|
Ulster was part
of Catholic Ireland until the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603) when,
after suppressing three Irish rebellions, the crown confiscated
lands in Ireland and settled the Scots Presbyterians in Ulster.
Another rebellion in 1641-51, brutally crushed by Oliver Cromwell,
resulted in the settlement of Anglican Englishmen in Ulster. Subsequent
political policy favoring Protestants and disadvantaging Catholics
encouraged further Protestant settlement in Northern Ireland.
Northern Ireland did not separate from the South until William Gladstone
presented, in 1886, his proposal for home rule in Ireland. The Protestants
in the North feared domination by the Catholic majority. Industry,
moreover, was concentrated in the North and dependent on the British
market. When World War I began, civil war threatened between the
regions. Northern Ireland, however, did not become a political entity
until the six counties accepted the Home Rule Bill of 1920. This
set up a semiautonomous Parliament in Belfast and a crown-appointed
governor advised by a cabinet of the prime minister and eight ministers,
as well as a 12-member representation in the House of Commons in
London.
When the Republic of Ireland gained sovereignty in 1922, relations
improved between North and South, although the Irish Republican
Army (I.R.A.), outlawed in recent years, continued the struggle
to end the partition of Ireland. In 1966-69, rioting and street
fighting between Protestants and Catholics occurred in Londonderry,
fomented by extremist nationalist Protestants, who feared the Catholics
might attain a local majority, and by Catholics demonstrating for
civil rights. These confrontations became known as "the Troubles."
The religious communities, Catholic and Protestant, became hostile
armed camps. British troops were brought in to separate them, but
themselves became a target of Catholics, particularly by the I.R.A.,
which by this time had turned into a full-fledged terrorist movement.
The goal of the I.R.A. was to eject the British and unify Northern
Ireland with the Irish Republic to the south. The Protestants remained
tenaciously loyal to the United Kingdom, and various Protestant
terrorist organizations pursued the Unionist cause through violence.
Various attempts at representational government and power-sharing
foundered during the 1970s, and both sides were further polarized.
Direct rule from London and the presence of British troops failed
to stop the violence.
In Oct. 1977, the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Mairead
Corrigan and Betty Williams, founders of the Community of Peace
People, a nonsectarian organization dedicated to creating peace
in Northern Ireland. Intermittent violence continued, however, and
on Aug. 27, 1979, an I.R.A. bomb killed Lord Mountbatten as he was
sailing off southern Ireland, heightening tensions. Catholic protests
over the death of I.R.A. hunger striker Bobby Sands in 1981 fueled
more violence. Riots, sniper fire, and terrorist attacks killed
more than 3,200 people between 1969 and 1998. Among the attempts
at reconciliation undertaken during the 1980s was the Anglo-Irish
Agreement (1985), which, to the dismay of Unionists, marked the
first time the Republic of Ireland had been given an official consultative
role in the affairs of the province.
In 1997, Northern Ireland made a significant step in the direction
of stemming sectarian strife. The first formal peace talks began
on Oct. 6 with representatives of eight major Northern Irish political
parties participating, a feat that in itself required three years
of negotiations. Two smaller Protestant parties, including hard-liner
Ian Paisley's Democratic Unionists, boycotted the talks. For the
first time, Sinn Fein, the political wing of the I.R.A., won two
seats in the British Parliament, which went to Sinn Fein president
Gerry Adams and second-in-command Martin McGuinness. Although the
election strengthened the I.R.A.'s political legitimacy, it was
the I.R.A.'s resumption of the 17-month ceasefire, which had collapsed
in Feb. 1996, that gained them a place at the negotiating table.
A landmark settlement, the Good Friday Agreement of April 10, 1998,
came after 19 months of intensive negotiations that involved eight
of the ten Northern Irish political parties. Chaired by former U.S.
senator George Mitchell, the talks were advanced by a high-profile
set of mediators, including British prime minister Tony Blair, Irish
prime minister Bertie Ahern, and U.S. president Bill Clinton. Two
participating groups, the Protestant Ulster Democratic Party and
Sinn Fein, were temporarily suspended from the talks because of
continued paramilitary activities. The accord called for Protestants
to share political power with the minority Catholics, and gave the
Republic of Ireland a voice in Northern Irish affairs. In turn,
Catholics were to suspend the goal of a united Ireland-a territorial
claim that was the raison d'être of the I.R.A. and was written
into the Irish Republic's constitution-unless the largely
Protestant
North voted in favor of such an arrangement, an unlikely occurrence.
The resounding commitment to the settlement was demonstrated in
a dual referendum on May 22, 1998: the North approved the accord
by a vote of 71% to 29%, and in the Irish Republic 94% favored it.
But the deaths of three Catholic boys in July 1998 during the traditional
Protestant marches through Catholic neighborhoods was an appalling
reminder of the fragility of peace. In October, the Nobel Peace
Prize was awarded to John Hume and David Trimble, leaders of the
largest Catholic and Protestant political parties, an incentive
for all sides to ensure that this time the peace would last.
In Dec. 1998
the rival Northern Ireland politicians agreed on the organization
and contents of the new coalition government, but in June 1999 the
peace process again hit an impasse when the I.R.A. refused to disarm
prior to the assembly of Northern Ireland's new provincial cabinet.
Sinn Fein insisted the I.R.A. would only begin giving up its illegal
weapons after the formation of the new government; Unionists demanded
disarmament first. As a result, the Ulster Unionists boycotted the
assembly session that would have nominated the cabinet to run the
new coalition government. The nascent Northern Irish government
was stillborn in July 1999.
Subsequent talks
on the agreement, which would have ended three decades of direct
rule from London, seemed to go nowhere, despite the last-ditch intervention
of George Mitchell, who helped engineer the Good Friday Agreement.
Finally, at the end of November, David Trimble, leader of the Ulster
Unionists, abandoned the seemingly sacrosanct "no guns, no
government" position, and took a difficult leap of faith in
agreeing to form a government prior to Sinn Fein's disarmament.
If the IRA did not begin the destruction of their weapons by Jan.
31, 2000, however, the Ulster Unionists threatened they would withdraw
from the Northern Irish Parliament, shutting down the new government.
With this compromise in place, the new government was quickly formed,
and on Dec. 2, 1999, the British government formally transferred
governing power to the Northern Irish parliament. Two leaders of
Sinn Fein, Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness, received seats in
the four party, 12-member parliament. By the deadline, Sinn Fein
had made little progress toward disarmament, and claimed it had
not made any such commitment. As a result, the
British government
suspended parliament on Feb. 12, 2000, and once again imposed direct
rule. On May 30, 2000, Sinn Fein again pledged to put the IRA's
weapons "beyond use," and Britain restored parliamentary
powers. While the IRA did allow for the inspection of some of its
arms dumps, the months limped by without real progress, and Sinn
Fein's commitment to disarmament once again appeared strikingly
disingenuous. Trimble, caught in the middle, appeared to many of
his Protestant compatriots as a pawn of the Republicans, and was
nearly ousted by his own party on Oct. 28. Had he been forced to
step down, there is little doubt that the Good Friday Agreement
would have toppled with him. But Trimble survived, pledging to get
tough by imposing sanctions on Sinn Fein.
[back
to top]
|
Geography
