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The basis of the Northern Ireland state for 50 years has been religious hatred. By deliberately fostering a loathing for Catholics among the Protestant working class, the big landowners, industrialists and their British backers have clung to popular support.
Protestants have been given marginal privileges to distract them from unemployment and slum housing. They have been organised into bodies like the Orange Order, which every few years launches murderous attacks upon Catholic areas. Paul Foot & Brian Trench & Jimmy Grealy & Chris Harman, article August 1971, ‘Army Reign of Terror’
In the streets a score or more of people have been killed, most of them from the nationalist section of the population. Already, thousands of people are streaming in terror out of Belfast into primitive refugee camps in Southern Ireland.
The British government claims that it has had to introduce internment – imprisonment without trial – in order to ‘clear out the murderers’. The British press has backed up Heath and [Reginald] Maudling by continual talk of ‘terrorists’.
Most of the killing, however, has been carried out not by the IRA but by the British army and the bigoted thugs in the Orange Order. ibid.
The reality of human existence in Ireland over the last few centuries has been dominated by the British Empire. Ireland is the oldest colony in that empire. Marx summed up the nature of that long imperial rule in a single sentence:
‘England has never ruled Ireland in any other way, and cannot rule it in any other way, except by the most hideous reign of terror and the most revolting corruption’. Four hundred years ago Ireland was ‘planted’ with colonists loyal to the British crown. Under the cover of the Protestant religion, armed and equipped by the most powerful force on earth, these colonists made Ireland safe for British landlords. The Irish population was kept in order by consistent and ruthless violence. Paul Foot, article July 1988, ‘Dividing Ireland’
I was only a working-class boy from a Nationalist ghetto. But it is repression that creates the revolutionary spirit of freedom. Bobby Sands
They won’t break me because the desire for freedom, and the freedom of the Irish people, is in my heart. The day will dawn when all the people of Ireland will have the desire for freedom to show. It is then that we will see the rising of the moon. Bobby Sands
Self-government is our right, a thing born in us at birth, a thing no more to be doled out to us, or withheld from us, by another people than the right to life itself – than the right to feel the sun, or smell the flowers, or to love our kind. Robert Casement, Irish nationalist, executed for treason 1916
When all your right become only an accumulated wrong; where men must beg with bated breath for leave to subsist in their own land, to think their own thoughts, to sing their own songs, to garner the fruits of their own labours ... then surely it is a braver, a saner and truer thing, to be a rebel in act and deed against such circumstances as these than tamely to accept it as the natural lot of men. Robert Casement, statement at Old Bailey trial
It was a brutal and audacious bank robbery using the maximum threat of violence and death. It sent shockwaves around the world just days before Christmas in 2004: the theft of £26.5 took place from the headquarters of the Northern Bank in Belfast, Northern Ireland. Britain’s Biggest Heists s2e4: The Northern Bank Robbery, Sky 2011
Two employees and their families were abducted and held hostage by a criminal gang who threatened them with violence and death. ibid.
Following the raid, the Northern Bank announced that it would take the drastic step to withdraw all its bank notes. ibid.
Too many things point it having been the IRA. One is the manner of taking people hostage ... Second is the scale of the thing. Professor Richard English, author The History of the IRA
Heath was deeply troubled. Unemployment went against everything he believed in. It marked the beginning of a terrible few weeks. On 30th January 1972 thirteen men were shot dead on the streets of Derry by the British army: Bloody Sunday. Heath vs. Wilson: The 10 Year Duel, BBC 2012
Nowhere in Britain was safe from the violence that had engulfed Northern Ireland. Dominic Sandbrook, The 70s: Doomwatch 73-74, BBC 2012
The idea of two nations in Ireland is revolting and hateful. The idea of our agreeing to the partition of our nation is unthinkable. John Redmond, Nationalist leader 11th April 1912
No man has a right to fix the boundary of the march of a nation; no man has a right to say to his country – thus far shalt thou go and no further. Charles Stewart Parnell, speech Cork 21st January 1885
The Irish leader who would connive in the name of Home Rule at the acceptance of any measure which alienated for a day – for an hour – for one moment of time – a square inch of the soil of Ireland would act the part of a traitor and would deserve a traitor’s fate. Arthur Griffith, 1871-1922
Don’t you realize that, if you sign this thing, you will split Ireland from top to bottom? Cathal Brugha, to Eamon de Valera
Such a scheme as that agreed to by Redmond and Devlin, the betrayal of the national democracy of industrial Ulster, would mean a carnival of reaction North and South, would set back the wheels of progress, would destroy the oncoming unity of the Irish Labour movement and paralyse all advanced movements whilst it endured. To it Labour should give the bitterest opposition, against it Labour in Ulster should fight even to the death, if necessary. James Connolly
I would give the South anything, or almost anything, but I would not enforce anything on the North. Bonar Law
In January 1919 Sinn Fein declared Ireland’s independence and formed its own parliament, the Doyle. This was an assault on the Empire as well as the United Kingdom. Michael Collins set up an elite team of IRA assassins known as the twelve Apostles. They efficiently targeted British troops and collaborators. The British responded with a MI5 team of British agents, known as the Cairo Gang. In November 1919 Collins set out to destroy them. At eight one Sunday morning the twelve Apostles burst into eight houses and shot fourteen British agents dead ... Now the violence spread in all directions. Sinn Fein and the Doyle were outlawed. British forces stormed through Ireland. After eighteen months of terror Eamon de Valera and Lloyd George agreed to a truce. Talks began in October 1921. De Valera stayed at home and ordered Collins to join the Irish delegation in London. If he came back with less than Sinn Fein’s full demands, Collins knew he’d be the scapegoat. As the negotiations began, he said to a fellow Republican, ‘You might say the trap is sprung.’ The talks moved towards a compromise, with Ireland self-governing but still inside the British Empire, and with the six predominantly Protestant northern counties free to choose to remain within the United Kingdom. After nearly two months the Irish delegation was still agonising over the deal. With a theatrical flourish Lloyd George arrived brandishing two envelopes: one contained the agreements and the other the refusal to come to terms. ‘If I send this letter,’ he said, ‘it’s war. And war within three days. Will you give peace or war to your country? We must have your answer by ten p.m. tonight.’ One by one the Irish representatives signed the agreements. Michael Collins believed he was giving Ireland something it had wanted for seven hundred years. But that night in his lodgings he wrote, ‘This morning I have signed my death warrant’. Andrew Marr, The Making of Modern Britain, BBC 2009
Britain was confronted by the single most violent act on British soil since the war. After the arrival of British troops in Northern Ireland in 1969 there had been increasing violence in the province. When Edward Heath introduced Internment without trial for suspected terrorists, tension reached boiling point. On the 30th January 1972 a protest march was planned by the nationalist Catholic community of Londonderry or Derry ... From behind the barricades the orders went out to the Paras, Go and get ’em, and good luck ... And then it started: in barely thirty minutes, thirteen civilians were dead ... Five of them were shot in the back ... The events around Bloody Sunday remain hotly disputed territory ... Before Bloody Sunday the IRA was comparatively puny and after it the violence spread in all directions. Within months an IRA bombing campaign was terrorising the mainland. ibid.