The Troubles

For roughly three decades, from the late 1960s until 1998, Northern Ireland was torn by a violent conflict over its constitutional future, known as the Troubles. Unionists and loyalists, mostly Protestant, wanted to stay in the United Kingdom; nationalists and republicans, mostly Catholic, wanted a united Ireland. Paramilitaries on both sides and the British security forces were involved, and more than 3,500 people died before the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 brought a political settlement.

The division went back centuries, to the Plantation of Ulster with Scottish and English settlers from 1609 and later struggles between Catholic and Protestant. After the Irish War of Independence, the Government of Ireland Act 1920 split the island, and Northern Ireland stayed in the United Kingdom with its own parliament at Stormont. Catholics, then about 35% of its population, faced discrimination in housing and jobs, and electoral boundaries were redrawn in ways that favoured unionists. Nationalists generally regarded partition as illegitimate.

Historians disagree about when the conflict began; suggested starting points range from 1966 to August 1969. In the mid-1960s a civil rights campaign led by the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association demanded fair housing, an end to job discrimination, one person one vote in local elections and police reform. Some loyalists saw the movement as a republican front. On 5 October 1968 police broke up a banned march in Derry (Londonderry), injuring more than 100 people, and televised images of the scene caused outrage. In August 1969 three days of fighting in Derry's Bogside and sectarian rioting in Belfast left 10 dead, and on 14–15 August British troops were deployed in what became Operation Banner, the army's longest operation.

Relations between Catholics and the army quickly soured. Internment without trial, introduced in 1971, fell overwhelmingly on Catholics. On 30 January 1972, Bloody Sunday, soldiers of the Parachute Regiment shot dead thirteen unarmed men at a banned anti-internment march in Derry, and a fourteenth died later. That year was the deadliest of the conflict, with nearly 500 killed; the Provisional IRA's bombing campaign included Bloody Friday in Belfast, and London suspended Stormont and imposed direct rule. A power-sharing settlement agreed at Sunningdale in 1973 collapsed in 1974 after a loyalist general strike.

Through the late 1970s and 1980s violence continued at a lower level, including attacks in Britain such as the Brighton hotel bombing of 12 October 1984, aimed at Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet. In 1981 ten republican prisoners died on hunger strike seeking political status; one of them, Bobby Sands, had been elected to Parliament. Afterwards Sinn Féin began contesting elections. Inquiries later found that elements of the security forces had colluded with loyalist paramilitaries.

The IRA declared a ceasefire on 31 August 1994, and loyalist groups followed some six weeks later. The IRA broke it with the Docklands bombing in London in February 1996 but restored it in July 1997. Talks led to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, which restored self-government on a power-sharing basis and provided for police reform, disarmament and prisoner releases. In August 1998 a Real IRA bomb in Omagh killed 29 civilians, the most from any single bomb of the conflict. Devolved government was restored for good on 8 May 2007.

The Conflict Archive on the Internet counts 3,532 deaths between 1969 and 2001, while the book Lost Lives records 3,720 between 1966 and 2006. By the widely used breakdown, about 60% of deaths were caused by republican paramilitaries, 30% by loyalists and 10% by the security forces. Just over half of those killed were civilians.

Our 1985 and 1994 maps show Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom, separated by the border from the Republic of Ireland.