Why did the situation in Northern Ireland turn so violent? After all in America the white/black divide while causing riots and lynchings never turned to Iraq-style secterian/partisan warfare and constant terrorism even though blacks were oppressed more than Irish Catholics ever were?
America did have some armed rebellions by slaves, but I think you’re looking at this the wrong way. The riots and lynchings were the reason there was never a full scale partisan war. Whites were always in power and always were able to head off a rebellion before it formed. The numbers were stacked against blacks, and the fact that they formed an easily identifiable group worked heavily against them.
N. Ireland, on the other hand, is split about 55-45 protestant vs. Catholic. Thus, Catholics have enough numbers to fight on fairly even terms. They also have several more advantages. They have the rest of Ireland and a large expat to raise funds. They aren’t quickly and easily identifiable like blacks are. And they have Ireland to use as a base and an entry point for weapons, or as a refuge.
Stupidity over who’s worshiping Jesus right.
I recommended this book to you before, and recommend it again if you want to fully understand the situation in Northern Ireland.
You should understand that the conflict in Northern Ireland, as bloody as it was, never turned into the open fighting that was seen in The Yugoslav Civil War or the intensity of what is seen in Iraq’s sectarian killings. It would arguably be of more interest to ask why it didn’t get more violent. Civil society remained largely intact, apart from certain small parts at certain times the rule of law was maintained across Northern Ireland. No more than 30 or so people died on any single day of the Troubles. Indeed the murder rate in a number of American cities is possibly similar to what Northern Ireland’s was at the height of the Troubles.
The terrorists in Northern Ireland’s Troubles were drawn from a similar background to that of (whatever nationality) Mafia groups in the US and indeed since things have quietened down in the North, many former paramilitaries have turned to largely a-political gangsterism to make a buck.
This is nonsense. Protestants in Northern Ireland, as well as being a majority closer to 2:1 for much of the period that NI as a political entity has existed, controlled the state apparatus, the police and paramilitary organisations in Northern Ireland prior to 1972. One of the major reasons the conflict became bloody was the unwillingness of the Protestant/Unionist authorities in Northern Ireland to countenance extending full civil rights to all citizens of Northern Ireland, regardless of creed. Within Northern Ireland I can’t think of any metric where Protestants and Catholics were on fairly even terms in the period.
MODERATOR NOTE
Iawoot. You’re in General Questions. I’d expect a better answer/post. It comes across in a way you perhaps didn’t intend.
samclem, Moderator, General Questions
I missed the edit window with last post:
Of course, the underdog status of Catholics/Republicans in Northern Ireland was of some benefit to them internationally but it should be noted that apart from the achievement of full civil rights, the avowed aims of physical force Republicanism in Northern Ireland have not been achieved. Northern Ireland is still very much a part of the United Kingdom and no amount of bloodshed changed that.
“Was”? There are still riots every July.
Last month. (Check out the bike at 1:22.)
2009.
Etc.
That’s because the majority of the citizens of Northern Ireland wish to do so.
I’m aware of that, my post was a continuation of the previous post that was a response to treis’ comments. Your comment, although factually correct is of scant relevance to your OP.
This is an interesting question, but could have the conflict become more violent with a military superpower on one side and just the IRA? What was the prerogative of the Irish government at this time? Was it helping stanch the flow of weapons and money or was it turning a blind eye?
It seems to me that the conflict got about as hot as it could go, without risking a wholesale British invasion. It is interesting to think about what would have been had the 1991 mortar attack on 10 Downing Street been more successful.
The IRA was a well-funded, organized, and well-armed organization, which is all I meant by fairly equal. Of course they had no chance in a toe to toe fight with the British Army, but they had the ability to do something to hurt the protestants. That is a stark contrast to blacks in America, who never could muster anything resembling the IRA.
Couldn’t you also say that a lot of the tensions there goes back centuries – I mean, that’s not what they’re fighting over, but that’s when it began, and it really hasn’t stopped since? (It only got worse since the partition.)
(Wanna hear something really eerie? I have my mp3 player on shuffle, and when I started reading this thread, U2’s “Sunday, Bloody Sunday” came on.)
In 1970, there was the Arms Crisis, wherein a couple of Irish cabinet ministers were implicated in an attempt to import weapons into Northern Ireland for the use of the IRA. It seems that the Irish taoiseach at the time at least discussed the possibility of sending the Irish Army into Northern Ireland to protect Catholics. I’m not entirely sure how much of a likelihood that ever would have been but the Irish Army would have been destroyed by the British Army and the whole island reoccupied had the Taoiseach been so foolhardy as to order such an advance. But in the real world, the Irish government, although nationalist, feared the instability that stoking the flames in Northern Ireland would unleash south of the border.
