OK here we go. It's impossible to talk about Northern Ireland without letting your own opinions cloud it, so I'm not going to try too hard to stay neutral. Inevitably I'll make someone mad, it's just one of those topics that you can't be objective about, and if you disagree, other opinions are available.
I'm not going to go into the history of Protestantism vs Catholicism or what beliefs they differ on. If you care at all about this topic you probably know already. But in order to explain how Norn Irn (as the locals call it) became such a clusterfuck, we're going to have to go a long way back, all the way back to 1642 and the outbreak of the English Civil War.
The English Civil War was fought between King Charles 1st and England's Parliament. Charles had raised a series of incredibly unpopular taxes to pay for yet more fruitless wars against the French, and when Parliament refused to pass any more taxation laws Charles tried to abolish it. The result was the bloodiest war ever fought on English soil. By the time Parliament won in 1651, nearly 250,000 people were dead, including Charles himself who was beheaded for Treason.
One of Parliament's key generals was a man called Oliver Cromwell. Cromwell was a joyless, sadistic Puritan religious fanatic with a near-psychotic hatred of Catholics. Naturally, he was the man chosen to lead Parliament's campaign in Ireland, at that point an English colony. Cromwell decided to take the opportunity to, erm, deal with the Catholic question while he was at it. Cromwell's actions in Ireland were not so much a military campaign as a psychopathic genocide, burning, looting and slaughtering his way through the countryside, ignoring military targets to take out his hatred for the Catholic locals.
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This portrait of Cromwell is the origin of the phrase "warts and all". Cromwell, like any good fun-hating puritan,
insisted that his portrait painters capture his Lemmy-esque face lumps.
After the war, for the next seven years England (later Scotland as well) became a Republic for the only time in its history (at this point in time England and Scotland were still separate countries but shared the same monarchy) under Cromwell, who styled himself "Lord Protector" like something out of a shitty YA novel. Cromwell's fanatical Christian Taliban literally cancelled Christmas, and banned dancing and sport as being Satanic. He also took the opportunity to kick the Irish around whenever he got the opportunity.
By the time of his death he was so hated by Catholic and Protestant alike that not only did Parliament decide to restore the Monarchy, they dug up Cromwell's corpse, put it on trial for treason, decapitated it, and put his head on a spike in London for everyone to cheer. Charles 1st's son Charles II returned from exile and crowned king of England, Scotland and Ireland, and everything seem set to calm down. But instead things got worse.
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Whilst all you inbred continentals had your deformed Habsburgs, Charles II had the best hair
in Christendom and fathered almost 30 children, none with his wife. Absolute fucking Chad.
It soon emerged that Charles II's younger brother and heir James (Charles II had many children, but no legitimate ones) was a closet Catholic, and This Would Not Do. England's last Catholic Monarch, "Bloody" Mary Tudor, had tried to forcibly convert England back to Catholicism by burning Protestants at the stake and persuading the Spanish to try to invade her own country, which as I'm sure you can imagine did not go over well (imagine a Democrat president inviting Putin to invade to kill Republicans, which would be a rough equivalent). Some attempted to pass a law barring James from the succession, but failed. After his ascension to the throne as James II of England and James VII of Scotland, all hell broke loose as most Protestants refused to acknowledge him as King, and it got worse when he had a son, raising the possibility of an entire dynasty of Catholics (whereas the Irish thought this was a great idea, obviously).
The response was for many prominent Protestants to put their weight behind the next Protestant in line to the throne, James' son-in-law and Dutch Prince William of Orange. Matters reached a head and William invaded with an army of mercenaries and Protestant defectors, deposing James in a bloodless coup and sending him into exile. William was crowned as William III of England and William II of Scotland, but the Catholics weren't done yet. James landed a force in Ireland in 1689, aiming to recruit a Catholic army and seize control of Ireland, and then press his claim to the English and Scottish thrones as well. William intercepted him though, and crushed James' army at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690, possibly the most significant battle in Irish history. This battle established that Catholic Ireland would be ruled by Protestants for the next 250 years. Not long afterwards the Act of Union was passed that created the UK, including all of Ireland (which didn't get a say).
