These people are known as republicans. Within the Protestant community, there were people who took up the gun to defend the link with Britain. These people are known as loyalists. Thousands more were injured. Thousands were traumatized by violence. Thousands were sent to prison. However by the s there was recognition that violence would not deliver a solution to the conflict and that any effort to find a political answer would only succeed if republican and loyalist paramilitaries were given a voice at the negotiating table.
This period has seen the establishment of political negotiations, ceasefires by the main republican and loyalist paramilitary organizations and fundamental reform of aspects of our system of governance in order to command the respect and allegiance of all our citizens. It resulted in a resentful Catholic minority within Northern Ireland. Students often misunderstand this; they think of Northern Ireland as the Protestant-majority part of Ireland.
And while it is the Protestant-majority part of Ireland, at the time of the division, about a third of the Northern Irish were Catholic. While Northern Ireland had a clear Protestant majority when it was established, it also had a substantial Catholic minority—larger than many students realize, says Weaver.
The Ulster Unionist Party in Northern Ireland wrote into law rampant discrimination against Catholics—in housing, employment, education, and job opportunities. Meanwhile, the Irish Republic was also effectively a one-party state, strongly committed to cultural nationalism, with a lot of influence from the Roman Catholic Church, including a heavy infusion of doctrinaire Catholicism in the constitution.
That was bound to heighten the resistance of Ulster Protestants to inclusion within anything like a united Ireland. It was really a situation that was bound to explode at some point.
And, indeed, when the civil rights movement in the s came along, it did, with a year period of violence, the Troubles. It defies the whole spirit of the Good Friday Agreement , the power-sharing agreement that ended the Troubles, in , and tended to diminish the distinctions between north and south.
Brexit has also activated a historic sense of betrayal on the part of the Northern Irish against Britain. This is the main cause of the recent surge in unionist protest in Belfast. A Northern Irish unionist clashes with police in Belfast in April near a peace wall separating the nationalist and loyalist communities.
Unionist protest has surged due to fear that Brexit will strand Northern Ireland on the other side of a customs border in the Irish Sea, Weaver says. This cult exists on both sides of the confessional and political divide in Ireland. The strong referendum in favor of the Good Friday Agreement on both sides of the border in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, suggested that there was a political will, if not toward unification, at least toward reconciliation. There are a lot of reasons that still make me think Ireland will eventually reunite.
The demographics have changed. Protestants are no longer a clear majority in Northern Ireland. Recent census data shows that the population of Ireland is nearly split between Protestants and Catholics, with a growing percentage identifying with neither. The Catholic population, meanwhile, is growing relative to the Protestant population.
More importantly, from the s onward, we see a liberalization in the Irish Republic, with a lessening hold of the Catholic Church on Irish culture, education, and the state. There has been a real move toward liberalization and secularization to align the Irish Republic with the rest of Europe, so they are no longer a kind of quasi-theocratic outlier, but instead a place that looks more like the rest of Europe, along with economic progress.
The first serious English attempts to settle Ireland began in the s, but were not hugely successful. The next settlements were in the province of Ulster, in the north of Ireland, in the s. The settlements were called Plantations.
They 'planted' Protestant settlers in Ulster who were loyal to the British monarch. The rest of Ireland remained Catholic and generally opposed to British rule. There were many bloody wars and rebellions against British rule in the s and s. There were also smaller scale rebellions in the s, s and s.
Most of these rebellions were organised and led by the Irish Republican Brotherhood. They were usually known as Fenians, after a mythical Irish army in the past. Despite this, their rebellions all failed. The British government managed to ignore the Home Rule issue until the early s. It passed a number of measures that improved conditions for ordinary Irish farmers and helped them to buy their own farms which most of them rented. Home Rule did not become a big issue again until There was an election that year.
There was just as much resistance to Home Rule this time as there had been in the s and s. Redmond believed they were bluffing and that the British government should force them to accept Home Rule. Nationalists in Ireland then formed their own army - the National Volunteers often called Irish Volunteers.
It looked as though there would be a civil war in Ireland by , but then a bigger war came along. Both sides dropped their claims. Redmond encouraged the National Volunteers to serve in the British Army.
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