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

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Really, as civil wars go, it was not much to write home about. The United Nations estimated casualties of the Sri Lankan civil war as somewhere between 80 and 100,000 killed between 1982 and 2009. Now that’s what you call a civil war. Compellingly written and completely even-handed, this is by far the clearest account of what happened in the Northern Ireland conflict - and why. The worst year of the troubles was 1972, its death toll of almost five hundred far exceeding that of any other year. Fourteen of those deaths occurred in Londonderry on 30 January, in what was to be remembered as one of the key events of the troubles, Bloody Sunday. What happened on that day was to drive even more men and youths into paramilitary groups. Thirteen people were killed and another thirteen were injured, one fatally, when soldiers of the Parachute Regiment and other units opened fire following a large illegal civil rights march in Londonderry city.

The chronology can be summed up like this: sectarian violence, despair, hope for peace, distrust of the peace process, sectarian violence... cycle repeats ad nauseum with a rotating cast of characters through the decades. If you want a frank, accurate and authoritative account you cannot do much better.... There could be no better guide through the intricacies of the Peace Process. This book...is likely to be the definitive account.... An important book.... It should be on every bookshelf. Irish Independent

Born in 1999, into a post-troubles heavily Protestant east Antrim, there was a lot of my upbringing that I never questioned or considered.

In May 1981 a British soldier shot Julie Livingstone in the head with a plastic bullet. He alleged he was shooting at rioters. She died the following day. She was 14. Ocr tesseract 5.0.0-1-g862e Ocr_detected_lang en Ocr_detected_lang_conf 1.0000 Ocr_detected_script Latin Ocr_detected_script_conf 1.0000 Ocr_module_version 0.0.15 Ocr_parameters -l eng Old_pallet IA-WL-1300122 Openlibrary_edition How did it end? The families of the 13 other hungerstrikers, the ones who hadn’t yet died, insisted they stop – they were terrified, they were out of their minds, they knew the British government didn’t care a hoot, and the prisoners eventually listened to their families and stopped. A last-minute breakthrough was achieved with the aid of the ingenious device of creating a new category of extra ministers. Faulkner would have a majority within the eleven-strong executive, which was to be made up of six Unionists, four SDLP and one Alliance. But four extra non-voting ministers were to be appointed, so that the full executive would consist of seven Unionists, six SDLP and two Alliance members. This piece of sleight-of-hand meant that Faulkner could claim he had a Unionist majority while non-Unionists could simultaneously claim he had not. It's worth noting here that the Suffragettes, in the 1910s, also went on prison hungerstrike. They were force-fed. The government decided they would not do that with the Irish prisoners. Indeed, Margaret Thatcher said :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. Republican prisoners were determined to fight to maintain their special political status. So they decided to refuse to wear prison uniform. Prison officers would beat these guys, and in retaliation, the IRA began systematically killing off-duty prison officers (ten in 1979 alone). The names of Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams were mere boogymen. To be conjured as insult on the teenage playground. “You fancy Gerry Adams!” “Would you rather kiss Gerry Adams or marry Ian Paisley?” 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.

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.’ Whitelaw was as unimpressed with the republicans as they were with him. He recorded in his memoirs: ‘The meeting was a non-event. The IRA leaders simply made impossible demands which I told them the British government would never concede. They were in fact still in a mood of defiance and determination to carry on until their absurd ultimatums were met.’ The very fact that the meeting took place, however, was of great psychological importance in both political and paramilitary circles, being regularly cited in support of the argument that Britain might someday not rule out doing a deal with violent groupings. While this scheme was politically coherent, two sets of statistics, concerning electoral support and the level of violence, help show just how formidable were the forces ranged against it. A majority of Unionist voters were against the proposition, while perhaps 30,000 or more of them were so opposed to accommodation that they joined loyalist paramilitary groups prepared to use force to resist what they saw as any further erosion of Protestant rights. There was a certain overlap of the political and paramilitary within the assembly itself, where half a dozen or more anti-deal Unionists had connections with shadowy loyalist groups. In the political centre only a small number of voters supported cross-community parties, the non-sectarian Alliance party being the most prominent, with 9 per cent of the vote. Extraordinarily well-balanced, sane, comprehensive and rich in sober understatement' Glasgow Herald In terms of providing an overview, the book does its job. But most of the time, it's dry reading. Furthermore, since I'm not familiar with Irish/British politics, the multitude of names, organizations, paramilitary groups, acronyms, and political positions are difficult to follow.The IRA wanted a united Ireland, the Unionists wanted to remain part of the UK, the mainstream Catholics just wanted to live as they pleased, the mainstream Protestants wanted to keep treating Catholics like dirt, and the British Army was just trying to keep it from boiling over. Catholic priest Father Edward Daly, who later became Bishop of Derry and will always be associated with Bloody Sunday, witnessed the death of a seventeen-year-old youth as both ran away from soldiers. He said he saw the youth laughing at the sight of a priest running: ‘The next thing he suddenly gasped and threw his hands up in the air and fell on his face. He asked me: "Am I going to die?" and I said no, but I administered the last rites. I can remember him holding my hand and squeezing it. We all wept. We got him to the top of the street. I knelt beside him and told him, "Look son, we’ve got to get you out", but he was dead. He was very youthful looking, just in his seventeenth year but he only looked about twelve.’ The shootings produced one of the lasting images of the troubles in photographs and television film of Father Daly waving a white handkerchief while helping carry a fatally wounded youth out of the killing zone.