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Paper Abstract: Relationship between violence & politics. History of Catholic-Protestant conflict, Bloody Sunday, strategies, British role, IRA, internment, Provos. Paper Introduction: On a Sunday in January of 1972, an angry but peaceful civilrights march in Northern Ireland was shattered by gunfire from British paratroopers who had been brought in to act as peacekeepers in the civil strife between Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics. When the shooting was over, 13 unarmed civilian marchers lay dead. In the aftermath, the Troubles in Northern Ireland took a new and more violent turn, and peace has not yet returned to the province. The following essay is a study of the relationship of violence and political leverage. Bloody Sunday, as the shootings in January of 1972 came to be called, was not itself an act designed for leverage. For the British Army, which had done the shooting, it was indeed a severe political setback. But it took place withinand to a degree was made inevitable Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. The overwhelmingly Catholic population ofSouthern Ireland has strong ties of religion, history, and generalsentiment with Ulster Catholics. After Bloody Sunday, there was no prospect of returning to astate of peace in Ulster, even of uneasy peace. The failure of the Ulster Protestants to develop a more systematicapproach to right-wing terror is in one sense surprising. 333-4). This alone might not havecaused a crisis, but England was threatened by Catholic Spain--and theSpanish sought potential allies among the Catholic Irish chieftains. Moreover, Britishpoliticians were talking of abolishing the Stormont Parliament andinstituting direct rule from London, which would further limit Protestantcontrol. Within a year, the troops themselvesbecame the target of Catholic extremists and in turn came to view radicalCatholics--and ultimately Catholics in general--as the enemy. A restoration of Home Rule was the drivingmotivation of 19th- and early 2 th-century Irish nationalists. In more recent years, they have had reason tosuppose that the British Army was defending their interests. HenryVIII made himself King of Ireland, but still there was no real change. The Brits in Northern Ireland have by no means been innocentof excesses of the sort indistinguishable from state terrorism. Nevertheless, Southern Ireland has verylargely resisted being drawn into the Northern Irish Troubles. Thus, Ulster became the only region in Ireland whereProtestants were actually the majority. What exactly happened remains unclear.The British troops evidently believed they were being fired on (Hillyard,1983, p. But the Ulster Protestants were passionately opposed tobeing subsumed in a predominantly Catholic Ireland. On the sameday, a few blocks away, the head of the Provos was proving the hollownessof that claim by holding his own public press conference (Bell, 1987, pp.139-4 ). The shootings of the demonstrators in January, 1972, came to be calledBloody Sunday--the very name echoing an earlier violent incident in 2 th-century Irish history (Collins, 1976, p. It was the highly politicized, Protestant character of the RoyalUlster Constabulary which originally prompted the British government, in1969, to insert regular British Army forces onto the streets of Belfast andother towns in Ulster. Certainly, the Provos seem no closer to gaining their objectives. (1983). But, as the violence directed against the Army by the IRAescalated, Ulster Protestants were in a sense recalled to the originalreason why they were Unionists--that, in the long run, British power wastheir bulwark against eventual Catholic dominance. Given Ulster's sharpcommunal divisions, most inhabitants share in some degree the passions andprejudices of their community. Afascination with organization and discipline might seem to be naturalconcomitants of such an outlook. Ireland was not entirely won until 169 --another contentious date inIrish history. At the same time, the IRA had kept up very much with the times interms of revolutionary theory, developing a Marxist interpretation ofUlster's social and political divisions. It wouldsubsequently come out that attempts were made by the army, in the immediateaftermath of the shootings, to plant weapons on some of the dead victims asa post-hoc justification (Bell, 1987, p. The Provos have also come face-to-face with the reality that theBritish--as World War II's Blitz demonstrated--are extremely difficult tocoerce (Bell, 187, p. They had before them the general roll-back ofEuropean colonialism around the world and the more specific spectacle ofthe United States withdrawal from Vietnam. The remainder of this essay will be structured as follows. UlsterProtestants pride themselves on being exemplars of the Protestant ethic, incontrast to what they view as the lazy and feckless Catholics. When the shootingwas over, 13 unarmed civilian marchers lay dead. Instead of crippling the IRA, the internment policy thus served onlyto heighten the level of resentment in the Catholic community towardBritish troops. soccer) fans. Finally, in the 192 s, the British granted effective independence tomost of Ireland. But there is no evidence that theshootings were planned. 