Northern Ireland E-Book

Jonathan Tonge

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Global Political Hot Spots
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 429

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

For almost three decades the troubles in Northern Ireland raged, claiming over 3,600 lives, with civilians accounting for almost half the fatalities. In this book, Jonathan Tonge examines the reasons for that conflict; the motivations of the groups involved and explores the prospects for a post-conflict Northern Ireland. The book: * * assesses the motivations and campaigns of the IRA, UVF and UDA and other armed groups * discusses what each paramilitary group achieved through violence * analyses the continuing controversies surrounding the Northern Irelands dirty war * outlines the extent of collusion between British security forces and loyalist paramilitaries * explores how governments and political parties shaped the peace process * scrutinizes prospects for the political development of unionism and nationalism within a devolved power sharing framework * examines whether the sectarian divide is strengthening or weakening * concludes by assessing whether Northern Ireland can move permanently from violence and instability to become a normal peaceful polity, in which the war is merely a historic relic Written by an acknowledged expert in the field, Northern Ireland combines incisive analysis, original research and a lucid style to provide an important assessment of what has been described as an 800 year old problem.

Leseprobe

NORTHERN IRELAND ————

HOT SPOTS IN GLOBAL POLITICS

Published

Alan Dowty, Israel/Palestine

Amelendu Misra, Afghanistan

NORTHERN IRELAND ————

JONATHAN TONGE

polity

Copyright © Jonathan Tonge 2006

The right of Jonathan Tonge to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2006 by Polity Press

Polity Press

65 Bridge Street

Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK.

Polity Press

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN: 978-0-7456-5745-5

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Typeset in 10.5 on 12 pt Sabon

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Contents ————

Acknowledgements

List of Tables

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1  Theories of the Conflict

2  The Provisional IRA

3  The Overt War against the IRA

4  The Covert War against the IRA

5  The Politics of Sinn Fein

6  Republican Ultras

7  Loyalist Violence

8  War by Other Means or the Triumph of Moderation? The Party System

9  Auditing the Peace and Political Processes

Conclusion

Chronology of Events

Glossary

Internet Links

References

Index

To Maria

Acknowledgements ————

I wish to thank a number of people for their help in producing this book. Dr Louise Knight at Polity commissioned the work and proved a patient and helpful publisher, as did her colleague, Ellen McKinlay. The anonymous reviewers were also very supportive, and I am grateful for their constructive comments. Dr Catherine McGlynn helped with chapter 7 on loyalist paramilitaries. Professor James McAuley, Dr Jocelyn Evans, Dr Peter Shirlow, Professor Steven Fielding, Dr Kevin Bean, Dr Chris Gilligan, Andy Mycock, Jennie Coates, Anita Hopkins, Dermot Zafar, Stanley and Brenda Tonge all contributed in many different ways. Yvonne Murphy and Kris Brown were as helpful as ever in the Northern Ireland Political Collection in the Linenhall Library in Belfast. I am indebted to various officials at Sinn Fein, the SDLP, the Alliance Party, the Ulster Unionist Party and the Grand Orange Lodge of Ireland for facilitating interviews and/or membership surveys in recent years. The Economic and Social Research Council has financed three of these surveys, and their financial assistance is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are due to the University of Salford for research sabbatical leave in 2004–5. I am grateful to all the political parties for permitting interviews with members over a prolonged period between 1999 and 2004. Garda Siochana detectives took an interest in research visits for chapter 6. My young son Connell has a knack of asking difficult but brilliant questions. The book is dedicated to Maria. Responsibility for its content is of course my own.

