Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict

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The incident had enormous ramifications, taking a place in Irish history as a formative moment which not only claimed fourteen lives but also hardened attitudes, increased paramilitary recruitment, helped generate more violence, and convulsed Anglo-Irish relations. In 1998 Tony Blair, as prime minister, announced the establishment of a full-scale judicial inquiry. In the same month a rioting crowd began throwing stones at a passing milk lorry. The lorry crashed into a lamppost and the driver and his son, Desmond Guiney, were killed. Desmond was 14 too. I suppose my only real complaint is that the book spends a lot more time and effort on describing the coming of peace than it does on the coming of violence. I suppose the peace process is more recent and better documented, but i was really hoping for a better understanding of how communal tensions and unease descended into bloody murder. I went to Protestant churches, schools and groups. I didn’t understand what Catholicism was or why there was one primary school with children we were discouraged from playing with, until high school when I found out a friend in my year was catholic, and later asked my parents about it. Politics was not discussed.

He sounded out loyalist paramilitaries too, on one occasion meeting loyalists wearing masks and sunglasses in his Stormont Castle office. But a few days after his encounter with republicans a brief IRA ceasefire broke down. The IRA and the British government had met face to face, each concluding that the other was unreasonable and in effect beyond political reach. The IRA stepped up its violence with a vengeance, while loyalist groups also began killing on a large scale.The discussion document laid down that unfettered majority rule was a thing of the past and that future devolution would be on a basis of partnership. New institutions, it stipulated, must ‘seek a much wider consensus than has hitherto existed. As a minimum it would mean assuring minority groups of an effective voice and a real influence; but there are strong arguments that the objective of real participation should be achieved by giving minority interests a share in the exercise of executive power.’ In putting the concepts of powersharing and an Irish dimension on the table as the pillars of a future settlement, London had defined what were to be the main constitutional battlegrounds for the next three decades. The next step was to assemble the three parties which would form the executive, together with the London and Dublin governments. They met at a civil service training centre at Sunningdale in Berkshire in late 1973, the deal which emerged from it becoming known thereafter as the Sunningdale Agreement. Whitelaw, the principal architect of the new settlement, was promoted to a senior post in London, Heath believing that he needed his talents for his government’s confrontation with trade unions in Britain. He was replaced by the less experienced Francis Pym only four days before the Sunningdale conference took place.

Republicans meanwhile set off bombs which killed large numbers of people. Nine died in Belfast on what came to be known as Bloody Friday, as the IRA detonated twenty devices in just over an hour, injuring 130 others and producing widespread confusion and fear in many parts of the city. According to one account: ‘In many places there was panic and pandemonium as shoppers and others heard bombs going off all over the city. The carnage, with some people blown to pieces, was such that the number of dead was unclear for some time, newspapers at first reporting that eleven people had been killed.’ A police officer who went to a bomb scene in Oxford Street said: ‘You could hear people screaming and crying and moaning. The first thing that caught my eye was a torso of a human being lying in the middle of the street. It was recognisable as a torso because the clothes had been blown off and you could actually see parts of the human anatomy.’ In his memoirs Brian Faulkner wrote: ‘Few Ulster people will forget seeing on television young policemen shovelling human remains into plastic bags in Oxford Street.’ The election result was yet another illustration of Unionist divisions. Thirty-nine of the Unionist party candidates gave their allegiance to the Faulkner approach but, in an echo of O’Neill’s 1969 crossroads election, ten others refused to do so. Unionist rejectionists won 27 of the 78 assembly seats with 235,000 votes, while Unionists supporting the initiative won 22 seats with 211,000 votes. Faulkner thus emerged from the election leading a bitterly divided party and without a majority among Unionist voters. His best hope was that, if a working system of government could be set up, its successful functioning would gradually attract more Unionist popular support. Whether the new government system succeeds or fails, however, there is a widespread sense that a corner has been turned. It is too much to expect a future of friendship and harmony, for all those involved inflicted much damage on each other. Yet it is not too much to hope that the major campaigns of organised violence are in their last days, and that the death toll will continue to decline." Extraordinarily well-balanced, sane, comprehensive and rich in sober understatement' Glasgow HeraldI felt the book would have been much improved had it opened with a scene far in the future, describing the carnage of a roadside bomb, leading up to the question: "So how did we get here?" That would be a dramatic way of setting up the book and making the reader more interested in how the ancient conflict began. Two weeks later came another horrendous incident when seven people were killed by a 200lb IRA car bomb left in Donegall Street, close to Belfast city centre, following contradictory telephoned warnings. The explosion injured 150 people, including many who were fleeing from a bomb scare in an adjoining street. The Belfast Telegraph reported: There could have been no more definitive display of political motivation than the spectacle of ten men giving their lives in an awesome display of self-sacrifice and dedication. It was possible to view this as outlandish fanaticism, and many did; but it was not possible to claim that there were indistinguishable from ordinary criminals. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-02-11 06:12:09 Associated-names McVea, David Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40362214 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier

This is a great sober account of a little war in a little place. Really nothing much to bother about. Just a little normal sorrow, just some ordinary pity. Only 3,739 dead people. There’s probably more than that in two days in Syria or the Congo. Although London and Dublin were able to reach agreement on most issues, they had to agree to differ on a number of points and especially on one hugely important issue. In the absence of an agreed single statement on the status of Northern Ireland, the governments agreed that separate statements should be printed side by side in the final conference communiqué. This was seen both as an oddity and as a sign of continuing British-Irish differences. The Irish government statement ‘fully accepted and solemnly declared that there could be no change in the status of Northern Ireland until a majority of the people of Northern Ireland desired a change in their status’. Dublin did not, however, propose to delete or change Articles 2 and 3 of the Irish constitution, which Unionists regarded as an offensive claim to jurisdiction over Northern Ireland. Some in Dublin favoured such a move, but the problem was that the constitution could only be changed by a referendum. If a referendum had been held and lost, the entire initiative would have been undermined. Elections to the new assembly were held in June 1973. During the campaign the wily Faulkner repeated that his party would not share power with any party ‘whose primary objective was to break the link with Great Britain’. Some Unionists appear to have voted for him on the assumption that this meant he would not share power with the SDLP. Afterwards, when it emerged he was indeed prepared to sit in government with the SDLP, opponents accused him of misleading voters. His reasoning was that ending the Union, while perhaps the ultimate ambition of the SDLP, was not its primary objective. This is a well written book that I was able to follow and understand despite having only a rather sketchy idea of the problems in Northern Ireland.The prisoners were refused any clothing if they refused to wear the uniforms. They were given a blanket and a mattress. By 1978 there were 300 such prisoners “on the blanket”. It was a classic battle of male egos. The problem for the prisoners was that no one much cared if they were naked. Their campaign went on for 18 months and got nowhere. So they hit on the idea of refusing to wash. Thus began the next phase, the dirty protest. They refused to leave their cells at all, either for food or to have a shower or, crucially, to empty their chamber pots: The IRA are more Irish than the rest of us, they believe. They are the pure master race of Irish. They are the keepers of the holy grail of the nation. That deep-seated attitude, married to their method, has all the hallmarks of undiluted fascism. They have all the other hallmarks of the fascist – the scapegoat – the Brits are to blame for everything, even their own atrocities! By November the talks had achieved agreement on most of the major issues but were stalled on the composition of the eleven-man executive (no women were in line for office) and had yet to settle the form of the Irish dimension. Faulkner insisted that his party should have a majority in the executive while the SDLP and Alliance pointed out that he did not command a majority within Unionism and certainly not within the assembly. Whitelaw told Edward Heath that he expected the talks to fail and made plans to return to London to make a statement in the Commons on 22 November. On the day before, however, he piled the pressure on the parties to reach agreement by having his helicopter land, visibly and very noisily, on the lawn outside Stormont Castle where the talks were taking place. First published two decades ago, Making Sense of the Troubles is widely regarded as the most 'comprehensive, considered and compassionate' ( Irish Times) history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Written by a distinguished journalist and a teacher of history in Northern Ireland, it surveys the roots of the problems from 1921 onwards, the descent into violence in the late 60s, and the three terrible decades that followed.

Making Sense Of The Troubles is a very good place to start if your knowledge of the events in Northern Ireland is poor or scattered like mine was. The text is easy to understand and follow. Essential reading at the moment when tensions are once again on the rise in NI. It was exactly what I was looking for to help me understand what took place. The authors also I thought managed to provide a very fair and neutral picture of the events.All of this increased the sense of crisis and galvanised the British government. Heath noted in his memoirs: ‘The atmosphere had now grown more poisoned than ever and I feared that we might, for the first time, be on the threshold of complete anarchy.’ He, Maudling and other ministers had already considered a wide range of options, some of which would have greatly alarmed Unionists had they known of them. One idea was for a repartition which would divide Northern Ireland into Protestant and Catholic districts, with the latter being allowed to join the Republic. Another was to have Northern Ireland governed jointly by Britain and the Republic, its citizens having dual citizenship. Heath seems to have considered and rejected these options, though intriguingly the minutes of one meeting of ministers, released in the spring of 2000, mention the possibility of Irish unity. Recording the gist of ministerial discussions, this document said: ‘If the object were to preserve the option of creating a united Ireland at some time in the future, it might be better to seek first for a political solution in which the minority were persuaded to participate in government.’