38). Previously, as noted above, the role of Protestant extremistorganizations had been attenuated because Protestant extremists had solarge a degree of influence over the government and the police. The characteristic form of Protestant terrorism wasthe random shooting of Catholics, most of whom had no connection with theIRA factions. Bloody Sunday, as the shootings in January of 1972came to be called, was not itself an act designed for leverage. During the Stormont era, after all, they controlled theparamilitary police, the Royal Ulster Constabulary, which amounted ineffect to an instrument of state terror (though not usually terror in itsmore dramatic forms). Thus, neither side (or more precisely, as we shall see below, none ofthe three sides) intended Bloody Sunday to unfold as it did. The demonstrations andshooting had taken place on a Sunday, and the episode was quickly namedBloody Sunday. Those drawn tothe cause in these stories either end in rejecting its violence or arebrutalized and killed off with no tears shed (Bell, 1987, pp. The events of that Sunday in January of 1972did not themselves constitute anyone's deliberate tactical plan nordirectly fulfill anyone's strategic objective. The very fact that Britain as a whole--with the conspicuous exceptionof Ulster itself--was a fairly peaceful society, however, limited Britishoptions. The Protestant William III defeated the Catholic Stuartpretender at the Battle of the Boyne, and a Protestant Ascendency wasfirmly fastened onto Ireland, with the Catholic majority reduced to (atbest) second-class status. Under the circumstances,it would in any case have taken only a single stray gunshot or two (or asound like gunshots) to trigger a violent response from the keyed-uptroops. Irish-American (and other American) public opinion is also a potential target ofactions by all the militant parties. The British. Ulster Catholic passions were inflamed, and sympathiesfor the IRA Provos were reinforced. With the Vietnam war still raging,counterinsurgency was all the rage in military circles, and Westernofficers were learning to read the works of Mao Zedong. This was the final ingredient that led to the disaster of BloodySunday. At first, Ulster militants resented the Britishpresence as a limitation on their own freedom of action (especially thefreedom to use violence to keep the Catholics in line). Many Britons wouldhappily leave Ulster to its own devices. In the summer of 1971, with fatal attacks against British soldiersescalating in frequency, the British authorities fell back on a 1922 lawthat allowed internment without trial. Many, however, simply wish to be leftalone. The first marches were peaceful, but they prompted a violent response onthe part of Ulster's Protestant Unionists. By herreign, the Protestant Reformation had taken firm hold in England, but notat all in Ireland, which remained Catholic. The Southern Irish. The natural military response is to level thebuilding. The situation was worsened, however, by thedecision to send paratroops. But police training and the police outlook in general isdirected toward limited, controlled use of violence in a context ofsurrounding civil life. Finally, in January of 1972, British paratroopers, evidently believing(or at least claiming) that they had been fired on, opened fire into aCatholic Civil Rights demonstration. But, as the violence receded to acceptablelevels, the peace movement seems to have faded. Viewed throughthat lens, the Ulster situation took on a recognizable form. Much of the politicalactivity by all parties, however, is aimed at mobilizing portions of thenon-activist majority. The historical background. In the escalation of violence that followed in the years immediatelyafter Bloody Sunday, the Provos appeared to hope that they would achievethe ultimate goal of driving the British finally out of Ireland in arelatively short time. The gun in politics. This violence was neither systematic nor politically directed,however, during the early months of the British presence. On