List of Tables ————

1.1  Long-term constitutional preferences in Northern Ireland, according to religion

8.1  Election results in Northern Ireland, 1982–2005

8.2  Potential lower-preference vote transfers to other unionist parties among Ulster Unionist Council members

8.3  Attitudes to the Good Friday Agreement among SDLP members

9.1  Architecture and implementation of the Good Friday Agreement, 1998 201

List of Abbreviations ————

APNI

Alliance Party of Northern Ireland

CIRA

Continuity Irish Republican Army

CLMC

Combined Loyalist Military Command

DUP

Democratic Unionist Party

FRU

Force Research Unit

GFA

Good Friday Agreement

IICD

Independent International Commission on Decommissioning

IIP

Irish Independence Party

INLA

Irish National Liberation Army

IRA

Irish Republican Army

LVF

Loyalist Volunteer Force

MLA

Member of the Legislative Assembly

MRF

Military Reconnaissance Force

NIHRC

Northern Ireland Human Rights Commission

NILP

Northern Ireland Labour Party

NIO

Northern Ireland Office

NORAID

Irish Northern Aid Committee

NSMC

North-South Ministerial Council

NUPRG

New Ulster Political Research Group

OIRA

Official Irish Republican Army

PFI

Private Finance Initiatives

PIRA

Provisional Irish Republican Army

PSF

Provisional Sinn Fein

PSNI

Police Service of Northern Ireland

PUP

Progressive Unionist Party

RIRA

Real Irish Republican Army

RSF

Republican Sinn Fein

RUC

Royal Ulster Constabulary

SAS

Special Air Service

SDLP

Social Democratic and Labour Party

SEUPB

Special European Union Programmes Body

STV

Single Transferable Vote

UDA

Ulster Defence Association

UDR

Ulster Defence Regiment

UFF

Ulster Freedom Fighters

UKUP

United Kingdom Unionist Party

ULDP

Ulster Loyalist Democratic Party

UPRG

Ulster Political Research Group

UPV

Ulster Protestant Volunteers

UUC

Ulster Unionist Council

UUP

Ulster Unionist Party

UVF

Ulster Volunteer Force

UWC

Ulster Workers Council

32CSM

32 County Sovereignty Movement

Introduction ————

Historical Background: Understanding Northern Ireland as a ‘Hot Spot’

The conflict in Northern Ireland from 1969 until the beginning of the twenty-first century was by far the worst seen in Western Europe since the Second World War. Of the 3,665 deaths in the conflict up to 2002, republicans, fighting mainly within the Irish Republican Army (IRA) for an independent, united Ireland, were responsible for 2,148. Loyalist paramilitaries, mainly in the Ulster Defence Association (UDA), its ‘killing wing’, the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) and the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) killed 1,071 in their avowed ‘defence’ of Northern Ireland’s continued place within the United Kingdom. The combined ‘security forces’ of the British Army, Ulster Defence Regiment, Royal Irish Regiment and Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) accounted for 365 deaths, in their avowed role of combating paramilitary activity. A further 81 deaths were either committed by others or could not be attributed (McKittrick et al. 1999). The conflict has been subsiding, albeit unevenly (with some particularly bad years in the early 1990s), since the early 1970s, when, in its worst year, 497 were killed. During that decade, 2,176 lost their lives, compared to 891 in the 1980s and 553 in the 1990s. From 2000 to 2003, there were 46 deaths due to the security situation (Police Service of Northern Ireland 2003).

At the heart of the armed conflict was the campaign of the Provisional IRA (PIRA), effectively the IRA for most of the conflict, for the ending of the partition of Ireland, the removal of British rule in Northern Ireland, and the establishment of a thirty-two-county, independent Irish Republic. In pursuing this cause, the IRA targeted the British security forces, although a substantial minority of its victims were civilians. The PIRA’s raison d’être may have been the territorial unity and independence of Ireland. However, after its inception in 1970, much of the PIRA’s support from the minority Catholic population in Northern Ireland was on the basis that the IRA was that population’s ‘defender’, rather than necessarily being the creator of a united Ireland, although the IRA proved incapable of fulfilling either role. Support for the IRA was fuelled by resentment of the British Army and the police force in Northern Ireland, seen as partisan entities oppressing nationalists. The IRA’s armed struggle was not formally abandoned until 2005, but its campaign against British rule effectively ended in 1997, when it called its second cease-fire of the 1990s.

