Problems of Northern Ireland (AQA A-Level History): Revision Notes

Problems of Northern Ireland

The persistence of the Troubles

The conflict in Northern Ireland, known as the Troubles, remained unresolved throughout the 1970s. Historian Peter Hennessy argues that Northern Ireland became "the greatest absorber of high-level prime ministerial time" during the Heath government. Although the Labour government appeared to make progress on the issue, particularly through the Sunningdale Agreement, the settlement proved unstable and vulnerable to collapse.

Responsibility for addressing the crisis shifted between government ministers. Initially, Home Secretary Reginald Maudling (1970-72) and Robert Carr (1972-74) led efforts to resolve the situation. From 1972 onwards, a newly created position, the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, assumed leadership. William Whitelaw held this role from 1972 to 1973, followed by Francis Pym from 1973 to 1974. Despite these administrative changes and political initiatives, the fundamental tensions driving the conflict remained unaddressed.

The collapse of the Sunningdale Agreement

The Sunningdale Agreement represented an attempt to establish a power-sharing arrangement between constitutional parties in Northern Ireland. Although leaders from both sides of the sectarian divide formally committed to the agreement, the settlement failed to satisfy extremist groups. The IRA continued its armed campaign, whilst the compromises reached through negotiation neither alleviated Unionist anxieties about the union with Britain nor fulfilled nationalist aspirations for Irish unity.

The agreement collapsed rapidly. Within days of its signing, loyalist paramilitary organisations unified under the umbrella name of the Ulster Army Council. This coalition represented a serious threat to the power-sharing arrangements. Within weeks, Unionist politicians withdrew their support, voting against continued participation in the Northern Ireland Assembly. The political institutions established by Sunningdale could not function without cross-community support.

Within months, the Ulster Workers Council organised a general strike, which triggered widespread rioting. The combination of paramilitary pressure and industrial action destroyed any remaining possibility that the Sunningdale arrangements could survive. The collapse demonstrated that without addressing the concerns of both loyalist and republican paramilitaries, as well as securing genuine cross-community political support, any settlement would prove fragile.

Escalation of violence

The IRA bombing campaign on the British mainland

Following the collapse of Sunningdale, the IRA intensified its strategy by targeting locations on the British mainland. In 1974, bombs exploded in pubs in Birmingham, Guildford, and Woolwich, killing and injuring numerous civilians. The British government responded with swift arrests and prosecutions. Several individuals were convicted in separate group trials and received lengthy prison sentences.

After prolonged campaigns by families, legal representatives, and civil liberties organisations, the courts eventually overturned the various convictions. Those imprisoned served between 15 and 16 years before their release. The wrongful convictions represented a failure of justice, and the authorities never successfully prosecuted anyone else for these attacks.

The failure of the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention

In May 1975, elections took place for the Northern Ireland Constitutional Convention (NICC). The electoral system employed proportional representation to ensure that a broader spectrum of political opinions and parties would gain representation. However, this approach highlighted rather than resolved the deep divisions within unionism.

Six different Unionist parties secured seats in the NICC. The fragmentation of unionism demonstrated the extent to which political opinion within that community had splintered. The largest grouping within the NICC opposed both power-sharing arrangements and the convention itself. With the dominant Unionist faction fundamentally opposed to the institution's purpose, the NICC could not reach any agreement on a way forward. The convention lapsed without achieving its objectives.

The failure of the NICC marked a turning point. It would take nearly 30 years of continued violence and painstaking negotiations before all parties could be brought back to a settlement comparable to Sunningdale. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement would eventually succeed where Sunningdale and the NICC had failed, though only after decades of bloodshed.

The consequences of political failure

The dominance of paramilitaries

Historian Kenneth O. Morgan assesses that the collapse of the Sunningdale Agreement and the failure of the NICC left Northern Ireland in a situation where "the violent men of the IRA and the Protestant 'Defence' organisations had the field to themselves". Without functioning political institutions or meaningful dialogue between constitutional parties, paramilitaries filled the vacuum. Both republican and loyalist armed groups claimed to represent their respective communities, and violence became the primary form of political expression.

