British Counterinsurgency by John Newsinger

Author:John Newsinger
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781137572394
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Published: 2015-11-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

The Long War: Northern Ireland

The conflict in Northern Ireland has been the most protracted of British counterinsurgency campaigns, with the retreat from Empire ending up in what is still part of the United Kingdom. The consequences have been devastating. Nearly 2 per cent of the province’s population have been killed or injured since fighting began. If the ratio of fatalities to population were to be reproduced for the United Kingdom as a whole there would by now have been some 111 000 people killed, considerably more than were killed by German bombing during the Second World War, and 1.4 million injured. More people have died as a result of political violence in Northern Ireland since 1969 than in the rest of the European Community put together over the same period.1 Moreover, the conflict on a number of occasions extended into England. Only sheer luck saved Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet from death in the bombing of the Grand Hotel in Brighton on 12 October 1984.

What we shall examine here is the conduct in this conflict of the security forces and, in particular, the transformation in strategy from a counterinsurgency model, that served only to exacerbate the situation, to an internal security model that successfully contained it. A process of attrition subsequently saw Sinn Fein and the Provisional IRA come to terms with the Unionists. Both sides were so worn down by the years of conflict as to accept terms that would once have been completely unthinkable. For the British, the inability to comprehensively defeat the IRA was substituted by diplomatic success that was trumpeted as if it were a victory.

The Troubles begin

Northern Ireland was established in conflict. The creation of the new devolved state involved the denial of national rights to a third of its population and was accompanied by violence and disorder that approached the level of civil war. Over 550 people, mainly Catholics, were killed between July 1920 and July 1922. In Belfast alone, 23 000 people, a quarter of the city’s Catholic population, were driven from their homes by Protestant vigilantes carrying out a series of bloody pogroms. In September 1921 the Unionist government had begun raising a Protestant militia, the Special Constabulary, that was to be in the forefront of repressing the minority. This was followed in March 1922 by the passing of the Special Powers Act that endowed the new state with draconian emergency powers. And, in May 1922, internment was introduced, leading to the imprisonment without trial of some 500 Catholics (and a handful of Protestants). They were not released until the end of 1924. To all intents and purposes, the Catholic minority was beaten into submission.2

This Protestant victory was consolidated by the establishment of the new Northern Ireland state as a sectarian Orange state that relied on discrimination, gerrymandering and intimidation for its survival. From the very beginning, the Stormont regime relied on emergency measures and did not function as a conventional bourgeois democracy on Westminster lines, although it adopted the trappings.

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