August 13, 1971, the British commander held a pressconference at which he declared that the IRA had been broken. Political thriller novels give an interesting reflection of thepopular image in the United States and the West as a whole of the Provosand the Irish Troubles: the characteristic impression given is that theCatholics have legitimate grievances but that the Provos' tactics are self-brutalizing; from being a means and a possibly-justified response toprovokation, Provo violence has become an end in itself. Finally, we will turn to the strategic implications that developed inthe aftermath of Bloody Sunday and how each of the key players in Ulsterviolence and Ulster politics responded to that changed situation. In Catholic eyes, the British were again usingindiscriminate deadly violence against Irish Catholics. On a Sunday in January of 1972, an angry but peaceful civil-rightsmarch in Northern Ireland was shattered by gunfire from Britishparatroopers who had been brought in to act as peacekeepers in the civilstrife between Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics. 4. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, pp. E. They wish to retaintheir advantages within Ulster, and deeply fear reduction to minoritystatus within a united Ireland. That it didso unfold was, however, a natural consequences of strategic and tacticalpolicy decisions which each of the three main parties have previouslyundertaken, and once the smoke was cleared and the bodies gathered up, theaftermath of Bloody Sunday created a new situation to which each party hadto respond. (1983). We will outline thebackground that has led up to that situation, identify the major players onthe Ulster political scene, their objectives, and the means by which theyseek to gain leverage in order to meet those objectives. For others, it was a setback to be overcome. Other Catholics and Protestants in Ulster. Its last offensive, in the 195 s, had been a failureand was eventually called off. 157). But, given the weight of Irish history and historical legend and thebitter legacy of Irish-British conflict, the presence of British troopsguarding Irish streets was highly inflammatory to Catholic militants(Darby, 1983, pp. We willfirst consider the general political situation. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, pp. Activist or militant Ulster Protestants. The police, overwhelminglyProtestant and with close links to Unionist political groups, failed toprotect Catholics from Protestant rampages. Unfortunately for him, it was a Protestant pub, he was aCatholic--and 1966 was the 5 th anniversary of the 1916 Easter Rising.Sectarian tensions were high, and the hapless Catholic barman was murderedby the Protestant crowd in the pub (White, 1983, p. From conflict to violence: The re-emergence of the IRA and the loyalist response. As Catholic violence against the troops escalated, Protestant violencetended to dwindle away. Irish-Americans, particularly in the Eastwhere old Irish-American neighborhoods, ties, and sentiments still persistto a degree, have had some involvement in Ulster's Troubles. 2 -2 2). Thetrouble began with the greatest of English monarchs, Elizabeth. In the aftermath, theTroubles in Northern Ireland took a new and more violent turn, and peacehas not yet returned to the province. We conclude witha summation of our findings and a discussion of the implications whichBloody Sunday and Ulster's Troubles have for our understanding of the roleof leverage in the politics of terrorism and unconventional warfare. In the middle 196 s, the Western world as a whole had never heard of,or at least had forgotten, Northern Ireland, the Irish Republican Army, andthe long bitter history of Ireland's Troubles. Forthe first time, the English thought it necessary to truly conquer Irelandand bend the Irish to their will. 117 was, indeed, the year in whichthe Troubles began. They simply proved to be in the wrong place at the wrongtime, in a very tense situation. The Battle of the Boyne, regularly commemorated by UlsterProtestants with marches specifically designed to insult and provoke UlsterCatholics, was fought in 169 . The escalation of Provoviolence, including numerous bombings within England and the assassinationof British officials and other prominent officials (most notably retiredWorld War II general Lord Mountbatten), was rooted in this belief. The full ramifications of Northern Ireland's Troubles are so complexas to almost defy analysis. 