IRA violence prompted a strong backlash from loyalist paramilitary groups, the self-appointed ‘cutting edge’ of the resistance of the British population of Northern Ireland, as armed loyalists demonstrated that they would not be coerced into an independent Ireland. The polity of Northern Ireland was carved from a dubious but pragmatic sectarian head count in 1920, designed to allow the Protestant-unionist-British population concentrated mainly in the north-east corner of the island to retain their Britishness. Unionists, many supporting the heavily armed UVF formed in 1912, were determined to resist absorption into an independent Ireland; decades later, that resistance had not diminished and formed the basis of the revival of the UVF and other loyalist groups, even though, in the modern troubles, most unionists expressed their unionism in constitutional form. Although the post-1969 conflict did not descend into a civil war between loyalists and republicans, there were periods when such a scenario appeared possible.

The IRA based its case upon an interpretation of history which viewed Ireland as a colonial possession of the British, with ‘armed struggle’ necessary to remove the British govern-ment’s claim to sovereignty. The IRA had rebelled against British rule in 1916, and the majority of the island’s citizens had supported Sinn Fein, campaigning for an independent Irish state, in the last all-Ireland election ever held, in 1918. As such, there was a democratic mandate for the establishment of an independent Ireland. Unionists in the North declined to accept this result or the Home Rule (semi-independence) offered by the British government to the entire island. Instead, what became termed by republicans as the ‘unionist veto’ emerged, by which Ireland was partitioned. Six of the nine counties in north-east Ireland, those with the strongest Protestant-unionist-British majorities formed Northern Ireland, with its own devolved parliament under the sovereign Westminster parliament. The IRA in the other twenty-six counties of Ireland divided over whether to accept partition and only semi-independence under the Anglo-Irish Treaty and fought a civil war. However, these twenty-six counties eventually asserted their independence, no longer swearing allegiance to a British monarch and leaving the British Commonwealth in 1949. The parties in what eventually became the Irish Republic, notably Fianna Fáil (Soldiers of Destiny), the descendant of the original IRA which had resisted the Anglo-Irish Treaty, continued to oppose the partition of Ireland, but verbally, not physically.

Unionists based their case to be British upon a similar premiss as the IRA: the right to national self-determination. Regarding themselves as politically, religiously and culturally British, in addition to having developed the north-east part of the island economically, unionists argued that two nations existed on the same territory, and that partition was formal acceptance of an existing scenario. Sinn Fein had obtained relatively little support in the 1918 election in Ulster, where there was a narrow unionist majority, stronger when Ulster was redefined politically as Northern Ireland. Absorption of Protestant unionists, present on the island since the plantation of Ulster in the early 1600s, would have created a dissident minority within a disjointed Catholic Irish state in which Protestant political and religious freedoms could be threatened.

Despite rival historical interpretations and the unhappiness of the one-third Catholic-nationalist minority population in Northern Ireland, trapped in a Protestant-unionist-British entity in which they felt alien and second class, the northern state suffered only episodic violence during its first five decades, conflict being most substantial in the early years after the partition of Ireland and during an easily quashed rebellion by the IRA from 1956 to 1962. The tensions within the province were less easily suppressed on a long-term basis. Nationalist demands for reform of Northern Ireland were met by an insecure and at times hostile unionist response. Partly as a consequence of the failure to reform Northern Ireland, the IRA rose, phoenix-like, in 1970, to create what was supposed to be a ‘final’ outcome to the problem of Northern Ireland: its abolition and the establishment of an independent, united Ireland, free from British sovereign claims. Measured by its own objectives, that campaign ended in failure amid the watering down of republican demands in the peace process in the 1990s. After the ‘peace deal’ of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland moved initially into perhaps its more common form, with the following elements apparent: sporadic, low-level violence; paramilitary criminality; distrust between (Irish Catholic) nationalists and (British Protestant) unionists; malfunctioning political institutions; sectarianism and a dependency culture. However, with the Provisional IRA eventually ‘going out of business’, the possibility of a durable political settlement, based upon power sharing between unionists and nationalists, appeared stronger than at any previous period in the history of the province.