Perhaps the 10 Downing Street attack, if successful, would have upped the ante in NI, goading the British Army into reprisals but it seems unlikely. The Brighton Hotel Bombing of 1984 was more “successful” but failed to do any such thing. I suppose if either attack had culminated in the death of the Prime Minister that either event could have been a game changer.
It seems that by the 1980’s there was a faction within the IRA which wanted to up the ante militarily with the British Army, by actually taking over parts of Northern Ireland, specifically South Armagh and seceding from Northern Ireland, something of a Tet offensive. This strategy, which would have resulted in many casualties was supposed to draw in the UN. To what extent this was ever actually planned I don’t know. Ed Moloney’s book The Secret History of The IRA, I believe deals with this. IIRC the Eksund carried weapons that were to be used in this escalation.
As well as the British Army’s quelling of the conflict, there is also the, possibly more important fact, that by and large middle class Northern Irish people on both sides of the community did not get directly involved in the conflict.
Although this perhaps was later the case, the IRA in the early part of the Troubles wasn’t as far as I am aware. It is worth noting that the British Army were initially sent onto the streets of NI largely to protect Catholics/Republicans.
I wonder if black America had ever had a Bloody Sunday, perhaps that would have provided impetus for an IRA-style organisation in that community. There were groups like the Black Panthers and the SLA which were somewhat like the IRA, although I don’t know if Black Panthers were ever involved in crime/terrorism etc. and none of their activities were ever on the same scale as the IRA’s. It is also worth noting the distinction between the two communities in Northern Ireland rested on the notion of nationhood as well as religion. The Republic of Ireland lent Catholics a notion that they could and would separate from Britain. As far as I know, there was no serious talk amongst black Americans about actually seceding from America and forming a black nation in North America. Blacks could and did rail against the system but they did not realistically have the option of a space, a nation-state outside of that system.
Yes. Remember the IRA was heir to a long-standing tradition of pursuing national independence through armed force – a tradition, furthermore, which had succeeded in establishing the southern state. It made little sense to view the political situation in Northern Ireland through that particular lens, as they eventually came to realise, but that background did provide them with a framework for military organisation and action which black Americans lacked, in pursuit of a political objective which black Americans didn’t share.
Terming the conflict Protestant vs. Catholic misses a significant ethnic point. From the time of Henry II on, Ireland’s native Gael populace were dominated by an Anglo-Irish Ascendancy. (That’s the historically standard term for it, and emphasizes the aristocracy vs. peasantry sort of dominance it was. This was true for the whole island, to varying degrees – Ulster, Leinster, and Meath were far more dominated than Munster and Connacht, as a general rule. In the southern 26 counties, this slowly ebbed during the 19th century, ending with dominion status in 1922 and later full independence as the Republic.
But in Ulster, Cromwell and William III encouraged settlement by Scots and others, who were predominantly Protestant (Presbyterians and Low Church Anglicans as well as Dissenters). And the conflict came to be drawn along ethnic lines, with the predominantly-Catholic native Gaelic Irish vs. the immigrant mostly-Protestant Scotch-Irish (although as many were north-of-England as Scotland in origin, the term Scotch-Irish stuck). Only in Ulster – and the six counties at that – were the Protestants in a majority and able to force remaining Unionist. So the conflict was especially fierce there.
So much like Catholic Croatia vs. Orthodox Serbia, the religious conflict is one minor aspect – and often used as a simplistic explanation – of a rather complex ethnic and ideological conflict.
This is not to disagree with any previous post, simply to add a bit of historical perspective.
This is pretty much my understanding as well.
Remember, the response of the US as whole to the Civil Rights movement was to make sweeping changes. If the Scots Irish southerners had been free to chose, they would have taken as hard a line on the changes as their brethren in Ulster. The changes of the Civil Rights movement were forced on them much to their displeasure.
At the risk of derailing the thread, I’ll point out that no black American equivalent to the IRA developed because so much of the black intelligentsia was effectively bought off with unprecedented opportunities for education and advancement. Without an intelligentsia to plan, organize, and propagandize, many of the ostensibly black revolutionary organizations turned entirely to crime. It’s also true that many of the members of these groups were criminally inclined to start with.
THe IRA evolved into a criminal organization (as did many Unionist gangs); thus drugs and extortion became the business of these groups-if you owned a shop, you were forced to pay a “tax” to support your local gang. If you didn’t pay up, you would be killed or your shop burned down. After a while, the nationalist leanings became unimportant-a lot of IRA and Unionist “leaders” were more like Mafia dons than anything else.