181-96. In the process, however, the IRA split. Of these six parties, three have been active participants in theUlster violence: militant Catholics (and particularly the ProvisionalIRA), militant Protestants, and the British Army.Traditionally, the main component of Catholic militancy was the IrishRepublican Army, or IRA. By the late 196 s, however, the IRA had becomemilitarily moribund. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, pp. The Irish Diaspora. Our goal will be to investigate several factors: how each of theplayers in the Ulster Troubles sought to use the violence in one way oranother to gain leverage; how their tactics related to their strategy; whattheir goals were; and whether the means they used were appropriate toachieving those goals. And, some years earlier, Oliver Cromwellpromoted a large-scale Protestant immigration into Ulster, the northeasterncorner of Ireland. In practical (and predictable)consequence, the result of Bloody Sunday was precisely counterproductivefor the British. Thus, signs such as"Remember 117 " can be seen spray-painted on walls in Belfast. In some respects, the British have found themselvesvictims of their own long intervention in Ireland. To these parties we might add a sixth: 6. This essay is not anaccount of Bloody Sunday itself; as indicated above, Bloody Sunday was aspasmodic event which had no true tactics and grew out of no strategicplan. In Ulsteritself, the British have been unimaginative but steady and have succeededin containing violence at tolerable levels. By then,however, it was too late for this to achieve the political effect ofinstituting a more evenhanded political regime within the province andtherefore alleviating the grievances of the Catholic minority. Normally, revolutionary movements either win and thusbecome ruling governments, or they fade away. A good many Catholic political militants and agitators, butrelatively few of the Provo gunmen, were swept up in the dragnet andinterned. Thus,they hope to keep their enemies perpetually insecure and off-balance.Their cellular organization has proven highly resistant to penetration.They seem ready to persist indefinitely. In contrast, the IRA Provos have proven themselves to be one of theworld's most well organized rebel or terror movements. B. At the same time, the poorerProtestants were also potential proletarian recruits, who were kept fromrecognizing their class interests by the constant stirring of sectarianpassions by the Protestant elite (Grosscup, 1991, p. On the other side of the Ulster political divide, the traditionalUlster militant elements, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Ulster DefenseOrganization, were likewise moribund. But British troops could not long function as neutralpeacekeepers in Northern Ireland. In Ulster, itseems, everyone has sought, but no one has gained, sufficient leverage tohave any lasting effect on the situation. The consequence was inevitably to convert the situation in Ulster fromone of tension to one of urban guerilla warfare. Their issues became purely Irish in character (Bell, 1987, pp.152-54). In recentyears, indeed, specifically Ulster Protestant violence and terrorism seemsto have fallen largely by the wayside, as the Ulster conflict wassimplified into a conflict between the Catholic militants (especially theProvos) and the British. The peacemovement of the middle-and late-197 s has faded. The Provisional wing, which formally broke off from it by197 , was less wedded to ideological theory but much more militant. Faced with a sniper in abuilding, the natural police response is to cordon it off and perhaps sendin a specialized SWAT unit. Far Hills, NJ: New Horizons Press.Hillyard, P. We willthen briefly outline the major trends that have taken place in Ulster'sTroubles in the two decades since Bloody Sunday erupted. Nevertheless, Protestant extremistorganizations never became as organized as their Catholic opposite numberssuch as the Provos. If the British were to withdraw from NorthernIreland, however, realizing the Protestants' worst fear, there can belittle doubt that the Ulster Protestants would move quickly to make uptheir deficiencies in the areas of political violence and terror. But it took place within--and to a degree was made inevitable by--an atmosphere in which several parties to the Northern Irish conflict wereprepared to use violence as a means of exerting leverage in order to gaintheir political objectives. Forexample, a traditional and persisting role of the Orange Order was toorganize and stage the yearly parades on the anniversary of the Battle ofthe Boyne, parades designed at once to strengthen Protestant identity andto intimidate the Catholics. If the intent were terror, 13killings were grossly insufficient. Broadly speaking, five parties canbe identified as involved in Ulster's