The violence that characterized the three decades after 1969 looks dated. Global Islamic extremist ‘jihad’ now claims much greater attention than any lingering Irish republican militancy. The IRA pledged to fight until British rule in Northern Ireland was ended, but ended its campaign with its political wing, Sinn Fein, attempting to manage British rule in a Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont, a parliament which the IRA had destroyed in 1972. Almost nine out of ten supporters of Sinn Fein, now the main nationalist party in Northern Ireland, state that they ‘could accept’ or ‘could live with’ Northern Ireland remaining in the United Kingdom if its population never voted to join a united Ireland (Bric and Coakley 2004b: 3).

The question begged, therefore, is what has been the purpose of political violence in Northern Ireland, given grudging nationalist acquiescence to the constitutional status quo. For many, the answer may be that violence has served no purpose. Given how the IRA campaign atrophied, this may be true, although it is perhaps to overlook the extent to which Northern Ireland has been formed and reshaped through political violence, or, perhaps more accurately, the threat of violence. For all the pious incantations throughout the Troubles about the need to defeat terrorists, Northern Ireland was a statelet formed partially through the threat of violence and, in the south, the Irish Free State, later the Irish Republic, was at least partly a product of British miscalculations in dealing with the 1916 Irish rebellion. The presence of the UVF prevented Home Rule for the entire island, and forced partition upon a reluctant British government and an opposed Irish population. After 1969, reborn loyalist paramilitaries reminded the British government of its supposed duty in respect of Northern Ireland, and served warning to the British government of civil war should it attempt to disengage from Northern Ireland. As a result, British ‘policy’ towards Northern Ireland has been ‘residual colonial’. Britain exercises a reluctant sovereign claim over a territory in which it acknowledges it has ‘no selfish strategic or economic interest’. The persistent underestimation of the impact of armed loyalism upon the British government created within the IRA ‘fantasy politics and poor history’, as the potential consequences of rapid withdrawal were too severe (Cusack and McDonald 2000: 1). Equally poor history, however, is the notion that constitutional arrangements in Ireland have been shaped merely by politics.

In an oft-quoted passage, Winston Churchill remarked after the First World War how ‘we see the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone emerging once again. The integrity of their quarrel is one of the few institutions that have been left unaltered in the cataclysm that is the modern world’ (cited in Cusack and McDonald 2000: 39). The Good Friday Agreement reshaped that quarrel by downgrading Irish historical territorial claims and attempting to replace their integrity with more abstract notions of ‘identity’. It began to eradicate key questions of national sovereignty and self-determination. The IRA and Sinn Fein, having acted as the supposed will of the Irish people, now begged for recognition of their mandate on equal terms with all the other parties in Northern Ireland. Having insisted for decades that its existence was based upon opposition to Britain’s colonial presence in Ireland, the IRA adopted pluralist notions of equality and parity of esteem for nationalists in a Northern Ireland still part of the United Kingdom.

By relegating questions of who governs to a more minor spot, the Good Friday Agreement climaxed a peace process of long gestation. Although historical evidence discourages such a conclusion (and historical determinism motivates some violent republicans), it is possible that serious violence in Northern Ireland is over permanently. The political conflict may not have ended, but the violence of the dispute has largely subsided, unlikely to return. Few Catholics in Northern Ireland care passionately about a united Ireland; few loyalists might fight to stay exclusively British. The possible difficulty with this argument is that few ever did feel passionately in these respects. Certainly on the Catholic side, support for armed struggle to achieve a united Ireland was only ever a minority taste, but this did not stop the descent into serious conflict. A political fault line remains apparent. According to survey evidence, variation in attitudes towards Northern Ireland’s constitutional future according to religious denomination remains stark, as table 1.1 shows.

