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"NORTHERN IRELAND CONFLICT" By: Tariq Al-Ansari

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INTERNATIONAL CONFLICT RESOLUTION Paper on "NORTHERN IRELAND CONFLICT" By: Tariq Al-Ansari I. Introduction 1. Throughout history, the island of Ireland has been regarded as a single national unit. Prior to the Norman invasions from England In 1169, the Irish people were distinct from other nations, cultivating their own system of law, culture, language, and political and social structures. Until 1921, the island of Ireland was governed as a single political unit as a colony of Britain. A combined political/military campaign by Irish nationalists between the years 1916 to 1921 forced the British government to consider its position. Partition was imposed on the Irish people by an Act of Parliament, the Government of Ireland Act (1920), passed in the British legislature. The consent of the Irish people was never sought and was never freely given. 2. With the objective of “protecting English interests with an economy of English lives” (Lord Birkenhead), the partition of Ireland was conceived. Proffered as a solution under the threat of ''immediate and terrible war'' (Lloyd George, the then British Prime Minister). The Act made provision for the creation of two states in Ireland: the ''Irish Free State'' (later to become known as the Republic of Ireland), containing 26 of Ireland's 32 counties; and ''Northern Ireland'' containing the remaining six counties. 3. Northern Ireland (the Six Counties) represented the greatest land area in which Irish unionists could maintain a majority. The partition line first proposed had encompassed the whole province of Ulster (nine counties). Unionists rejected this because they could not maintain a majority in such an enlarged area. http://www.sinnfein.org/documents/freedom.html 4. The historical and contemporary existence of the Irish nation has never been in dispute. For centuries, Britain has sought to conquer, dominate and rule Ireland. For centuries, the Irish people have sought to free Ireland from British rule. Britain, a large, powerful and ruthless colonial power, was able to defeat the numerous and sustained efforts of the Irish people to liberate themselves. In the course of the 19th century, as a result of British oppression and famine, the population of Ireland was halved. Séan MacBride S. C, recipient of the 1983 Nobel and Lenin peace prizes 5. In August 1969, a confrontation between Catholic residents of the Bogside and police in Derry following an Apprentice Boys of Derry march led to a large communal riot now referred to as the Battle of the Bogside – three days of fighting between rioters throwing stones and petrol bombs and police who saturated the area with CS gas. This confrontation didn’t happen accidentally, it was a result of many years of 1 discrimination by the Protestants against the Catholic minority. The conflict was also a spark that detonated the powder keg of decades and almost two centuries with debate on the legality of the act of the UK when it partitioned Ireland, the emergence of what so called unionists who wanted to liberate Northern Ireland from the UK, and the others “loyalists” who refused that move. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwcsSHF3A9w 6. A peace agreement was signed in 10th April 1998 between the parties of the conflict, the UK, the Republic of Ireland and the Irish Republican Army. It was called “The Good Friday Agreement”. This agreement has provided Northern Ireland’s divided society with a political framework to resolve its differences. A model of governance based on ‘parity of esteem’ has replaced the old divisive system of majority rule. The two political traditions of unionism and nationalism have agreed to proportional inclusion of each group in government. Legislators in the Stormont Assembly designate themselves as unionist, nationalist or other and the voting system works to ensure that unionists and nationalists cannot vote against each other’s group interest. The Agreement respects the right of each political tradition to pursue its goal to remain part of the United Kingdom or to join the Irish Republic. http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/static/northern_ireland/understanding/events/good_ friday.stm http://peacemaker.un.org/uk-ireland-good-friday98 7. This paper will prove that the use of constructive ambiguity in the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 and the spirit of compromise, formed an essential cornerstone to resolve the violent conflict of Northern Ireland, however, the agreement didn’t resolve the root causes to the conflict that can not be buried or ignored forever. Even if the agreement achieved a formal ceasefire, it will not be sufficient enough to deter the danger of relapsing in violence again, due to the factors elaborated in this paper. II. Facts BACKGROUND 8. The Troubles is the common name for the ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland that spilled over