Politics: Northern Ireland 1968–98

Abstract

The story of the huge amount of political activity, overt and covert, national and international, bilateral and multilateral, republican and nationalist, conventional and paramilitary, which led to the Good Friday Agreement, via the Lynch/Wilson talks of 1968, Sunningdale, the Northern Ireland Assembly, the Anglo-Irish Agreement, the Mitchell Principles and the Downing Street Declaration has been told well and often.¹ So has the story of the social and political forces in Ireland which culminated in Partition in 1921: centuries-old wars of religion resulting in three times as many Catholics as Protestants in Ireland as a whole, and half as many in the North: a classic double minority which had defied resolution for several hundred years.² A short civil war between the pro-and anti-Treaty factions in the Free State from which the Irish Republic’s present-day parties are descended; de jure claim to sovereignty over the whole island; de facto acceptance of the border; groups prepared to use violence to achieve a united Ireland when the time was ripe, and groups prepared to use violence to prevent them and maintain the union with Britain.³