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Divisions between north and south Ireland were prevalent since the 1920s. Yet, until the 1970s, nobody in public life in the Republic of Ireland argued that partition was justified. This book examines in detail the impact of the Northern Irish Troubles on southern Irish society during the period 1968-79. It begins with the aftermath of the civil rights march in Derry in October 1968 and traces the reaction to the events until the autumn of 1972. The impact of August 1969, the aftermath of internment and the response to Bloody Sunday are examined. The book looks at violence south of the border, particularly bombings and shootings and their human cost, and examines state security, censorship and the popular protests associated with these issues. A general outlook at the changing attitudes to refugees and northern nationalists is provided before describing the impact of the conflict on southern Protestants. The controversies concerning the Irish Republican Army and their activities are highlighted. The book looks at the question of revisionism and how debates about history were played out in academia as well as at a popular level. A variety of social and cultural responses to the conflict are examined, including attitudes to Britain and northern Unionists. For many southerners, Ulster was practically a foreign country and Northern Ireland did not seem very Irish. By 1979, the prospect of an end to the conflict seemed dim.
local parliament of ‘limited jurisdiction’ in the North and an all-Ireland parliament ‘in which all parts of the country would be represented’.19 It was thus only in the imagined future of an agreed federal settlement that northern nationalist representatives could claim their seats in an all-Ireland parliament. However, while McBride’s proposal became increasingly speculative the whole issue of taking seats in Dublin was one that was 98 Deteriorating relations with Dublin, 1950–55 becoming progressively more significant to the IAPL. At its annual convention in May
split. Yet, until the 1970s, nobody in public life in the Republic of Ireland argued that partition was justified.15 It was routinely denounced both as a crime against the nation’s territorial integrity and ‘our people’ in the Six Counties. Sympathy with northern Catholics and hostility to Ulster Unionists was a given. Emotionally and politically the south claimed to want a united Ireland. Yet, faced with the reality of war, the Republic seemed to recoil. This further alienated Northern nationalists, who already felt they had been abandoned for the previous 50 years
integration into the United Kingdom; independence; and majoritarian devolution)’.24 Indeed, unionists could not expect southern Irish voters to endorse these preferences, which offered little to nothing for northern nationalists. Thus, whilst Tonge is right to suggest that the Irish electorate could not, alone, bring any change to Northern Ireland’s status as part of UK, neither could unionists, alone, decide the constitutional future of the region. In this regard, the dual-referenda mechanism provided an effective guarantee to northern nationalists. It meant that unionists
that ‘Northerners on all sides tend to be extreme and unreasonable’; 59% also believed that ‘Catholics in Northern Ireland have more in common with Northern Protestants than they have with Catholics in the Republic’.4 From an early stage, Liam de Paor noted a widespread perception that ‘they were all bigots in the North (and) we are better off without them’.5 Many 118 The impact of the Troubles 1968–79 northern nationalists also saw the Republic as at best indiffferent and perhaps even hostile. Dónall Mac Amhlaigh reported in 1972 how ‘northern Catholics who have
might, the report argued, be capable of playing a role in the border regions: ‘By entirely excluding this possibility, Cruise O’Brien is supporting the claim of the IRA to be [the] Catholic community’s safest line of defence.’ Hemmed in between a British Army that viewed them as an enemy to be confronted and an Irish Government that characterised them as a burden that could not be helped, northern nationalists would have to look to themselves. While the collapse of the power-sharing executive had left the Government ‘depressed and dispirited’, and it was clear that
This book considers Northern Ireland’s constitutional nationalist tradition in the years leading up to the outbreak of the Troubles. Starting in 1932, the year in which the nationalist party the National League of the North walked out of the Northern Ireland parliament, and ending in 1970, when the Nationalist Party was eclipsed by a new generation of civil rights activists, it presents an account of the diverse political parties, organisations, and activists that sought to redress Catholic grievances and pursue the nationalist political goal of Irish unity through constitutional means. The book traces the emergence of anti-partitionism as a major preoccupation of constitutional nationalist groups and parties that existed in the period and critically examines a range of strategies which were intended both to galvanise Catholic support and to move closer to the goal of Irish unity. It assesses the context of these strategies as well as their outcomes and consequences. The fragmentary nature of Northern nationalism, the divisions between its rural Catholic conservative and urban secular labourist elements, and its strategic divide between parliamentary abstentionism and active participation, are all evaluated; so too are the problematic relationships that existed between Northern nationalists and successive Irish governments, and the continued challenges posed by militant Irish republicanism. Finally, this book explores developments in the 1960s when a liberal minority within constitutional nationalism called for a modernised politics and a new relationship between Nationalism and Unionism.
2 De Valera’s Northern Ireland policy, 1932–1948 By 1932 northern nationalist representatives, under instructions from Dublin, had participated in the six-county Parliament for almost seven years. During this time, proportional representation for Northern Ireland elections had been abolished and an array of ancillary anti-nationalist measures had been adopted. In May 1932, some four months after Fianna Fáil’s election victory, Joe Devlin led the Nationalist Party out of the six-county Parliament. In his final accusatory speech he declared to the unionist
Irish government in 1939. Writing in November to Joseph Connolly,7 a Belfast-born senior member of Fianna Fail, Peter Murney warned of the possible consequences of Dublin’s continued failure to offer northern nationalists ‘practical direction’: ‘In the absence of even vocal leadership, our people feel deserted and are tempted to listen to the dangerous counsels of those who have less responsibility.’ Murney suggested that there were ‘practical things’ that de Valera’s government could do to ‘correct bad impressions’, and he cautioned that the ‘imprudent military
, of all hues, to look towards Dublin to provide the solution to what a future Irish government minister would vividly call the ‘nationalist nightmare’ in Northern Ireland.1 This phraseology suggests an intensity of concern for northern nationalists which rarely surfaced in Dublin in the period under review. Expectations that Dublin (or London) could be called upon to end partition by imposing a settlement on unionists proved to be a mixture of wishful thinking, naivety, and, in the case of elected representatives, quite often an abdication of responsibilities to