Religion and International Security by Lee Marsden;

Author:Lee Marsden;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
Published: 2019-01-21T16:00:00+00:00

Ken Newell and Gerry Reynolds

The politics of Northern Ireland is steeped in the history of the nine-hundred-year fractious relationship between Great Britain and its western neighbour. Throughout much of that history the inequitable treatment of the Catholic majority on the island of Ireland and the superior economic, political and social status accorded to the Protestant minority has led to tensions and periodic rebellions culminating in the War of Independence in 1919–21, which eventually accorded independence to twenty-six of Ireland's thirty-two counties. The six counties retained as part of the United Kingdom were six of the nine counties of the province of Ulster, selected on the basis of its Protestant majority and their refusal to countenance Irish Home Rule or independence. The division of the island of Ireland in 1921 left resentment in the South, which in its written constitution laid territorial claim to the whole of Ireland, until the Good Friday Agreement (1998). The newly created province of Northern Ireland included a third of the population who were Catholics.

The discrimination against Catholics, which had defined Irish society, became even more acute in the north of the island. Catholics faced discrimination in employment, council housing and voting, where electoral districts were gerrymandered and the unionist business community accorded extra votes, and in recruitment for government jobs. The Special Powers Act introduced in 1922 empowered the Ulster Unionist Party, which won every election in Northern Ireland until the imposition of Direct Rule in 1972 (to 1998), to take whatever action it was felt necessary to preserve the peace in the province. This led to internment without trial, the banning of nationalist publications, meetings and marches and was used to suppress the nationalist community. Such actions were enforced by an overwhelmingly Protestant/unionist criminal justice system with an armed police force backed by the vehemently anti-Catholic, and pro-unionist Ulster Special Constabulary known as the B Specials, who were later disbanded by the British Government in 1970.

The discrimination against Catholics and nationalists in Northern Ireland was resisted by the Irish Republican Army border campaigns (1956–62) and then with the support of some moderate unionists by the Northern Irish Civil Rights Association (NICRA) who marched and protested inspired by the legacy of Martin Luther King Jr and the American Civil Rights movement. Civil Rights protests and demonstrations were violently suppressed by the Royal Ulster Constabulary and B Specials and although NICRA continued to engage in promoting and advocating civil rights, the province descended into violence, with Protestants setting fire to Catholic houses in Bombay Street in Belfast in 1969 and the exodus of Catholic families from mixed areas. The British Army were sent in to try and restore order and by 1972, after three years of fighting, NICRA's role was effectively over.

Catholic/Protestant, Unionist/Nationalist tensions and divisions grew in the wake of violence on all sides, the resentment experienced by the introduction of internment without trial, bombing campaigns by the Irish Republican Army and Irish National Liberation Army, and assassinations and targeted killings of Catholics and nationalists by the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defence Association.

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