Ireland, 2021: a century of insurgency, terrorism and security challenges

Ireland’s ‘decade of centenaries’ means different things to different people.¹ On the one hand, for Irish nationalists in Northern Ireland and the Republic,² the term refers to the period bookended by the second reading of the Home Rule Bill in May 1912, which promised a degree of self-government for the island, and the ending of the Irish Civil War in May 1923. On the other hand, for Ulster unionists,³ the September 1911 march against Home Rule represented a mobilization of some 70,000 people that inspired the following year’s ‘Ulster Day’ where over 500,000 men and women signed the Ulster Covenant pledging resistance to Home Rule. The establishment of a Northern Irish parliament under the premiership of James Craig in June 1921 stands at the end of the unionist decade of commemorations, representing, as it did, a definitive break with the rest of Ireland on the respective basis of a 6/26 county partition. It is partition – the establishment of new political dispensations on the island of Ireland – that is due to be marked in 2021. Therefore, this special issue of Small Wars and Insurgencies is published at an opportune moment to take stock of the transformative changes on the island in the context of both this centenary and also at a time of great geo-political uncertainty triggered by the UK’s decision in 2016 to leave the European Union. One hundred years on from partition, Ireland once again stands at the forefront of world events.

From partition to the ‘Troubles’

Following the partition of the island in 1921, the two new Irish states settled into a kind of Cold War – avant la lettre – for almost half a century. This was aided by demographic and electoral realities: The Irish Free State (which would declare itself a Republic in 1949) was dominated by a right-wing party, Fianna Fáil, and controlled by a repressive ideological apparatus that combined fundamentalist orthodox Catholic teaching and education with an almost totalizing cultural nationalist outlook. The Northern state was administered by Ulster Unionists who established an institutional and electoral framework that systemically excluded alternative viewpoints, whether from the nationalist minority or, increasingly, from the 1950s onwards, a disruptive and powerful labour movement headed by the Northern Ireland Labour Party.⁴ Both states were mirror opposites of each other, born into a maelstrom of political violence as the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and rival Protestant militant groups like the Ulster Protestant Association clashed with one another, civilians and the local security forces of the northern state. In the first two years of its existence it is estimated that between 232 and 544 people were killed in these disturbances.⁵ Northern Ireland was a state under siege.⁶

The inter-state stalemate was occasionally troubled: republicans courted Nazi Germany during the Second World War and carried out a sporadic series of attacks during what was known as the ‘Border Campaign’, which began in December 1956 and eventually petered out by February 1962. As the paper by Edwards and Hadjiathanasiou makes clear, the IRA saw developments in Ireland through a prism of national liberation struggle gripping other parts of the world, which drew them into common cause with, among others, Greek nationalists in the EOKA armed group who had been fighting British Security Forces in Cyprus between 1955 and 1959. IRA leaders like Seán Cronin and Seán Mac Stíofáin believed these anti-colonial struggles transcended the local and had the potential to become transnational, a view disputed by IRA Chief of Staff Ruairí Ó Brádaigh.⁷ Nevertheless, the IRA campaign petered out without doing much lasting political damage to Northern Ireland’s Unionist government. Partition remained a stubborn reality.

The first meeting of a Northern Ireland Prime Minister, Terence O’Neill, and an Irish Taoiseach (prime minister), Seán Lemass, only occurred in January 1965, giving the appearance of a thawing of relations. Although the two premiers sought to focus solely on areas of mutual cooperation and economic development, the rapprochement could not surmount the constitutional and ideological divide which continued to inspire their opponents and critics. O’Neill, in particular, came under repeated attack by a young evangelical preacher, the Reverend Ian Paisley, who memorably quipped that his rival had ‘forfeited’ the right to be the prime minister of Northern Ireland: ‘He is a bridge builder, he tells us. A traitor and a bridge are very much alike for they both go over to the other side’.⁸