The peace movement

Despite the pessimistic outlook, some grounds for optimism emerged in 1976 with the development of a grass-roots peace movement. The catalyst was a tragic incident in which a PIRA activist, fleeing in a getaway car, caused the deaths of three children. Two Catholic women, Mairead Corrigan and Betty Williams, led the response to this tragedy by organising demonstrations for peace, initially in Northern Ireland itself and subsequently attracting support worldwide.

The peace movement represented a genuine expression of popular exhaustion with violence. In 1977, Corrigan and Williams received the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of their efforts to promote non-violent resolution of the conflict. However, whilst the movement demonstrated that many ordinary people rejected paramilitary violence, it could not overcome the entrenched political and sectarian divisions that sustained the Troubles.

Internment and imprisonment

Operation Demetrius and Long Kesh

In 1971, the authorities initiated Operation Demetrius, arresting suspected republicans without trial. Those detained were interned at Long Kesh, a facility constructed using buildings left over from the Second World War. Of the initial 452 suspects arrested, the authorities released 104 because investigations revealed they had no connections to terrorist organisations. This admission undermined confidence in the intelligence on which internment had been based.

Arrests continued, and the number of internees grew substantially. By 1972, more than 900 people were interned at Long Kesh. By the end of 1975, when the policy of internment finally ended, nearly 2,000 people had been held without trial. The policy proved counterproductive, generating resentment within the nationalist community and providing republican paramilitaries with a powerful recruiting tool. The scale and duration of internment without trial raised serious questions about civil liberties and the rule of law.

Special Category Status

The status of prisoners convicted of politically motivated violence presented a complex problem for the authorities. Those imprisoned did not regard themselves as criminals. Additionally, the acknowledged need to keep members of different paramilitary organisations separated imposed practical difficulties on prison management.

During negotiations for a truce with the Provisional IRA, the Conservative government agreed in 1972 to introduce Special Category Status. This arrangement allowed prisoners more free-association time, additional visits, extra food parcels, and, most significantly, the right to wear their own clothes rather than prison uniforms. The conditions under which Special Category prisoners were held resembled those for Prisoners of War under the Geneva Convention more closely than those for criminals serving sentences.

Four years later, in 1976, the Labour government decided to maintain the Special Category arrangement for existing detainees but reversed the policy for new prisoners. Those newly convicted would serve their sentences in recently constructed accommodation known as H-Blocks on the Long Kesh site, which was renamed Her Majesty's Prison Maze (HMP Maze). The government intended to treat paramilitaries as ordinary criminals rather than political prisoners.

Prison protests

The blanket protest

The first prisoner sentenced under the new policy refused to accept criminal status. Without his own clothes and rejecting the prison uniform, he wrapped himself in blankets. By 1978, nearly 300 prisoners had adopted the same course of action. The blanket protest represented a collective assertion of political status and a rejection of the government's attempt to criminalise the conflict.

The dirty protest

Prisoners escalated their resistance by refusing to cooperate with the normal prison regime of cleanliness. They refused to shower, declined to empty chamber pots, and smeared excrement on the walls of their cells. The authorities responded by periodically moving prisoners to different cells in order to steam clean the resulting filth. The dirty protest created appalling conditions within the Maze and attracted international attention to the prisoners' demands.

Hunger strikes and their consequences

In 1980 and 1981, prisoners took their protests further through extended hunger strikes. These actions resulted in ten deaths. The hunger strikes generated enormous publicity and emotional responses both within Northern Ireland and internationally. The deaths transformed some of those who died into martyrs within republican ideology, strengthening rather than weakening support for the IRA.

Meanwhile, PIRA leadership adopted a new tactic, deciding to treat prison officers, RUC officers, and British soldiers as legitimate targets for assassination. This campaign claimed 19 lives. The targeting of prison staff and security forces represented an expansion of PIRA's violent strategy and added another dimension to the conflict. The decision to kill prison officers stemmed directly from the confrontation over prisoner status and conditions, demonstrating how the prison issue had become central to the wider Troubles.