Northern Ireland Essay ⋆ Political Science Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

When Ireland gained independence from the United Kingdom in 1921 after two years of violent “troubles,” six counties in the northern province of Ulster remained within the United Kingdom. Northern Ireland, with a population of around one and one-half million, was established to satisfy the demands of a Protestant Unionist minority in Ireland that wished to remain within the United Kingdom, but it included a sizeable Catholic and Irish nationalist minority composing one third of the population. The new entity enjoyed a high level of autonomy, and the Northern Ireland Parliament and government at Stormont, on the outskirts of Belfast, was insulated to a large degree from “interference” by the British Parliament. For the next fifty years, the Ulster Unionist Party, a party of Protestant unity, won every election and formed every government in Northern Ireland, while the Catholic minority was almost completely excluded from the exercise of power at all levels.

Violent Conflict

In the late 1960s, a civil rights movement that enjoyed strong support in the minority community presented an innovative challenge to government control. A police force closely associated with the Unionist party and dominated by the Protestant community came into increasing conflict with protestors and rioters on the streets. Sectarian rioting compounded the conflict, and by August 1969 the breakdown of order was so severe that British troops were deployed on the streets. In 1970 the newly formed Provisional Irish Republican Army, recruiting among a freshly radicalized minority, launched a campaign of violence aimed at ending British sovereignty and reuniting Ireland. By 1972 violence had escalated dramatically, and in March 1972 the British government instituted “direct rule,” suspending the Parliament and government of Northern Ireland.

A further two decades of low-intensity conflict followed, during which almost 3,500 people were killed, more than half of them by Irish Republican groups, mainly the Irish Republican Army (IRA), and almost a quarter by Ulster loyalist groups that sought to illegally augment state efforts against the IRA. Repeated initiatives to end direct rule and reestablish a stable form of regional autonomy that guaranteed participation in government to both Protestant and Catholic communities failed.

The Peace Process

The IRA ceasefire of 1994, followed by a loyalist ceasefire, opened the way for inclusive negotiations on a political settlement involving the British and Irish governments with significant international support from the United States and the European Union. The 1998 Belfast Agreement, or Good Friday Agreement, established consociational structures for governing Northern Ireland and was accompanied by conflict resolution measures, including the early release of prisoners and radical reform of policing. The agreement was endorsed in separate referenda in Northern Ireland and in the Republic of Ireland, thereby addressing long-standing Irish nationalist demands that the Irish people as a whole should decide the future of the island. The agreement also established new structures to manage relations between the two Irish jurisdictions and relations between Ireland and Great Britain.

Contemporary Issues

The current political settlement brings together Irish republicans, including former IRA activists, with their most outspoken Ulster loyalist opponents in a mandatory coalition that guarantees seats at the cabinet table to all significant parties. High levels of discontent with this compromise among a large section of the Protestant majority, and a resurgence of violence by “dissident” Irish republicans seeking to restart a campaign, pose ongoing challenges to the settlement.

The consociational arrangements have been criticized for embedding sectarianism in the structures of government and rewarding extremism, but it has also been argued that these agreements have in fact drawn the extremes toward the center and generated cross-community cooperation, at least at the elite level.

As a settlement that determinedly internationalizes Northern Ireland by creating interlinking internal structures and cross-border institutions within Ireland, the new structures of government are an innovative attempt to resolve an ethno national conflict by simultaneously softening and securing a contested international border within a European Union context, in which borders between members states have shed many of the functions and meanings they used to have. It provides an example of conflict resolution through negotiation rather than military victory that has been frequently cited by actors and analysts in other conflict situations in recent years.

Bibliography:

Bew, Paul. The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday Agreement. Dublin, Ireland: Liffey Press, 2007.
Bew, Paul, Peter Gibbon, and Henry Patterson. Northern Ireland 1921–2001: Political Forces and Social Classes. London: Serif, 2002.
Conflict Archive on the Internet. cain.ulst.ac.uk.
Cox, Michael, Adrian Guelke, and Fiona Stephen. A Farewell to Arms? Beyond the Good Friday Agreement. 2nd ed. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2006.
Dixon, P. “Why the Good Friday Agreement in Northern Ireland Is Not Consociational.” Political Quarterly 76, no. 3 (2005): 357–367.
Horowitz, D. L. “Explaining the Northern Ireland Agreement: The Sources of an Unlikely Constitutional Consensus.” British Journal of Political Science 32, no. 2 (2002): 193–220.
Lijphart, A. “Constitutional Design for Divided Societies.” Journal of Democracy 15, no. 2 (2004): 96–109.
McGarry, John, and Brendan O’Leary. Explaining Northern Ireland: Broken Images. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
The Northern Ireland Conflict: Consociational Engagements. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.
O’Leary, Brendan, and John McGarry. The Politics of Antagonism: Understanding Northern Ireland. Conflict and Change in Britain Series—a New Audit. London Athlone Press, 1993.
Patterson, Henry. Ireland since 1939. London: Penguin, 2006.

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