Paisley quickly rose to prominence owing to the fact that he was articulating growing and deep-rooted uncertainties within the unionist community. These related to demographic changes in border counties and towns; concerns about potential republican mobilization in the build-up to the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising; anxieties surrounding the republican movement’s tilt towards far leftist ideas; apprehensions about the growth of labourism and, later in the 1960s; and suspicions about the emergence and nature of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement.⁹ The formation of the loyalist paramilitary grouping, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), signified a more sinister embodiment of these fears. Indeed, the first killings of what would become known, colloquially, as ‘the Troubles’, were carried out by the UVF when it shot dead two Catholics in 1966.¹⁰ The mobilization and backlash against the embryonic Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) at the end of 1968 turned a rather marginal reformist umbrella grouping into a mass movement.¹¹ Although the Unionist government quickly acceded to many of NICRA’s demands (excepting reform or dissolution of exceptional policing powers), the shift in focus from parliamentary methods to street politics proved almost impossible to resist. Following a summer of increasingly violent and prolonged clashes between nationalists and the police, which left the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) at the point of collapse, the London government intervened in August 1969 by deploying troops onto streets.

Something akin to what, in other circumstances, Stuart Hall would refer to as a condensation of social forces¹² took place within Irish nationalism during the first half of 1969: both constitutional and physical force nationalism radicalized, north and south of the border. Thus, although the (in)famous warning by Taoiseach Jack Lynch that his government could not ‘stand idly by’ and watch Catholics being burned out of their homes in Belfast and Derry may well have been a coded admission that he was going to do nothing other than that, it nevertheless offered succour to violent republicans, who, correctly believed that Dublin perceived the instability as an opening to push a united Ireland agenda.¹³ The creation of a non-socialist, more Catholic, more proactive, and more sectarian northern-based command of the IRA in December 1969 and its rebranding as the Provisional IRA (PIRA) (taking its initial adjective to be a noun in a nod to the ‘provisional’ government established by Patrick Pearse in 1916) brought into being one of the most violent terror groups of the second half of the Twentieth Century.

Counting the costs of the Troubles?

Although in absolute terms the numbers of dead (3,600+) in the Northern Ireland Troubles pale in comparison with some other ethnic conflicts, in proportional terms, around one out of every three people was directly affected by the violence in Northern Ireland.¹⁴ Irish Republicans were the foremost perpetrators of killings and violence, accounting for just under 60% of the deaths; loyalist paramilitaries were culpable of around 30% of the deaths. State forces (army and police) just under 10%.¹⁵ Although the majority of the latter were carried out lawfully, in the line of duty, nationalists have increasingly questioned, in particular, the RUC’s use of informers and paramilitary members to prevent attacks, intimating that ‘collusion’ between the British state and terrorists occurred. Indeed, some academics have asserted that it may even have been systemic.¹⁶ Although there is no doubt about the former, the latter charge is more problematic.¹⁷ Apart from former Sinn Féin President Gerry Adams, who survived at least one assassination attempt, most of the republican leadership emerged remarkably unscathed from the violence. Indeed, one scholar has found further evidence that confirms that Adams was protected by the RUC Special Branch on at least one other occasion.¹⁸

For republicans, their casus belli is related to a historical narrative of inevitability: on the one hand, the civil rights movement was attacked by loyalists and the RUC indicating that the Northern state was irreformable and was based on structural exclusions; and, on the other, in response to legitimate protests against those attacks by nationalists, the police and loyalists terrorized Catholic areas of Derry and Belfast, burning down entire streets of houses where Catholics lived. Mary Lou McDonald, the current President of Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Provisional IRA and the main nationalist party in the Northern Ireland Assembly, recently recycled this history of inexorability and victimhood: IRA volunteers, ‘never went looking for war but it came to them’.¹⁹ In other words, social justice and defence justified a campaign of violence that was a reaction to discrimination and oppression. Yet, the idea that the IRA was a purely defensive organization has also been found wanting. For example, Timothy Shanahan has argued that the ‘PIRA is the organisation most directly responsible for the greatest number (341) of Catholic Troubles-related deaths in Northern Ireland’.²⁰ Not only did republicans not defend their communities, but, owing to their activities, Catholics suffered over 1,500 killings during the course of the conflict.