politics and potentially in itsviolence: 1. The British had no paramilitary police ready at hand, save thepolitically unsuitable Royal Ulster Constabulary. (1987). However innocent the original firing may have been, the responseafterward was certainly suspicious in the extreme, as an attempt was madeto plant weapons on the dead bodies of shooting victims (Bell, 1987, p.159). The people theyhad originally been sent in to protect were increasingly hostile to them.At the same time, the people they had been sent to protect them from wereless hostile and were also conspicuous for their display of British symbolssuch as the Union Jack. We have alreadynoted the remarkable durability of the IRA prior to the 1969 split betweenthe Officials and the Provisionals. It was extinguished, and an entirely separate Bretonmovement arose in the 196 s and 197 s. Themarchers were not like Iranian Revolutionary marchers, seeking martyrdom,eager to be shot. Sporadic violence was,however, directed against the soldiers by both Catholic and Protestantmilitants. With thisinfluence ended, the Protestants turned to further development of their owncapabilities for extra-official deadly violence. 13-31.Grosscup, B. 2 9-1 ). 159). For them, the dream ofIrish independence is a dream denied, while they remain subjected to theUlster Protestants' political and economic domination. While some of the paratroops who opened fire may have thoughtthey were under attack, others may have taken the opportunity for cold-blooded killings of troublemakers. 23-27). Support for the Provos wasgreatly strengthened, and belief on all sides in the prospects of apeaceful solution tended to fade away. The use of army troopswas the only available option. What we will turn to are the tactical conditions--actions by players, and the responses by other players--that made itprobable that such an event as Bloody Sunday would indeed just happen. From that time to the present, political and sectarian violence inUlster has been continuous. "Remember 117 ." That was the year in which an army of Welchmen andAnglo-Normans, fighting under the banner of Henry II and in alliance withone claimant to an Irish throne against another, invaded Ireland andsubjected it to the English throne. The closing of Stormont and the abolition of the Ulster DefenseRegiment had the strategic effect of changing the character of Protestantextremism. Military training is directed toward theoverwhelming use of violence on the battlefield. Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.Collins, M. The paratroops wereelite troops, exceptionally well-trained and motivated. The English crown made no real effort to fasten control on Ireland, andthe conquerors themselves settled down to become Irish clan chieftains.Indeed, the surname element "Fitz-" (as in John Fitzgerald Kennedy) wasoriginally Norman-French for "son of;" now, to us, it simply looks Irish. 187). By the late-197 s and early-198 s, however, prospects for aquick victory were slipping away. Certainly they fulfilled no conceivable tacticalor strategic objectives for the British. In the past, this measure hadproven quite effective in breaking the back of previous outbreaks of IRAviolence. 162). 3. For a time, the presence of heavily armedand neutral British troops was effective in reducing the level ofProtestant violence directed against Catholics. (It is worth noting that the use of random terroristviolence has long been a distinctive hallmark of right-wing terror, havingthe goal of promoting generalized insecurity.) The violent Protestantextremists, often recruited from among common criminals from the dockyardareas, did not form highly organized cells along the lines of the IRA, nordid they formulate any long-range strategy: "Tactics were for the Loyalistgunmen strategy" (Bell, 1987, p. Theoretical counter-insurgency doctrine might tip its hat toward political action to win awaythe population, but anti-guerilla soldiers in the field inevitably tendtoward the view sometimes expressed in Vietnam: "if you've got 'em by theballs, their hearts and minds will follow." British troops came to viewCatholic civilians as simply the unarmed but supportive auxiliary to enemyforces. What little claim the British stillhad to be neutral peacemakers was further shredded; Bloody Sunday simplyconfirmed what Irish Republicans tended to think all along: that theBritish were the real enemy, the Ulster Protestants simply the visiblefront men. While the British public is widelydisgusted with and frustrated by the whole Ulster question, there has beenvery little sign of any strong or widespread sentiment to pull out. Protestant hooligansthus ceased violent