Since the beginning of the 17th century, successive governments had pursued a policy of Protestantising Ireland by settling Scottish Protestants there in an attempt to replace the local population (good thing that kind of thing doesn't happen any more, eh?). It was only really successful in the northern Duchy of Ulster, and even then the ratio of Protestants to Catholics remained about 50/50, as it does to this day. During this time, British persecution of the Irish continued, with outrageous taxes and forced agricultural monoculture that resulted in the devastating Irish Potato Famine when the only crop the Irish were allowed, by law, to eat was destroyed by blight. The Irish took this until 1916 when a violent insurrection broke out, led by a group calling themselves the Irish Republican Army, trying to secure Irish independence by force.
In 1922 the British Government agreed, and the Irish Republic (or Eire in the native Gaelic) was born. But the British held on to half-Protestant Ulster to protect the Protestants living there who wished to remain British. As part of the settlement, the IRA was formally disbanded.
Except of course it wasn't.
The IRA were not only unhappy with Ulster remaining part of the UK, they were also unhappy that Eire allowed it to happen and that the new Irish government were generally cool with the British government (despite all the mayhem, the governments and peoples of the Republic and the UK were in general and remain on surprisingly good terms. Go to any pub in London and you'll find mixed groups of Protestant Englishmen and Catholic Irishmen drinking together and agreeing that the real enemy are the fucking French*). This is something that both the British AND the Americans forget - the IRA were devoted to not only driving the remaining British out of Ireland, they were also dedicated to overthrowing the Irish government as well for not hating Protestants or the British enough for their liking.
*The English hate the French because they have been at war with them for almost 400 of the last 1000 years. The Irish hate the French because of something that happened in the football in 2009, and they probably hate them more than the English at this point. Football is Serious Business.
Things kicked off again in the late 1960s for reasons that nobody seems to be able to agree on, but by the early 1970s Northern Ireland was a warzone. Around this time the British government began to crack down on the IRA and the disorder in general, and not in a gentle, targeted or reasonable manner. There were a series of events where Catholic civilians were killed, most notably "Bloody Sunday", on the 30th January 1972. Exactly what happened that day is to say the least disputed, but during a protest rally against the British both the British army and the IRA were present, and at some point *someone* opened fire. By the end of proceedings 14 unarmed Catholic civilians were dead.
The IRA switched tactics. Their earlier campaigns had targeted soldiers, police and pro-British ("Loyalist") paramilitary groups. But now the IRA wanted to kill civilians, and they did, by the hundred.
You might infer from the beginning of this article that I sympathise with the IRA's cause. And to a large extent I do, as do many regular Brits, but I do not at all sympathise with what the IRA did, and in the view of the vast majority of British people any legitimate grievances they had were outweighed by the sheer sadistic savagery of the IRA's methods. Giving in, in the minds of the British, would have been an endorsement of the IRA's tactics and only result in escalating demands and more atrocities. And they
were atrocities. Many Americans are not aware of the true horror of the IRA's terror campaign against innocent civilians with no say in the conflict they were caught up in. For all the IRA knew, the civilians they killed in bomb and gun attacks on crowded pubs, railway stations, hotels and town centres may have been sympathetic to their cause, or even Irish Catholics like themselves, but they didn't care and killed indiscriminately.
One of the IRA's favourite party tricks was the "Proxy Bomb". This involved kidnapping a random Protestant's family, handcuffing him to the steering wheel of a car rigged with explosives, and forcing him to drive to an often civilian target and blow himself up on pain of having his entire family killed if he didn't. That isn't the action of an "Army", or "Freedom Fighters". That's the action of hate-fuelled sadists high on human suffering. This is some Saw movie shit.
The IRA were not alone in their atrocities of course. The Loyalist paramilitaries (notably the UDA and UVF) were not as well funded or armed as the IRA, but they had the tacit backing of the British Police and Army, who fed them information about Republicans the British wanted out of the way and used them as extrajudicial kill squads for IRA members (or alleged IRA members) they didn't have the evidence to convict or the ability to capture (or, on occasion, people unconnected to Republicanism that they just had a grudge against). The Loyalists, filled with just as much hate as the Republicans, exploited this relationship to have the authorities often turn a blind eye to their own, frequent, massacres of Catholic civilians or lower-level criminal activity like robbery, smuggling and extortion.
