The Story of Ireland: A History of the Irish People (46 page)

This was on one level a clash between the Provisional IRA and a variety of representatives of the British State, including the army, police and part-time reservists. However, many other participants – including rogue elements within the security services, republican splinter groups and an array of loyalist paramilitary organizations with an eye on turf wars and the lucrative profits flowing from the sale of drugs – swirled together around the edges of the conflict.
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Constitutional politics nevertheless continued for the duration of the Troubles, although this term must be qualified: in 1971, for example, Ian Paisley followed the constitutional route by establishing his Democratic Unionist Party (DUP); but he also continued to maintain close contacts with a range of extremist loyalist groups that drew support from the increasingly disaffected Protestant working-class population of the province. The politics of Northern Ireland, then, might have seemed both impossibly poisoned and utterly deadlocked – yet conversation, negotiation and exploration continued throughout, usually under the most unprepossessing circumstances imaginable.

Many elements within the Catholic community were certainly not predisposed towards political violence: Northern society, indeed, was typified by an abiding conservatism that transcended sectarian boundaries. Many middle-class nationalists aspired rather towards a society founded on equality of opportunity – one far removed, that is, from the Unionist hegemony that had marked the first fifty years of Northern history. The failure of the British State to intervene in these decades in order to address such substantial issues of disadvantage had bred an inevitable sense of grievance and resentment. Indeed, there were echoes of the situation in 1800, when the Act of Union had not been accompanied by Catholic emancipation; it was in part the failure to bring the nationalist community fully into the governance and economic mainstream of Northern Ireland that had created the present political situation.

The foundation in 1970 of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) answered the need within this community for a modern political party influenced by the ideology of constitutional Irish nationalism and of civil rights: led first by Gerry Fitt and then by John Hume, the party would for the next three decades play a pivotal role in the politics of the province. However, the responses of the state – in the form of internment without trial, curfews and such events as Bloody Sunday – to the worsening security situation also took many Catholics away from mainstream politics and pointed them in the direction of the IRA and its political wing, Sinn Féin. Conversely, the working-class Protestant population, from which loyalist terrorism drew its strength, was driven by fear of an inevitable loss of political, economic and social status should nationalists be accorded equality in what was traditionally a Protestant Northern Ireland. It was tacitly understood on all sides that the British state had essentially lost any strategic or ideological interest in maintaining its presence in Northern Ireland. The high days of empire were long gone; the economic maintenance of the province was an ever-increasing drain on a stretched British exchequer; and the sense of an increasingly loveless attitude on the part of Britain towards Northern Ireland fuelled continuing Unionist and loyalist fears of what the future might bring.

The final main player was the Irish state: throughout the Troubles, the rhetoric of successive Irish governments continued to espouse the ideal of national unity, while at the same time political energy was principally channelled towards the preservation of stability in the Republic itself. The Irish state was obliged to bolster the position of Northern nationalists: the upsurge of violence in the late 1960s, for example, had been followed extensively in the Southern media; the presence of refugees from this violence in the Republic led to expressions of solidarity and material support in the form of money and accommodation; and the matter was raised at international level – for example, at the UN Security Council. The Irish state was also obliged to maintain its independence of action in this matter – in particular, by resisting overt British attempts to extract support for its security policies. The result was a disconcerting oscillation between periods of close cooperation between the two governments and spectacular quarrels, of which a series of bitter conflicts over the question of extradition of terrorist suspects were the most public.

This was a conflict, then, bound up with a tortured history – but one that was also fed by the strains inherent in a series of contemporary relationships: between the communities in Northern Ireland itself; between the two constituent parts of the island of Ireland; and between the British and Irish states. Any solution would be obliged to address all of these strands: it was perhaps little wonder that such a solution took time to present itself.

The troops that appeared on the streets of Northern Ireland in 1969 were greeted initially with a certain relief in working-class Catholic districts of Belfast and Derry: better to deal with British soldiers, it was widely felt, than with those elements in the police – the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) – who had long since forfeited the trust of Northern nationalists. The IRA was obliged to accept such a state of affairs – but only temporarily: within months the relationship between the army and the Catholic community had frayed as a result of the imposition of curfews and by vigorous and often violent sweeps through these districts in search of hidden IRA arms. The Northern Ireland government was pressing for an end to those nationalist ‘no-go’ areas of Derry and Belfast where a police presence was not tolerated; and all remaining trust was torn away in the shocked aftermath of Bloody Sunday. In the face of mounting disorder and amid fears of actual civil war, the Northern Ireland government was first suspended and then dissolved; and direct rule from London was applied to the province.

The first serious attempt to create a new settlement in Northern Ireland (as opposed merely to managing the crisis) came as early as December 1973. In that month, the Sunningdale Agreement – named after the well-heeled Berkshire commuter town where the deal, rather incongruously, was thrashed out – provided for a new power-sharing executive in the province, together with a Council of Ireland that would allow Southern observations on the governance of the North. The agreement encompassed the Ulster Unionist Party together with the SDLP and the small, middle-class and non-sectarian Alliance Party. The architects of the accord, however, had not allowed for the bitterness felt by many mainstream unionists who were not yet reconciled to their loss of power in the province. They had also not counted on the absolute opposition expressed both by extreme loyalist factions who could not stomach the notion of Southern interference in the affairs of the North and by the IRA, for which Sunningdale was simply not enough. In May 1974, a widely observed strike managed by loyalist groups brought large areas of Northern Ireland to a standstill; by the end of the month, the power-sharing executive had collapsed.