actions against British troops. In John Darby, Northern Ireland: The background to the conflict. Even remoteevents retain a sort of currency, as components of the myths that motivateall the major parties to the conflict in Ulster. The hostile encounter of Irish and Englishbegan in 117 . The violent Protestant response to the Civil Rights marches thus foundthe Catholics defenseless, and this in turn led in 1969 to therevitalization of the IRA. They are Unionists (supporters of unionwith Britain) mainly because they see Britain as their protector againstthe Catholic majority to the south. (1971). In 1966, Ireland's Troubles seemed far in thepast, and no one expected them to return in the near future. Symbolically, if not instrategic terms, the second Bloody Sunday of 1972 marked a decisive stagein the modern phase of Ireland's Troubles--and in Ireland, symbols are all-important. Beneath the "Masterpiece Theater" veneer thatAmericans usually associate with them, the English are an extremelypugnacious people. Soldiers are not police.Police are of course capable of excesses and of planned, systematicruthlessness. The IRA subsequently had tended to becomeprimarily a radical political grouping, associated with the Sinn Fein ("weourselves") political party. Tounderstand the complicated, multisided conflict in Northern Ireland today,it is thus necessary to sketch in, at least briefly, a long and convolutedprologue. We will then turn to the tactical situation. Thegeneral decision was to use soldiers in what was essentially a policefunction, albeit a paramilitary police function. London: Longman's.Darby, J. Forall, it marked a new stage in the conflict. In this increasingly hostile environment, it was notsurprising that British commanders and ordinary soldiers alike tended tocome to regard their mission not as peacekeeping, but as low-intensitywarfare. The tactical problem faced by the British was greatly exacerbated by ageneral decision and a more specific decision that flowed from it. As thisessay is being written, within the past few weeks at least one bombing inLondon has been linked to the Provisional IRA. The Provoswere hostile guerillas, albeit urban guerillas, and the Catholic populationwas the Maoist sea through which the guerillas swam. Unsurprisingly, the troops began increasingly tosee the hostile inhabitants of Catholic neighborhoods as the enemy. In general, Catholic activism in the middle- and late-196 s had movedin a political and primarily nonviolent direction, as typified by the CivilRights marches of 1968. 194). The Civil Rights march,organized by generally moderate and nonviolent elements in Ulster'sCatholic resistance movement, was not intended to provoke a violentresponse from the British Army in order to manufacture martyrs. The troops themselves thus found that they were caught in the middleof a situation both dangerous and difficult to understand. For a time, a peace movement dedicated to stopping the violencebecame a significant force. At thesame time, a goal of IRA actions is to promote war-weariness among theBritish public, thus perhaps leading to a withdrawal from Ulster. Law and order. To meet theirobjections, the British retained control of six of Ulster's nine counties.This territory had a two-thirds Protestant population and its ownProtestant-dominated Parliament at Stormont. The IRA Provos began todirect their attacks specifically against British soldiers, and the latterbegan to suffer casualties. The name was evocative of an incident in 192 , when IRAgunmen assassinated a number of suspected informers, and in the course oftheir response the authorities opened fire on a crowd at a soccer stadium(Collins, 1976, p. In 1972, the British government, belatedly recognizing theseriousness of the situation, finally suspended the Protestant-dominatedStormont Parliament and instituted direct rule from London. The British responded forcefully to theProvos and endured with some indifference the international opprobrium thatcame their way after the deaths of hunger strikers, revelations of Armytorture, and hints of death-squad activity. For many ifnot most Catholics--certainly for the overwhelming majority of thepolitically active element of the Catholic community--the time foralleviation was past. Their initial mission was to protect the Catholicsfrom Protestant violence, and in this role they were initially welcomed bymuch of the Catholic population. It wasclose to being achieved when World War I intervened, and the resultingtensions led to the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin and the beginning of a warthat was at once an Irish civil war and an Irish-English war. 124). However, there was little politicalneed for them; Ulster Protestants had firm control over the paramilitarypolice, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (Grosscup, 1991, pp. It was crushed, and in the aftermaththe long-existing Irish parliament was abolished, and Ireland was ruleddirectly from London. ReferencesBell, J. Taken alone, this was only one random violent incident in anatmosphere of uneasy peace. (1976). (1983). For theBritish Army, which had done the shooting, it was indeed a severe politicalsetback. 