Belfast | The Troubles Revisited

IN MANY WAYS, NORTHERN IRELAND, the small United Kingdom-member country on Ireland’s northeast coast, contains two countries: British Northern Ireland, populated mostly by Protestants who feel strongly connected to Great Britain, and Irish Northern Ireland, populated mostly by Catholics who feel a kinship to the Republic of Ireland, the rest of the island that gained independence from Britain in 1922.

Saint Patrick’s Day, the Republic of Ireland’s national holiday, celebrating the man who brought Catholicism to the island, makes this abundantly clear. Northern Ireland’s Catholics hit the streets of Belfast wearing green, Ireland’s national colour, in an act of cultural assertion. It has been 16 years since a ceasefire between Catholics and Protestants ended ‘the Troubles,’ the conflict that had polarised Belfast for the past 30-odd years. The 1998 ‘Good Friday Agreement’ officially ended the violence and effectively disarmed the Catholic paramilitary group, the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the militia that defended the Protestants. The political wings of these militias, which include the Catholic party Sinn Féin, once the political voice of the IRA, are now committed to peace and power-sharing in the Belfast assembly. Northern Ireland is a miracle of modern diplomacy and held up by its key brokers, the US, the UK and the Republic of Ireland, as an example of a successful peace process.

But this year, when the Saint Patrick’s Day parade winds its way through Belfast, some sectarian demons are likely to resurface. While the IRA has disarmed and its former leaders are key stewards of peace in Northern Ireland, small, breakaway groups called the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA, thought to number only in the hundreds, began a campaign of murder last year, targeting members of the British army and the Northern Irish constabulary. In March 2009, these groups killed two army personnel and one policeman. The sporadic attacks have continued, with police personnel and property targeted; most recently a car bomb paralysed a Catholic policeman in December 2009. The humanitarian loss shocked Northern Ireland, but more alarming was the symbolic import of the attacks.

The differences that divide Northern Ireland are religious, cultural and historical. They are rooted in the nexus of Britain’s counter-reformation and colonial project in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Eager to fully colonise her Irish subjects and ‘civilise’ them into ‘Britishness,’ Queen Elizabeth I set out on a campaign of cultural and religious suppression of the Irish. The native language, Gaelic, was banned and strict constraints were placed on the practicing of Catholicism.

Ireland, Britain’s closest neighbour, was arguably its most intractable colony, a highly resistant population that fomented numerous militant uprisings. Making little way in civilising the Irish, Queen Elizabeth I, who ruled in the 1500s, decided to try a new tack: planting her own Protestant subjects among the Irish in a bid to culturally dilute the island. In the North, she transplanted Scottish Protestants, who quickly multiplied. By 1921, when a restive Irish freedom movement negotiated independence, Britain insisted it keep Northern Ireland because of the zone’s Protestant majority.

Under British power, Catholic Irish were systematically discriminated against, a tendency that continued in Northern Ireland post-independence. Catholics were denied access to many public services, voting districts were gerrymandered to ensure Protestant political dominance and the police were overwhelmingly Protestant. A civil rights backlash by Catholics in the 1960s spiralled into fullscale sectarian war resulting in almost 4,000 deaths from 1968 to 1998.

Today, after only 16 years of peace, the 30 years of bloody violence are the backdrop to the recent murders and paramilitary activity. For people living in Northern Ireland, the significance is huge.

“It took me back to when I was growing up,” says David Power, 22, as he stood on the sidewalk watching last year’s Saint Patrick’s Day parade pass, a small Irish flag hanging limply from his hand. Power is a Catholic from Londonderry, a city that was particularly struck by violence during the Troubles. “These attacks have served to remind us all of what we don’t want to go back to. It shows us all how fragile the peace here really is, something I think we were beginning to take for granted.”

While people like Power are in shock from the attacks and the spectre of a return to the mass violence that they conjure, these violent developments came as no surprise to the intelligence community here, which has been monitoring breakaway terrorist activity since the peace process began. According to a security source in Northern Ireland, who spoke on condition of anonymity, the recent attacks are part of a much larger campaign being plotted by Catholic dissident groups like the Real IRA and Continuity IRA; plots that stretch back over a year. In that time, the source says, there have been over ten failed murder attempts of security personnel involving drive-by shootings, car bombs, booby traps and even homemade rocket propelled grenades.

So far, the Protestant community, including Protestant militant groups like the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF), are heeding their political leadership and resisting retaliation, but further dissident attacks by Catholic paramilitary groups, which intelligence sources say are imminent, will test this restraint. Armed Protestant splinter groups are beginning to emerge, one calling itself the Real UFF, which is claiming to have operations against Republican targets already underway. The worry is that if a tit-for-tat sectarian spat happens it could easily escalate into another large-scale war.

“I’m surprised there hasn’t been a [Protestant] backlash yet,” says the security source, adding that a reprisal would most likely be in the form of an assassination of a Republican leader. “Loyalist retaliation is the biggest concern right now in terms of this violence escalating [into a sectarian conflict].”

“It’s a real concern for our community,” says Daithi McKay, who represents Sinn Féin in Northern Ireland’s Legislative Assembly. “What we need now is more discussion with [Protestant] leaders to mitigate any possibility of attacks on the [Catholic] community.”

No organised backlash from the Protestant community has yet occurred, however the dissident attacks have stoked dormant sectarian hatreds in certain Belfast neighbourhoods and across Northern Ireland. The once familiar images of burnt-out cars and masked youths throwing rocks at the police are returning with increasing frequency. But, for now, the mainstream Catholic and Protestant leaders remain committed to peaceful democratic politics.

The question now is how far the dissident paramilitary groups are willing to go to weaken the diplomatic house of cards that has been so carefully constructed in Northern Ireland – and more importantly, how many hits can that house take.