Why were the IRA better funded than the Loyalists? Because they were funded by Americans. The "Noraid" system funnelled funds from sympathetic Americans to the IRA, which they used to buy weapons from Libya's Colonel Gaddafi. Gaddafi had a policy of indiscriminately arming terrorists and rebels anywhere in the world, regardless of cause, due to his batshit insane "Third Universal Theory" ideology that claimed that fighting imperialism necessitated aiding any and all rebel groups, even those with diametrically opposed aims. In 1986, the US bombed Tripoli on the grounds that Gaddafi was "arming terrorists", at the same time that Americans were paying him to do exactly that. If that doesn't sum up US foreign policy in the 80's, I don't know what does. Noraid continued even after the formal dissolution of the IRA, funding dissident splinter groups unhappy with the idea of negotiating with the British in any way. These splinter groups contained some of the most insane and sadistic Republicans, who wanted killing without end and without a clear aim, and these groups, without any political leadership to restrain them, committed some of the very worst atrocities of the Troubles.
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The Republican dissident group the "Real IRA" planted a bomb in the red car in the foreground.
19 seconds after this photograph was taken, every man, woman and child you see in it, including the photographer, was dead.
This went on right up until the 11th September 2001, when all of a sudden the Americans decided that funding crackpot religious fundamentalist terrorists who murder civilians wasn't so glamorous any more. No idea why that was.
We have not forgotten any of the above, by the way.
The IRA held several ceasefires during the 1990s but broke them with devastating bomb attacks on London because the British wanted them to decommission their weapons before they would negotiate with them. It took the intervention of the Clinton administration and a Labour government in London before negotiations got anywhere, and one of the great unsung heroes of British politics in Mo Mowlam to put together an arrangement that all sides were happy with. In the end it was the Republicans that blinked first, and they agreed to a permanent ceasefire in 1997 that enabled progress to be made, probably under pressure from their American paymasters.
Wikipedia says that the Troubles were a political conflict, but that's bollocks. You don't do the kinds of things that those people were doing to each other because you disagree about what flag should be flying over the town hall. The Northern Ireland conflict is a centuries old ethnic and religious conflict. It's obvious why the powers that be want it to be thought of as political, because admitting it being about one set of immigrants deliberately trying to displace the natives and the resulting complete inability for two ethnic groups to live with each other without bloodshed has ... unwanted implications in Current Year.
Then again, as an outsider, it is kind of mystifying that these people spent 500 years tearing each other apart due to a disagreement about whether Jesus is, or is not, made out of bread. Thousands of my countrymen died because you lot couldn't calm the fuck down about your stupid medieval slapfight. Fuck the lot of you. Tow Ulster into the Atlantic and just fucking sink it. Or give it to the Americans if they think they know all the fucking answers.
NornIrn Politics today
Anyway, on the rare occasions that someone hasn't stormed out because someone brought the wrong biscuits to a meeting, the four main parties who share power in the Northern Ireland assembly are as follows. The parties who stand for election in the mainland* UK do not stand for election in Northern Ireland because there wouldn't be any point and someone would probably get mad enough about it set fire to someone's car.
*For some reason, some in Ulster get their Jimmies seriously rustled if you refer to Great Britain as the "mainland" in the context of Northern Ireland. I don't know why and don't really care but if you're triggered by this you can either explain why or go fuck yourself, either is fine.
The Social Democratic Labour Party (SDLP)
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I couldn't find an interesting picture of them. I don't think there are any.
This is the "reasonable" pro-unification Catholic party, roughly equivalent to the British Labour party in policy outlook. They're a dull, serious bunch who always sought a peaceful solution to Irish reunification. There was much interest in 2010 when their leader wore a poppy to a Remembrance Day memorial ceremony (Remembrance Day is closely equivalent to Memorial Day in the US and is a pretty big deal over here. The Poppy is a reference to the poppy fields of Belgium in WWI, and became a symbol of the blood unnecessarily spilled in history's stupidest war. But some lefty types get BIG MAD about it because they think it glorifies imperialism blah blah blah). That this was seen as a Big Deal shows a) how petty NornIrn politics get and b) how dull the SDLP are.
Sinn Fein
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Gerry Adams (right) with future Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
Gerry's mortar bombs got much closer to Downing Street than Jeremy ever did.
