Divided communities, more than 3,500 deaths and thousands permanently injured. This is the legacy faced by Brexit negotiators.
It has been twenty years since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement brought an end to The Troubles in Northern Ireland.
At the heart of the bloody conflict was an issue which has sparked many wars: national identity.
Republicans (also called nationalists) wanted Northern Ireland to leave the U.K and join the Republic of Ireland.
Loyalists (also called unionists) on the other hand identified as British and wanted Northern Ireland to remain in the United Kingdom.
In the early 1960s historic tensions between these groups escalated from riots into a thirty-year guerrilla warfare style conflict characterised by riots, bombing campaigns and assassinations.
Fighting broke out between republican paramilitaries, loyalist paramilitaries, Northern Ireland’s predominantly protestant police force and the British Army, who were deployed to the region in 1969.
“It started out as an internal conflict within the state of Northern Ireland, but within three or four years of the outbreak of the troubles it actually mutated into something which was also about the British presence in Northern Ireland,” Professor of Political Theory Adrian Little said.
The conflict claimed the lives of more than 3,500 people and injured more than 47,000.
The 3,575 lives lost during the Troubles
Beautiful, easy data visualization and storytelling
For many, the Northern Irish conflict is greatly misunderstood. Some members from within communities feel their side of the debate was misrepresented.
“I’ve been frustrated for forty years of people not understanding the conflict,” former loyalist community leader James said.
“They think that Ireland is full of all one people and they’re not.”
James, who identifies as British, disagrees with the republican’s view that the U.K. army invaded Northern Ireland.
“It wasn’t [an invasion], the British people in Ireland were already there…part of British culture”.
Of course, many republicans, who label the army’s deployment to the region as the British occupation of Ireland, would argue otherwise.
So what was – and wasn’t – the violence about?
“One of the major misconceptions of the conflict is that it’s a religious conflict,” Foreign Policy Editorial Fellow Dan Haverty said.
He characterises the conflict as a “fight between mutually exclusive ethnic groups that are fighting for the same shared space”.
He said while religion does “play some component in what the [communities’] identities are and what they are fighting for,” religion is better understood as an “identifier” of those communities than as a cause of the conflict.
Professor Adrian Little gives a similar assessment and describes the Troubles as an “ethno-national conflict”, with religion “overlaid” over the top of the different ethnic groups.
Fatalities attributable to grouped agencies
Beautiful, easy data visualization and storytelling
By the 1980s they were the main combatants and had a significant influence on the nature and length of the conflict said Mr Haverty.
“Armies tend to compromise, even though they have to fight first to reach those compromises. Armies say ‘we surrender’ and then sit down and negotiate terms.”
“But paramilitary groups normally, but not always, can fight for a very prolonged period, and they’re prepared to.”
Their tactics are best suited to a “very prolonged, protracted guerrilla conflict”.
“The Troubles in Northern Ireland lasted thirty years, whereas it’s very hard to imagine a conventional conflict [between state armies] lasting that long” Mr Haverty said.
Paramilitaries didn’t just inflict violence on the other side, but in some cases, their own communities.
They acted as both the police and the judicial system, punishing “anti-social elements” (typically drug dealers).
The Centre for Security Governance links this informal policing to paramilitaries’ (on both sides) attempts to maintain control in their territories, as well as the distrust of the actual police in republican communities.
“In the 1970s, the fact that both republican and loyalist groups made it clear they would kill dealers kept [Belfast], apart from the traditionally bohemian student districts, relatively free of drugs.
The IRA made its attitude clear with several large-scale operations: in 1992, in one night, it killed one drug dealer and kneecapped another 10.”
– An excerpt from the 1995 Independent Article “How the Guns Kept Drugs Out Of Belfast”
But not all paramilitaries or their members had the same reservations about organised crime.
Some saw it as opportunity to make a profit and started trafficking drugs themselves.
Factionalism also led to violence within their own communities – McKeown’s database attributes it to 61 deaths during the Troubles.
“There were recurring divisions [among Paramilitaries] over policy and resources, and this led to conflict between groups which to the outside observer seemed to have a common goal.
“Frequently these conflicts led to one group taking punitive action against another,” McKeown wrote in the database’s accompany paper ‘Post-Mortem’.
The most common cause of death for factionalism related killings was assassination (36 people), followed by ‘dumped’ (8 people) and gun battle (7 people).
Mr Haverty says the British Army and paramilitaries knew a military victory would be “very hard” to achieve and they needed to eventually negotiate, but it took them twenty years to reach that point.
“Settlements [in paramilitary conflicts] tend to be very different, they tend to be much more complicated because paramilitary groups tend to be far less compromising and far more demanding.”
He points out the challenges of securing peace.
“How do you reconcile between two groups that are competing for the same piece of land?”
But in 1998, against all odds, the two groups managed to do just that, and signed the Good Friday Agreement – ending the conflict.
It set out a number of principles on the governance, status and rights of Northern Ireland and was supported by most major parties and paramilitaries, as well as the European Union and the United States.
“The intention behind the agreement was not to completely reset Northern Ireland…but to sure up the middle ground so that moderate nationalist and unionist parties would govern together,” Professor Adrian Little said.
A key tenant of the peace agreement was the right for Northern Ireland’s residents to hold British and Irish passports, and the right for Northern Ireland to leave the United Kingdom if the majority of its residents voted to do so.
This “legitimised the rights of both sides to aspire to different national outcomes,” Professor Adrian Little said.
He also credits it with allowing the republican movement in particular to move from violence to electoral politics.
“It is perfectly legitimate now to participate in Northern Irish politics, but in the belief that ultimately there should be a United Ireland…that wasn’t the case before the 1990s.”
FEATURED IMAGE: The New York Times