183). 159). If the underlying causes ofrevolutionary tension persist, they may be replaced by some other group ata later date, but there will be no institutional continuity between them.Thus, for example, there was a Breton autonomy movement in France duringWorld War II. The onecomponent of Protestant militancy that underwent least change was theOrange Order, which was in effect a political embodiment of Protestantextremism, whose function was to show the (orange Protestant) flag andrecruit boys and young men into the cause of Protestant militancy. 187). 2. This essay will focus on the events surrounding Bloody Sunday of 1972: the events that led up to it, and the pattern of events that flowed fromit. These marches typified the trend toward subsumingtraditional and uniquely Irish passions within the broader context of classstruggle; the very term Civil Rights clearly evokes the African-Americanpolitical movement of a few years before. Tensions were high as thousands of angry Catholics filled thestreets for a Civil Rights march, designed to be unarmed and nonviolent,but not in mood or tone peaceful. We must begin by understanding the limits of both strategy andtactics, and Bloody Sunday is an appropriate vehicle for conveying theimportance of those limits. Theviolent Protestant response to the Civil Rights marches of the late-196 swas disorganized, but it was effectively aided by the tendency of thepolice to stand aside when Catholics were under attack. Thus, a new strategic situation in Ulster developed out of the BloodySunday episode. By 1969, the British Army hadto be sent in as peacekeepers, to restore order and protect the Catholicminority in Ulster. The military mission of paratroops, as theirname implies, is to drop behind enemy lines --into an intensely hostile anddangerous environment, that is to say, where the need for a forceful, hair-trigger combat response is particularly critical. The new explosion of terrorism. Within Ulster, the Catholicstended to find themselves an underclass; they were subjected politically togerrymandering and economically and socially to systematic discrimination.At the same time, the Ulster Protestants, though a majority in Ulsteritself, still believed themselves to be a besieged minority within Irelandas a whole. The Ulster VolunteerForce and the Ulster Defense Association were revitalized. 5. But for the next four centuries, little more happened. In 1798, Irish nationalists--both Protestant and Catholic --launchedan abortive revolt against England. Ireland: 18 -197 . In John Darby, Northern Ireland: The background to the conflict. The following essay is a study of the relationship of violence andpolitical leverage. In any case, the troops opened fire, and 13 unarmed civilians werekilled. The killing goes on, buteverything remains the same, including the killing itself. Thetolerable current level of violence seems capable of extending itselfindefinitely without leading to real change of any sort. The pitch of violence has been now higher, nowlower. What these objectives were, how violence wasintended to gain leverage, and how it succeeded in doing so--or failed todo so--will be the issues covered below. By thesummer of 197 , the honeymoon between the troops and the Catholicpopulation had come to an end (White, 1983, p. The election of the IronLady, Margaret Thatcher as Britain's Conservative Prime Minister put inplace a British government that was extremely unlikely to negotiate awayUlster. The claims of asubsequent coverup, subsequently borne out, only further confirmed theworst suspicions of the Catholic population. But by 1968,the frustrations of Northern Ireland's Catholics (or Ulster's, to use theIrish expression) were being expressed in large-scale Civil Rights marches. The political effectiveness of this strategy is open to doubt,however. Attacks against them increased in number, comprising bothsniping or bombing attacks planned and carried out systematically by theProvos, and spontaneous violence (e.g., throwing of rocks and Molotovcocktails) against British patrols on the streets of Catholicneighborhoods. And once any of the