These guys are the more spicy Republicans, and spent three decades denying that they controlled the IRA, then somehow enforced the IRA's disarmament, but they definitely weren't in charge of them, OK? Post-peace process, and with their more objectionable and terrorist-linked leaders like Gerry Adams* and Martin McGuinness gone, they're doing very well electorally these days at the expense of the SDLP. On the regular occasions that the Assembly falls apart, it's either because Sinn Fein have walked out or because someone else has walked out in protest at something Sinn Fein said or did.
Sinn Fein win several seats in the national parliament each election, but refuse to take them up because doing so would involve taking an oath to the Queen, whose father-in-law they blew up on his fishing boat, killing his wife, his daughter and his two young grandchildren in the process. This stand, if principled, has effectively handed several seats to the Tories every election, because the Tories can count on the Unionist parties to back them up when things get tight, often resulting in legislation being passed that was directly against Sinn Fein's interests.
Policy wise, these guys are hard, hard Left.
*Fun Gerry Adams fact: In the 80s, the Thatcher government passed a law banning all British broadcasters from broadcasting Gerry Adams' voice on TV or radio, showing that it wasn't just the Ulster factions who could be pointlessly petty. This backfired when broadcasters simply overdubbed his voice. The voice actors they used were generally articulate and charismatic, and this gave everyone the impression that Gerry Adams was some kind of master orator, and when the restrictions were lifted many were surprised to discover that he was just a hairy little terrorist with a reedy, petulant voice.
These are the "reasonable" Unionists, without any confirmed links to murder squads. They swap militancy for incompetence, and everything they touch falls apart. They're not as reasonable as the SDLP though, and their antediluvian religious views are on full display to everyone. Currently effectively without a leader after Arlene Foster agreed to resign over her role in the Green Energy Subsidy scandal (see my last post) after a long period of trying to brazen it out. She hasn't formally left her post yet either, insisting that a new leader be elected first, and with that process taking forever due to the usual petty slapfighting so common in Ulster politics, she will probably cling to power a bit longer.
The UUP are in a semi-permanent unofficial voting pact with the Conservatives, whose platforms they broadly share, though the Tories' softening on issues like gay marriage and abortion under David Cameron did poison the relationship a bit. Many accuse the UUP of using their kingmaker power over minority Tory governments to extort concessions from them, and they're probably right about that. Though not these days, as such is the scandal and ineptitude that follows them around that they got wiped out in terms of Westminster seats in 2019 after a long period of decline.
No! Never! Not an inch! No surrender to papists! Yep, these are the spicy Unionists, though like their Republican counterparts in Sinn Fein, they have mellowed a bit since things calmed down, to their electoral benefit, especially given the UUP's current problems.
Back in the day, though, they were led by Presbyterian Preacher and purple-faced human foghorn Dr Ian Paisley, whose utter refusal to negotiate with anyone about everything and his insistence on calling the Pope "His Satanic Majesty" made him either a folk hero or the very worst man in Northern Ireland depending on your perspective, but his barking "No!" (Pronounced "Nye!" in the local accent) was one of the biggest political memes of the 1980s - you can tell the age of a Brit by whether or not they can bust out an impression of him.
Even the good Doctor mellowed in the end and participated in the peace process. The DUP was linked to Loyalist terror groups like the UDA and UVF, but unlike Sinn Fein's claims not to control the IRA, it was generally accepted that the DUP were not the masters of the Loyalists - if only because it seemed that they couldn't run a bath, let alone a terrorist cell. Policy wise, as you would expect, they're probably the most right-wing mainstream party in the UK.
The DUP were, however (and still are) closely related to the Orange Order, a nebulous religious-political organisation dedicated to the personal cult of William of Orange, who every year on the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne go on a good old march that takes them through a number of extremely Republican areas of Ulster. Whether this is a proud exercise of traditional rights or a cynical attempt to piss off the Catholics as much as possible is up for debate, but a riot is the usual result either way.
You may notice that all the Republican parties are left-wing, and all the Unionist parties are right-wing. What happens if you're a right-wing Catholic, or a left-wing Protestant? Well, what happens is that a nice man in a balaclava explains your options to you by shooting you in the kneecaps.
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Fuck, that was heavy. For the next post (whenever I get to it), let's handle a less sensitive topic - immigration.