The inevitability thesis also fails to reflect political developments. The Unionist government collapsed in 1972 when the Northern Ireland parliament was prorogued and ‘direct rule’ imposed by London. Although, for the PIRA, the introduction of direct rule was a major victory, it demonstrated no appetite for calling a halt to its escalating campaign; the then Officer Commanding in Derry, Martin McGuinness, remarked how ‘ … people are going around seeking for peace [sic]. They are wasting their time. We are fighting on. We are not stopping until we get a united Ireland’.²¹ It was not until the second half of the 1980s that republicans really began thinking seriously about what a peaceful strategy might look like. Sinn Féin’s first position paper, A Scenario for Peace was published in 1987 after which Adams began secret talks with his constitutional nationalist counter-part John Hume. In part, the Provisional movement’s shift towards a second front – or ‘peace strategy’ – was a result of the recognition that their electoral prospects remained hampered by PIRA’s campaign. Sinn Féin had continually reached a glass ceiling of around 10% (or around one out of every three Catholic votes in Northern Ireland), which it did not break through until after the ceasefires of the 1990s.²²

The peace process and beyond

The negotiations that were held during the 1990s were designed to bring the political representatives of Northern Ireland’s two main ethno-nationalist blocs into consensual, power-sharing, devolved and democratic governance. These culminated in the peace accord of 1998. At one level the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement (B/GFA) attempted to resolve or at least defer a constitutional conundrum: namely, the double-veto over any change that exists held by on the one hand Ulster unionists (mainly represented by the Ulster Unionist Party and the Democratic Unionist Party, which has latterly come to dominate Unionist politics), who favour the persistence of the constitutional status quo, and, on the other hand, Irish nationalists (mainly represented by the Social Democratic and Labour Party and latterly by Sinn Féin), who favour ending the partition of the island of Ireland. While the latter tend to espouse cultural values and attachments associated with the Irish Republic, the former look to the British state as a source of their cultural values and historical totems. A cross-community party, Alliance, has tended to attract around 10% of votes.

The Agreement was structured around three parts. Strand One covered matters internal to Northern Ireland and provided for the establishment of a devolved Assembly, elected on a proportional basis and administered through power-sharing. It also provided for the establishment of what proved to be a short-lived consultative body, a Civic Forum, and for the Assembly to have responsibility for administrative matters transferred from Westminster. Strand Two provided for a North/South Ministerial Council, to ‘develop consultation, co-operation and action within the island of Ireland’. Strand Three, meanwhile, focussed on the ‘totality of relationships’ between Ireland and Britain and provided for a British-Irish Council consisting of representatives from the British and Irish governments along with devolved bodies throughout the UK, and a British-Irish Intergovernmental Conference, comprising of representatives from Dublin and London, and which was designed to replace the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement arrangements. While the B/GFA did not provide for an overarching mechanism to deal specifically with the legacies of the conflict – including truth recovery/historical clarification, restitution and the potential for meeting victims’ rights and needs, and enduring segregation and sectarianism – it asserted that the ‘achievement of a peaceful and just society would be the true memorial to the victims of violence’. It did, however, provide for a Victims’ Commission to explore ways of giving voice, recognition and recompense to victims. The Agreement also included mechanisms for reforming policing, and provision for the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons and the early release of paramilitary prisoners. Finally, the B/GFA included provision for a range of equality and human rights reforms.

