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By Root 3387 0

(UUP) was to rule the new state until 1972, with the minority Catholic population (roughly 40%) stripped of any real power or representative strength by a Parliament that favoured the Unionists through economic subsidy, bias in housing allocations and gerrymandering: Derry’s electoral boundaries were redrawn so as to guarantee a Protestant council, even though the city was two-thirds Catholic. To keep everyone in line, the overwhelmingly Protestant Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and their militia, the B-Specials, made no effort to mask their blatantly sectarian bias. To all intents and purposes, Northern Ireland was an apartheid state.

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Many films depict events related to the Troubles, including Bloody Sunday (2002), The Boxer (1997; starring Daniel Day-Lewis) and In the Name of the Father (1994; also starring Day-Lewis).

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The first challenge to the Unionist hegemony came with the long-dormant IRA’s border campaign in the 1950s, but it was quickly quashed and its leaders imprisoned. A decade later, however, the authorities met with a far more defiant foe, in the shape of the Civil Rights Movement, founded in 1967 and heavily influenced by its US counterpart as it sought to redress the blatant sectarianism in Derry. In October 1968 a mainly Catholic march in Derry was violently broken up by the RUC amid rumours that the IRA had provided ‘security’ for the marchers. Nobody knew it at the time, but the Troubles had begun.

In January 1969 another civil rights movement, called People’s Democracy, organised a march from Belfast to Derry. As the marchers neared their destination, they were attacked by a Protestant mob. The police first stood to one side and then compounded the problem with a sweep through the predominantly Catholic Bogside district. Further marches, protests and violence followed and, far from keeping the two sides apart, the police were clearly part of the problem. In August British troops went to Derry and then Belfast to maintain law and order. The British army was initially welcomed in some Catholic quarters, but soon it too came to be seen as a tool of the Protestant majority. Overreaction by the army actually fuelled recruitment into the long-dormant IRA. IRA numbers especially increased after Bloody Sunday (30 January 1972), when British troops killed 13 civilians in Derry.

Northern Ireland’s Parliament was abolished in 1972, although substantial progress had been made towards civil rights. A new power-sharing arrangement, worked out in the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement, was killed stone dead by the massive and overwhelmingly Protestant Ulster Workers’ Strike of 1974.

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Brendan O’Brien’s popular Pocket History of the IRA summarises a lot of complex history in a mere 150 pages, but it’s a good introduction.

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While continuing to target people in Northern Ireland, the IRA moved its campaign of bombing to mainland Britain. Its activities were increasingly condemned by citizens and parties on all sides of the political spectrum. Meanwhile, Loyalist paramilitaries began a sectarian murder campaign against Catholics. Passions reached fever pitch in 1981 when Republican prisoners in the North went on a hunger strike, demanding the right to be recognised as political prisoners. Ten of them fasted to death, the best known being an elected MP, Bobby Sands.

The waters were further muddied by an incredible variety of parties splintering into subgroups with different agendas. The IRA had split into ‘official’ and ‘provisional’ wings, from which sprang more extreme Republican organisations such as the Irish National Liberation Army (INLA). Myriad Protestant, Loyalist paramilitary organisations sprang up in opposition to the IRA, and violence was typically met with violence.

In the 1990s external circumstances started to alter the picture. Membership of the EU, economic progress in Ireland and the declining importance of the Catholic Church in the South started to reduce differences between the North and South. Also, American interest added an international dimension to the