Nothing on the lines of Sunningdale would be attempted for years to come: instead, Northern Ireland continued to be governed directly from London. Violence persisted: although its scale gradually decreased, loyalist terrorists continued their sectarian killings of Catholics, while the IRA and smaller republican groups carried on their campaigns against members of the RUC and part-time police reserve. The political tension was ratcheted up once more in March 1981, when IRA inmates of the Maze prison outside Belfast renewed a hunger strike in order to assert that they were political prisoners rather than mere convicts.
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The demands that their status be recognized – political prisoners were entitled to wear their own clothes, for example – were denied by the new British government led by Margaret Thatcher. Bobby Sands was the first prisoner to go on hunger strike; in April, he won a Westminster by-election in the delicately balanced rural constituency of Fermanagh and South Tyrone. But Thatcher refused to budge: in May, Sands died inside the Maze; and by October, nine more prisoners had followed him.

The hunger strikes were accompanied by widespread and severe civil unrest and deaths. But while Thatcher’s firm response certainly won her allies in some quarters, the episode did little to enhance British prestige abroad; and, indeed, the prisoners’ demands were later quietly conceded. The episode handed a substantial propaganda boost to the IRA; paradoxically, it also indicated to elements in the organization’s political wing, Sinn Féin, the possible advantages of participation in electoral politics. From this time, therefore, the party opted to contest all elections in Northern Ireland, though it abstained from taking its seats at Westminster. This, of course, was a policy of considerable symbolic vintage: it could be traced back to Arthur Griffith’s original Sinn Féin, which had in its turn taken a cue from those Hungarian nationalists who had declined to attend the imperial Austrian parliament in Vienna. Sinn Féin’s new direction would slowly bear fruit: the party developed a highly effective grassroots structure and daunting fundraising abilities; and in time it eclipsed the SDLP as the pre-eminent voice of Northern nationalism.

In the aftermath of the hunger strikes, it appeared on the surface as though nothing much had changed in Northern Ireland. The economy puttered along sluggishly: this, however, was a society now kept afloat by British subsidies and one in which the state sector was wholly dominant, providing jobs and thus a high degree of financial stability. Indeed, it was a fact – though one seldom remarked on – that the prevailing political uncertainty and civic abnormality kept house prices low and living conditions high. Northern Ireland never experienced much in the way of economic boom conditions, but neither was it exposed to severe recession; and life – at least for the province’s socially conservative middle class – progressed reasonably smoothly. For the Protestant working class, by contrast, economic conditions became progressively worse: as Belfast had shared the boom of the industrial revolution with Glasgow and the cities of northern England, so it shared too in the decline of the United Kingdom’s manufacturing base; the guaranteed jobs provided by the city’s cherished shipyards, for example, were now a thing of the past.

The political situation continued along sectarian and profoundly dysfunctional lines: while the violence had declined to what one British minister called ‘acceptable’ levels, the situation appeared frozen without hope of a breakthrough. Many Unionist politicians actually preferred it that way: full integration of the province into the United Kingdom was politically impossible; any move in the opposite direction, however, would present the disagreeable prospect of a renewed Irish government stake in Northern affairs. And yet, despite this abiding air of political stasis, change was on the horizon. As early as the spring of 1980, Thatcher had met the new taoiseach, Charles Haughey, in Dublin – and the meeting had paid dividends: both for Thatcher, who was given a silver eighteenth-century Irish teapot; and for the Anglo-Irish relationship as a whole, in the form of an agreement to explore the ‘totality of relationships between these islands’. Joint studies were commissioned to explore matters of common interest, including security and economic cooperation.

The hunger strikes had followed on the heels of this initiative; but in 1983 the Irish government (now headed by Garret FitzGerald) convened the New Ireland Forum, consisting of the three largest parties in the Republic and the SDLP in the North. In May 1984 the forum concluded that a united Ireland was the best basis for a stable and lasting peace, although there were alternatives: either a federal state in Ireland, or joint British-Irish authority over Northern Ireland. But in November of that year (a matter of weeks after the IRA had attempted to kill her and her cabinet at the Conservative Party conference in Brighton), Thatcher had declared at a press conference that all three alternatives were ‘out…out…out’. It was a deeply humiliating moment for FitzGerald – and for Hume, whose party held a considerable stake in the forum deliberations.

FitzGerald nevertheless persevered with his efforts to find a way forward; in addition – and perhaps decisively – the Reagan administration in Washington, which had followed sympathetically the work of the forum, put pressure on Thatcher to move on the Northern Ireland issue. The result was the Anglo-Irish Agreement, signed at Hillsborough Castle in November 1985. This accord enshrined the right of the Irish government to be consulted on Northern issues. It guaranteed too the principle of consent: that the people of Northern Ireland itself would have the final say on their constitutional status. For the British authorities, the accord brought the prospect of increased Irish government cooperation in security issues; for the Irish government, it addressed the sense of isolation felt by Northern nationalists, for there was now an explicitly pan-Irish dimension to the governance of the North; and it also promised to bring stability to an unruly corner of the island – and thus to Ireland as a whole.