Although the peace process brought a dramatic drop in the number of security-related deaths, paramilitaries continued to operate a regime of so-called ‘punishment attacks’ on their own communities, low-intensity tactics that characterized the bulk of their activities during the conflict. These repressive ‘policing’ techniques are often directed against individuals deemed to be socially delinquent – who have been accused of becoming involved in drug dealing or joyriding – but the practices of ostracism and exiling have also been directed at individuals and families who represent ideological threats in the form of criticism of the paramilitary groupings. The twelve months to September 2020 also witnessed 18 bombing attacks and 42 shootings.²³ The British government-appointed Independent Reporting Commission (IRC), which was formed to act as a mechanism for ending paramilitary activity, reports that while the Coronavirus crisis had negligible effect on bombings and shootings, it did appear to slow down the rates of punishment attacks. As the latest findings of the IRC make clear, paramilitarism remains deeply entrenched within areas of Northern Irish society.²⁴ The IRC offers some comments on why paramilitarism remains endemic. For some members, paramilitary organisations provide a sense of belonging and tradition; they may also feel a responsibility to remain active in order to try to stop the groupings falling prey to violent criminals. However, as the IRC makes clear, certain individuals use paramilitarism as a ‘cover for criminality’, allowing them to ‘cloak’ their activities ‘under a quasi-political guise’. The IRC remains unclear on the question of whether a catalogue of racist attacks over the past decade have paramilitary underpinnings, with over 1,000 reports of such attacks year on year.²⁵

It is perhaps unsurprising that, given the persistence of a paramilitary presence, Northern Ireland remains relatively divided. While the ‘big picture’ suggests a thawing of inter-community relations, in many ways society has become more ghettoized as people choose to self-segregate. These types of sectarian choices may be driven by push and pull factors: a push away from areas of life where people feel isolated and insecure, and a pull towards ethno-religiously communal familiarity. This has become particularly evident in the area of social housing. As Paul Nolan has pointed out in a recent ‘Peace Monitoring Report’, residential segregation remains pronounced, though figures suggest a sharp decrease in the proportion of ‘single-identity’ wards (districts where one ethno-religious identity predominates over a threshold of 80%): from 55% of the city to 37% in the past decade. However, the picture is more complicated on the ground, so to speak, where people are self-segregating at street level. Take, for instance, the example of the rather well-off north Belfast area of Fortwilliam, which is comprised of 50% Protestants, 41% Catholics and 9% Other. A more micro-level analysis reveals that the ward can be subdivided into three distinct areas where segregation is blatant: Area 1 consists of 56% Catholics, 26% Protestants and 18% Other; Area 2 consists of 77% Protestants, 14% Catholics and 9% Other; and Area 3 consists of 54% Catholics, 37% Protestants and 9% Other. The movement at a micro-level towards segregated housing speaks to a conscious and careful choice (by the middle classes in this instance) to retreat to ethnic safety of a kind – ‘real’, existential threats, of course, still exist, but this kind of choice must also be seen a deliberate avoidance of political ‘otherness’.²⁶

Nolan goes on to conclude that the implications of this type of division suggest that, ‘[t]he moral basis of the 1998 peace accord has evaporated’ and the ‘fundamental divisions remain unchanged’, he argues, pointing in particular to the fact that ‘[o]ver 93% of children are educated in separate schools’.²⁷ But self-segregation, as a retreat into ethnic safety, is also driven by parental choice. The Northern Irish grammar school system reinforces this dynamic and creates a reproduction of the class divide with the Catholic and Protestant middle classes choosing to send their children to only the top-performing grammar schools. The grammar school authorities collude in this state of affairs, despite the transfer test at age eleven being outlawed in 2008, by administering their own versions of the ‘eleven-plus’ test outside of school-time on Saturday mornings. It is quirks of the dual, ethnic system that perpetuates inequality, disaffection and, ultimately, conflict in Northern Ireland.