at various times into the Republic of Ireland, England and mainland Europe. The Troubles began in the late 1960s, precisely in August 1969 - as mentioned in paragraph 5 above - and was considered by many to have ended with the Belfast Good Friday Agreement of 1998. However, periodic violence has continued since then. 9. The conflict was primarily a political one, but it also had an ethnic or sectarian dimension, although it was not a religious conflict. The key issues at stake were the constitutional status of Northern Ireland and the relationship between its two main communities. Unionists and loyalists, who are mostly Ulster Protestants, generally want Northern Ireland to remain within the United Kingdom. Irish nationalists and republicans, who are mostly Catholics, generally want it to leave the United Kingdom and join a united Ireland. The former generally see themselves as British and the latter generally see themselves as Irish. The main participants in the Troubles were republican paramilitary groups (such as the Provisional IRA), loyalist paramilitaries (such as the UVF and UDA), the British state security forces (the British Army and the 2 RUC, Northern Ireland's police force), and political activists and politicians. The Republic of Ireland's security forces played a smaller role. More than 3,500 people were killed in the conflict. 10. The Sinn Féin party split along the same lines on 11 January 1970, when a third of the delegates walked out of the Ard Fheis in protest at the party leadership's attempt to force through the ending of abstentionism, despite its failure to achieve a two-thirds majority vote of delegates required to change the policy. Despite the declared support of that faction of Sinn Féin, the early Provisional IRA was extremely suspicious of political activity, arguing rather for the primacy of armed struggle. 11. There are allegations that the early Provisional IRA received arms and funding from the Fianna Fáil-led Irish government in 1969, resulting in the 1970 "Arms trial" in which criminal charges were pursued against two former government ministers. Roughly £100,000 was donated by the Irish government to "Defence Committees" in Catholic areas and, according to historian Richard English, "there is now no doubt that some money did go from the Dublin government to the proto-Provisionals". 12. The Provisionals maintained the principles of the pre-1969 IRA; they considered both British rule in Northern Ireland and the government of the Republic of Ireland to be illegitimate, insisting that the Provisional IRA's Army Council was the only valid government, as head of an all-island Irish Republic. This belief was based on a series of perceived political inheritances, which constructed a legal continuity from the Second Dáil. 13. The Provisionals inherited most of the existing IRA organisation in the north by 1971 and the more militant IRA members in the rest of Ireland. In addition, they recruited many young nationalists from the north, who had not been involved in the IRA before, but had been radicalised by the communal violence that broke out in 1969. These people were known in republican parlance as "sixty niners", having joined after 1969. The Provisional IRA adopted the Phoenix as symbol of the Irish republican rebirth in 1969. One of its common slogans is "out of the ashes rose the provisionals". 14. The Real Irish Republican Army or Real IRA, also referred to as the New IRA, is an Irish republican paramilitary organisation, which aims to bring about a united Ireland. It was formed in 1997 following a split in the Provisional IRA, which had declared a ceasefire that year. Like the Provisional IRA before it, the RIRA sees itself as the only rightful successor to the original Irish Republican Army and styles itself as simply "the Irish Republican Army" in English or Óglaigh na hÉireann in Irish. It is an illegal organisation in Ireland and designated as a terrorist organisation in the United Kingdom and the United States. 15. Since its formation, the RIRA has waged a campaign in Northern Ireland against the British Army and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI), formerly the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). The RIRA is the biggest and most active of the "dissident republican" paramilitaries operating against the British security forces. It has targeted the security forces in gun attacks and bombings, as well as with grenades, mortars and rockets. The organisation has also been responsible for a number of bombings in Northern Ireland and England with the goal of causing economic harm and/or disruption. The most notable of these was the 15 August 1998 Omagh bombing, which killed 29 people. After the bombing, the RIRA went on ceasefire, but began operations again in 2000. In March 2009, it claimed responsibility for an attack on Massereene Barracks that killed two British soldiers; the first to be killed in Northern Ireland since 1997, the year the ceasefire was agreed upon.
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