troops fired, then there certainly weregunshots, to which other troops might well have reacted in panic. Inparticular, political and charitable fund-raising organizations such asNoraid have been accused of channeling funds and weapons to the IRA. The motivatingideology of the Provos drifted away from international radicalism (thoughthey fostered pragamatic links with radical anti-Western movementselsewhere). In recent years, the Provos have regularly shifted theirtargeting from one segment of the population to another: now shootings,now bombings, now targeted at troops, now at other types of targets. Faced with this reality, the Provos have fallen back on a long-warstrategy, designed to gradually wear down British resistance (White, 1983,p. They likewise carried on inthe face of terrorist actions within Britain. In general, the violence has never returned to the scale it reachedfor a few years in the middle 197 s, but neitherr has it died out. 38). At least they said so afterward. But the internment policy as re-instituted in August of 1971 proved tobe counterproductive (White, 1983, pp. Since that time, both groups havecarried on, though along somewhat different paths. 185-86). Thirteen Catholic civilians werekilled by British Army bullets (Hillyard, 1983, p. Theimmediate mission of the Provos, in 1969, was the use of violence againstthe police, in defense of the Ulster Catholic community. But Tories in particular havehistoric links to Ulster Unionists, while many other Britons fear thatwithdrawal would trigger a Protestant-Catholic bloodbath in Ulster. The past cannot be forgotten in dealing with Ireland. This is essentially how the situation stood in the middle 196 s, onthe eve of Ulster's renewed Troubles. In theimmediate wake of the Bloody Sunday shootings themselves, as noted earlier,a cover-up was attempted by planting guns on shooting victims (Bell, 1987,p. TheBritish thus find themselves in the uneasy position of trying to playpeacemaker, while having strong links to one of the warring sides. For centuries the English Kings were simply Lords of Ireland. But their wholetraining was geared away from a measured or restrained response to threats. The British presence tended to underline and re-awaken traditional Irish Catholic grievances and revitalize the traditionalagenda of Irish Catholic militancy: ejecting Mother England, as Britainwas ironically characterized, from Irish soil. Then, in 1966, a barman inNorthern Ireland, returning home from work, stopped in for a nip at adifferent pub. In John Darby, Northern Ireland: The background to the conflict. 32-6 .White, B. Though some Protestants were swept up in the dragnet thatfollowed, most of those interned with Catholic militants. Part ofthe Provo strategy was paradoxical: to push the British government intoharsh overreactions that would jar with the British self-image and thusundercut support for the government (as, for example, the revelation of theMy Lai massacre helped undercut American public support for the Vietnamwar). In contrast, the IRA has existedcontinually since around the turn of the century and has institutionalantecedents going back to the mid-18 s (Bell, 1987, p. It just happened. During the years ofrelative quite in the late-195 s and 196 s, intelligence-gathering hadlapsed, and the intelligence files used by the British proved to be badlyout of date. This long history of Ireland's Troubles inthe broader general sense is mirrored by the long institutional history ofsome of the players in the current Ulster Troubles. In practice, however, the Protestantshave never had the need to develop a highly organized extralegal terrorcapability. TheOfficial wing of the IRA, though it engaged in some political violence,tended to be primarily a political agitating group with a Marxistorientation. That perception allowed them to fit their situation into the contextof familiar tactical doctrines. The medieval French knew this well, the Irish have hadall too much experience of it, and it is visible today in the behavior ofBritish football (i.e. For some, it was an opportunity to exploit: a new means forthem to exert leverage. Nor, certainly, did the shooting of13 unarmed civilians fulfill any tactical or strategic objective of theBritish Army. By this interpretation, Ulster'sCatholics were an oppressed proletariat. Ulsterhas never become a front-burner issue in British politics. Few if anyrevolutionary organizations have maintained as long and continuous anexistence while failing to achieve their objectives as the IRA, or IrishRepublican Party. 185). Activist or militant Ulster Catholics. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.