Insurgency, terrorism and security challenges

With Northern Ireland locked in what analysts have referred to as a negative peace, serious questions remain about the causes, dynamics and role of violent actors. The contributors of this special issue attempt to address these outstanding questions. Moreover, the papers are also focused on addressing an overarching question: Why, one hundred years on from one conflict management process, does Ireland remain divided? At a time when the island’s future remains deeply uncertain, especially in light of Brexit, the authors explore divisions between governments, politicians and communities, as well as the more persistent fault-lines of insurgency, terrorism and violent protest which still aims to resolve the constitutional question of whether Ireland should continue to remain divided or united.

Stanislav Malkin, for instance, explores the discrepancies within institutional lesson-learning. He discusses politicians’ framing of military lesson-learning and suggests that current understandings of counter-insurgency need to rethink academic lessons based on a closer reading of the archival material. Malkin’s chapter also demonstrates how ongoing inter and intra-community conflict, civil disturbances and paramilitary activity can only be understood by taking a much longer view of the historical forces at work. Other contributors, such as Bielenberg and Ó Ruairc, address themes such as disappearances by republicans during the Anglo-Irish War of Independence. Their paper represents an important intervention in this often-vitriolic and still-contentious area of study. Again, the idea of framing or re-presentation of history is an underlying element in this discussion. Other papers in this special issue examine the structure and modus operandi of militant republicanism over the past half century or more. Martin McCleery’s article on sectarianism within the Provisional IRA, for instance, raises a key, albeit often unexplored question, about the nature of republican violence during the Troubles. Taking his cue from the pioneering work of Frank Wright, McCleery contends that sectarian violence can be thought of as violence against civilians because they are representative of an opposing group. Another important theme explored by Sean Brennan is the growing security challenges posed by loyalist paramilitary violence. Focussing on the tactics and ideological framings of dissident republicanism and loyalism respectively, Marisa McGlinchey and Sean Brennan highlight the dynamics involved in intra-group political evolution. Patrick Finnegan’s paper, meanwhile, complements these arguments by focussing on internal divisions within republicanism during the peace process. ‘Politics mattered’, he argues in reference to the split between the Provisional and the Real IRAs, though he suggests it is important to consider questions of self-preservation and surreptitious calculations of self-interest. Thus, Finnegan concludes that it ‘cannot be overlooked that the Engineering and Quartermaster’s Departments of PIRA provided the majority of those who left to form RIRA’. Samantha Newbery’s article on intelligence gathering and exploitation, as well as the methodology adhered to by the British government in its stewardship of peace process, is fundamental here because it helps us to understand how the state grappled with the prospect of intelligence failures in the 1990s. Newbery also lights a path for those engaged in scholarly work on the security dimension to erect a conceptual bridge between Intelligence Studies and Irish Political Studies. Finally, Paul Dixon helps to sharpen our intellectual focus to include heuristic and epistemological questions concerning how analysts and researchers approach areas of on-going and historical contention. Andrew Sanders article on the issue of legacy prosecutions of soldiers from the Army’s Operation Banner, raises long-lasting questions about controversies that have not been resolved by the passage of time.

At a time when protracted conflicts in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria have become the leitmotifs of 21^st Century conflict, the contributors ask how far lower intensity ethno-national conflicts, like those still ongoing in Ireland, continue to offer insight into the resolution or persistence of violent competition. There can be no doubt that ethno-national conflicts remain so persistent because there is so much at stake in terms of identity politics. The contributors of this special issue have all plotted a trajectory for future research. Robust, conceptual-based research that draws on granular empirical evidence has always been a key feature of the study of Irish history and politics. Explaining the complexity of the security challenges on the island is an additional strength of the kind of scholarship showcased in this special issue. As scholars closely involved in the study of the security dimension of conflict in Ireland know only too well, the island is no more sui generis than other parts of the world. The mere fact that this must be repeated eludes to the irony of ethno-centrism, especially in light of Ireland’s close geographic and political proximity to the European continent. Yet, such views are just as common in Dublin as they are in Belfast, Brussels, or, indeed, London. Future research would be well-advised to consider the reality of this truism if we are to continue to provide informed critical analysis on this fascinating part of the world.

