Direct Rule and Power Sharing,1972–74

Abstract

The prorogation of the Stormont parliament and the introduction of direct rule from London in March 1972 transformed the political context in Northern Ireland and contributed to the further radicalisation of the North’s politics. Westminster’s intervention in removing Northern Ireland state structures established the essential factors that framed the long-term marginalisation of the North’s politics and its protracted political impasse. It profoundly influenced the mobilisation of embedded ethnic identities, the entrenchment of political policy-making and policy direction and the polarisation of communal relations. It was the very lack of long-term planning and the absence of an articulate vision of what would replace the Northern Irish state apparatus that was instrumental in that mobilisation as both nationalist and unionist actors reacted to perceptions of changing opportunities and new threats to their status. Those reactions quickly radicalised each community, whose knock-on effects tied politicians to specific agendas and, in the process, entrenched communal division.