some areas, divisions within the Protestant community—between the Anglican Episcopalians of the established Church of Ireland and the Presbyterians of Scottish descent—were almost as wide as those between Catholics and Protestants, or between natives and settlers.

Nevertheless, the underlying trend in most areas, especially among the small farmers and the rural and urban working class, was toward sharp competition between Catholic and Protestant interests. Thus in the 1790s Protestants organized the Orange Order (named after William of Orange) and other secret societies to resist competition for land from a growing Catholic population. The Orange Order movement—usually referred to as the Orangemen or Orangeism—was initially supported by Anglican farmers and laborers, as well as by those landlords who saw the Order as a force for loyalty. Catholics created similar societies, such as the Defenders.

Not all new secret societies were sectarian, however. The Society of United Irishmen was a revolutionary movement founded in Dublin in 1791 to bring the democratic ideals of the French Revolution to Ireland and create an independent, religiously tolerant state. In Ulster, leadership of the United Irishmen was made up mostly of elite Presbyterians. With the help of French mercenaries, the United Irishmen instigated an uprising in counties Antrim and Down in 1798 that was intended to appeal to Irish people of all social and ethnic backgrounds. The disorganized uprising was bloody, and British forces suppressed it harshly.