There remains a diminishing Protestant majority in Northern Ireland, 45 per cent of the population belonging to a Protestant denomination according to the 2001 census, compared to 42 per cent Catholics and 13 per cent of no religion. When the overwhelming support for the Union among Protestants is added to the 21 per cent of Catholics backing the Union and the 45 per cent of those of no religion, it is apparent that the Union is safe for the foreseeable future if the ‘consent within Northern Ireland’ principle is applied to constitutional change. A united Ireland remains the most popular option among Catholics in Northern Ireland and is almost certainly favoured across the island, but Catholic constitutional preferences in respect of Irish unity would need to be even more overwhelming than those among Protestants in favour of the Union for a demographic political time bomb – a rising Catholic population capable of voting Northern Ireland out of the Union – to confront unionists. Should the unlikely happen and a pro-united Ireland majority emerge, over half of Protestants could live with the scenario, but 19 per cent would find it ‘almost impossible to accept’ (Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey 2003).

Table 1.1 Long-term constitutional preferences in Northern Ireland, according to religion

Source: Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey 2003

Overall, only 24 per cent of Northern Ireland’s population support Irish unity (Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey 2003). This figure would rise only to just over 30 per cent if Catholic ‘don’t knows’, possibly reluctant to advocate Irish unity because of its past association with violence and confrontation, were included.

The IRA’s campaign was of course built upon the perceived illegitimacy of Northern Ireland, an entity contrived against the expressed wishes of the majority of Irish people. Yet, by 2003, only one-third of Catholics rated the prospect of a united Ireland an even chance or better in the next 20 years, fewer than the 38 per cent of Protestants who rated similarly the prospects for Irish unity (Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey 2003).

Although described as a hope against history, the Good Friday Agreement, and any similarly framed successor, is likely to consolidate peace and develop political stability in a polity acknowledged hitherto by supporters as insecure and seen until recently by opponents as illegitimate. The constitutional contest has diminished markedly in ferocity, and Northern Ireland is barely a contested state, given the willingness of Sinn Fein to serve in its political institutions. The new politics of Northern Ireland might still be competitive between unionists and nationalists, but tends to concern the spoils of the settlement rather than the immediate future of the state. Seventy per cent of Protestants believe that nationalists ‘benefited a lot more than unionists from the Good Friday Agreement’, none believing the reverse (Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey 2003). Despite having to shelve their constitutional ambitions, nationalists believe that both communities benefited equally. The messages from these ostensibly paradoxical findings are that territorial ambitions and constitutional futures are less important for nationalists than equality, whilst, for unionists, the defence of the constitutional status quo was either not apparent, or overshadowed by concessions to nationalists elsewhere.

This book examines the reasons why Northern Ireland has long been a political hot spot. It explores the rationale for violence on the Irish republican and Ulster/British loyalist sides and assesses how the propensity for violence has shaped mainstream party politics and the attitudes of the British and Irish governments. Despite highlighting the contradictions within Northern Ireland as a political entity, the book indicates why areturn to previous levels of violence is unlikely in a polity that may gradually become depoliticized. Nearly a century after Churchill’s exasperation, there are indications that the quarrel between British unionism and Irish nationalism has been ended by newer forms of politics than the old certainties of anti-colonial struggle versus British sovereign claim.

The Plan of the Book

The main aims of the book are to examine the bases of division which led to political violence; explore the nature of that violence; assess the roles of the key perpetrators of that violence, and discuss whether the causes of conflict and the paramilitary actors have finally been removed. Chapter 1 examines rival theories of the conflict. It explores the contention that Northern Ireland is a site of ethno-national rivalry between two national groups, Irish and British, with distinctive characteristics and political ambitions. It assesses the validity of the claim that the essence of the conflict is ethno-religious, a claim normally made when particular attention is given to unionist perspectives. Colonial explanations, rare these days but deserving of attention, are explored, whilst economic disparities, important but perhaps not crucial in mobilizing nationalist discontent at the start of the conflict, are assessed.

Chapter 2 assesses the aims, objectives and methods of the PIRA. It examines the extent to which the organization represented continuity from the ‘old IRA’ of the early twentieth century, and outlines the structural and political differences. The chapter analyses whether the IRA was the sectarian organization claimed by its critics or whether it represented the physical force tradition of ‘liberating’ Ireland and creating unity of Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter, envisaged by the ‘first’ Irish republican, Wolfe Tone, in the late eighteenth century. The IRA’s avowed aims and the failure to fulfil its territorial demands are assessed, as is the utility of violence in achieving a united Ireland or creating a better deal for nationalists within Northern Ireland. The chapter traces the reasons behind the IRA’s ‘full circle’ movement, from violence seen as necessary and just towards the decommissioning of its weapons.