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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Aaron Edwards

Aaron Edwards is a Senior Lecturer in Defence and International Affairs at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and an Honorary Research Fellow in the School of History, Politics and International Relations at the University of Leicester. He obtained his PhD in Politics and International Studies from Queen’s University Belfast in 2006 and was appointed a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2012. His books include Mad Mitch’s Tribal Law: Aden and the End of Empire (Transworld Books, 2014), UVF: Behind the Mask (Merrion Press, 2017) and Agents of Influence: Britain’s Secret Intelligence War Against the IRA (Merrion Press, 2021).

Cillian McGrattan

Cillian McGrattan lectures in Politics at Ulster University. He previously taught at the University of the West of Scotland and Swansea University. He was awarded a PhD at Ulster University in November 2008 and was subsequently a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for British-Irish Studies, University College Dublin. His books include Memory, Politics and Identity: Haunted by History (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and The Politics of Trauma and Peacebuilding: Lessons from Northern Ireland (Routledge, 2017).

Notes

1. Braniff and Hennessey, “Memory, Commemoration and the Promise of Peace.”

2. Irish nationalists view the island of Ireland as a distinct territorial and cultural unit; they tend to be overwhelmingly Catholic and favour reunification; furthermore, they can be distinguished in terms of preferring a democratic struggle to that end (‘constitutional nationalists’) or a campaign of violence (‘physical force nationalist); Irish republicans have traditionally fallen into the latter category; for an introduction to the history behind these terms and political communities see Edwards and McGrattan, The Northern Ireland Conflict.

3. Ulster unionists aspire to retain the constitutional and cultural links with the rest of the United Kingdom. Predominantly Protestant, unionists espouse a British identity and outlook. Until the beginning of the violence in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the terms ‘unionism’ and ‘loyalism’ were mainly interchangeable; however, with the emergence of paramilitary groups in working-class urban areas, ‘loyalism’ came increasingly distinguished from the Protestant middle-class.

4. See Bew, Gibbon and Patterson, Northern Ireland 1921–2001. On the Northern Ireland Labour Party and socialist movement see Edwards, A History of the Northern Ireland Labour Party; and Loughlin and Christopher, Labour and the Politics of Disloyalty in Belfast, 1921–39.

5. O’Leary, A Treatise on Northern Ireland Volume 1, 47.

6. Follis, A State under Siege.

7. Halliday, “Irish Questions in International Perspective.”

8. For O’Neill-Paisley relations see Mulholland, Northern Ireland at the Crossroads, 61–79.

9. Patterson and Kaufmann, Unionism and Orangeism in Northern Ireland since 1945.

10. Edwards, UVF: Behind the Mask.

11. Purdie, Politics in the Streets

12. Hall, “For Allon White: Metaphors of transformation.”

13. Hennessey, Northern Ireland, 392.

14. Edwards and McGrattan, Northern Ireland, xviii.

15. See McKittrick et al, Lost Lives.

16. McGovern, Counterinsurgency and Collusion in Northern Ireland.

17. See Edwards, Agents of Influence; see also McGrattan, “Nationalism and dealing with the past in Northern Ireland, 1998–2008,” 225–49.

18. Edwards, Agents of Influence, 155–6.

19. Murtagh, ‘Michelle O’Neill speaks her mind at tribute to slain IRA gunmen’,

20. Shanahan, The Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Morality of Terrorism, 26.

21. Sunday News, 9 April 1972.

22. Leahy, “The Influence of Informers and Agents on Provisional Irish Republican Army Military Strategy and British Counter-Insurgency Strategy, 1976–94.”

23. Independent Reporting Commission, “Third Report: November 2020.”

24. Ibid., 17.

25. See, PSNI “Incidents and Crimes with a Hate Motivation Recorded by the Police in Northern Ireland.”

26. Nolan, Northern Ireland Peace Monitoring Report, 115–17.

27. Ibid., 11.