Chapters 3 and 4 examine the different means used to prosecute the war against the IRA. First, there was the overt action taken by the British Army, the UDR, the Royal Irish Regiment and the RUC, assessed in chapter three, which made Northern Ireland easily the most heavily policed area of Europe. At the height of the conflict, more than 30,000 British troops were based in the province, many in front line duties, with the remainder acting as policing support. Although many mistakes were made in the early years of the conflict, the coercive policy eventually contained an IRA which had developed as a result of those early blunders. Secondly, and detailed in chapter 4, behind the public ‘war’ against the IRA lay a secretive ‘dirty’ war in which elements of the British security forces conspired with loyalist paramilitaries for part of the conflict to defeat the IRA. Operating beyond legal parameters, the full details of these operations are only now being revealed.

With the IRA under such pressure, republicans were obliged to develop their political strength to survive and did so successfully, a process examined in chapter 5 on Sinn Fein. The need to enlarge electoral appeal has led to Sinn Fein’s growth as the dominant force within Northern Irish nationalism. Among a small section of republicans, however, the electoral concerns of Sinn Fein have eclipsed traditional republican principles and tactics. Chapter 6 assesses the views and methods of die-hard republicans, still committed to a physical force ‘struggle’. Chapter 7 examines the logic of loyalist violence, and considers whether it was based on naked sectarianism or a rational defence of the Union. Chapter 8 explores the party system in Northern Ireland, as the old moderate parties of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and nationalist Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) have been eclipsed by, respectively, the DUP and Sinn Fein. Chapter 9 examines the implementation deficit of the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), a deal designed to manage conflict through elite accommodation, but one which has been unstable and prone to substitution by direct rule from Westminster. The necessary ambiguities of the GFA have permitted a residual culture of low-level paramilitarism and organized criminality. Concurrently, political instability has increased cynicism over whether the deal can move Northern Ireland towards a fully functioning democracy.

The book ends by assessing whether ongoing political rivalries will continue to destabilize Northern Ireland, or whether it is likely to move from being an insecure post-conflict entity towards a durable, secure and peaceful polity in which political violence and, eventually, sectarianism will be seen as historic relics of a distant era.

1

Theories of the Conflict ————

Part of the problem in resolving the Northern Ireland conflict was that for years those involved or interested, whether ‘combatants’ or analysts, disagreed on its basis. Republicans offered a beguilingly simple colonial analysis, which found much sympathy outside the narrow confines of unionism, in which Northern Ireland was seen as one of Britain’s last colonies, a relic of Empire from which it had rapidly retreated elsewhere. This analysis was not confined to the militant republicans of Sinn Fein and the IRA. Northern Ireland was described as a ‘failed political entity’ by a Taoiseach (Prime Minister) of the Irish Republic, Charles Haughey. Constitutional republicans within Fianna Fail, often the governing party in the Irish Republic, denounced the partition of Ireland, suggesting that unionist-British rule in the North had been disastrous. It had been sectarian majority rule, followed by descent into violence and failed political initiatives.

Non-republicans offered a variety of alternative explanations, although the most common unionist complaint was the ‘irredentist’ claim to Northern Ireland held, if not pursued, under the 1937 constitution of the Irish Republic. Within academia, accounts of the conflict were often partisan union-ist (e.g. Wilson 1955, 1989) or nationalist-oriented accounts (e.g. Farrell 1976). Given that academic inquiry was often coloured by background, the lack of consensus among political representatives and paramilitary actors was unsurprising. None the less, academics did acknowledge that the conflict was a product of a multiplicity of factors. In his assessment of rival academic works, John Whyte noted that ‘while there is agreement that the conflict results from a mixture of religious, economic, political and psychological factors, there is no agreement on their relative importance. In particular there is a divergence on how much stress to put on religion’ (Whyte 1991: 245).