Ireland’s Wars: Northern Ireland To The Present Day

Coming towards the end of, well, the chronology of Irish “history” (it’s difficult to call the time after 2010 history really), we turn now, one last time, to Northern Ireland. In the previous entry on the North we discussed the difficulties, political, social and paramilitary, that Northern Ireland had to face up to the decade and change after the Good Friday Agreement was signed, a period marked by an enormous drop in bloodshed but continuing political instability. In many ways the 14 year period from 2010 to the present day would replicate that pattern, with historic lows of paramilitary violence, but a political system that seemed incapable of staying functioning for any significant amount of time.

In 2011, Stormont was back working, the higher profile paramilitaries had either decommissioned or were in the process of doing so and the biggest drama happening was connected to a global economic crisis. But to say that things were now stable in the North would be incorrect. Rioting of a sectarian nature was still happening with alarming regularity, such as in June/July of 2011 when elements of the Ulster Volunteer Force allegedly provoked violent action in various urban centres or in December the following year when a political row over the flying of the British flag over Belfast City Hall provoked widespread and lengthy unionist disturbances.

Within paramilitary circles, one of the most significant developments at this time was the creation of yet another form of a familiar acronym. In the Summer of 202 the “Real” Irish Republican Army undertook a merger with several other like-minded groups, most notably Republican Action Against Drugs and a Tyrone group thought to be responsible for the shooting dead of a PSNI constable in 2011. While the resulting group just used “IRA”, it came to be informally known as the “New” IRA. This creation came after a split within the RIRA ranks a few years previously had created another new paramilitary organisation, that went by the IRA’s traditional Irish-language name of Óglaigh na hÉireann (which, confusingly for those not familiar, is also the Irish-language name of the Republic’s regular military). The new entities were still small, with no more than a few hundred members each, but they rejected the ceasefires of the peace process and the GFA, and were determined to continue some form of armed campaign.

It was the NIRA who launched a campaign of letter bombing in 2013 and through into 2014. The targets were major figures in Northern Ireland’s law and order initially, before they moved on to target British Army recruitment offices on the British mainland. Nobody was killed in these attacks, or in a serious of minor bombings and mortar attacks that took place around the same time, with some claimed by the NIRA (or RIRA, depending) and others by ONH. The small-scale nature of the attacks gives an indication of the scope that these organisations were operating with, as does their lack of deadliness. There was little in the way of popular support for such actions either, with cross-community condemnation of such things loud and obvious after every such incident. If the goal was to attempt to essentially re-start a status of warfare similar to the Troubles, then such operations failed: they remained small-scale, scattered and did not lend themselves to any kind of sustained campaign. They did not seemingly attract much in the way of new membership for the organisations concerned, and they certainly did little to seriously effect the constitutional or political status of Northern Ireland. In line with the frequent accusations that various entities using the IRA name were now as much or more involved with criminal undertakings like drug-running as they were with traditional militant republican aims, it seemed more than ever that the era of republican paramilitaries was at its lowest ebb. Various paramilitaries, from both sides of the conflict, remained in some form of existence, and still sometimes engaged in internecine feuding within their own communities as well as occasional actions aimed at others, but it is fair to say hey had now been relegated to the status of a recurring nuisance rather than a legitimate threat to the existence of the state.

Throughout this time, the political life of Northern Ireland continued as it had, with the Democratic Unionist Party and Sinn Fein the dominant representatives of the unionist and nationalist communities respectively, and engaged in the work of completing devolution and attempting to ensure that the Stormont legislature lasted. At times, this was a very difficult job, with disputes over marches, flags, language legislation and other things frequently threatening to grind things to a halt. The situation became dramatically inflamed by the 2016 “Brexit” vote of the United Kingdom, whereby a majority of voters in the UK, but critically not in Northern Ireland, elected to leave the European Union, a situation that created a highly complicated problem in terms of the Irish land border. Six months later, with that situation up in the air, the Executive was collapsed by Sinn Fein in the aftermath of the so-called “Cash For Ash” scandal, whereby a renewable energy scheme overlooked by then DUP Minister for Enterprise Arlene Foster, subsequently First Minister, was botched in its execution, costing half a billion in public money. A subsequent election produced the remarkable situation of unionist parties failing to win a majority for the first time in Northern Irish history, with an even number of seats shared between them and nationalist parties. It didn’t matter though: Sinn Fein refused to resume their role in Stormont so the Executive continued to be in a collapsed state. The situation would last for the better part of three years, as a complex, and at times farcical, situation evolved over Northern Ireland’s Brexit arrangements, facilitated by an endlessly chaotic picture in the Westminster Parliament on the same. Unionist concern at what Brexit would mean was acute: any arrangement with the EU to avoid a “hard border” seemed tantamount to an acknowledgement that Northern Ireland was better off closer to the Republic on a number of levels, while a sea border in terms of trade and tariffs drove a wedge between the North and the British mainland. At the same time, nationalists continued to agitate for a border poll, as determined by the Good Friday Agreement.

Throughout, low levels of paramilitary activity continued, with the situation now changing to the point that attacks became more noticeable because of their comparative rarity. The death of journalist Lyra McKee in 2019 is one such example. McKee had been present at a series of disturbances in Derry in April that year, set-off by police raids on republicans ahead of Easter Rising commemorations. Amid missiles and firebombs, a member of the NIRA fired off shots at police, with one hitting a nearby McKee, who died shortly afterwards. The NIRA admitted culpability in the aftermath, and at time of writing a number of NIRA personnel are undergoing trial for the crime. McKee’s death, the reaction and the manner in which her death has been treated is a good example of the changed circumstances in Northern Ireland: from a point decades earlier where such an incident would barley register amid the rest of the carnage, the death raised widespread condemnation, outrage and genuine fears of a return to more widescale violence.

2020 brought a return of Stormont under a carefully constructed deal between nationalists, unionists and the British and Irish governments, but much of this work was quickly overshadowed by the arrival of the COVID pandemic, a situation which brought its own unique challenges to Northern Ireland, as it did the rest of the world. Stormont would struggle through the situation, and the widespread disputes over the extent and enforcement of lockdown laws, for two years before collapsing again, this time as a result of a DUP walkout following further Brexit negotiations and concern about the nature of those agreements. Plenty of commentators were probably not incorrect when they noted that at least part of the reason was the growing electoral success of Sinn Fein, with everything that this entailed: when the DUP were finally coaxed back into restoring Stormont, it meant that a nationalist politician, in this case Sinn Fein’s Michelle O’Neill, was entitled to take the First Minister position, the first non-unionist to hold such a position in Northern Ireland’s history. While the difference between the First Minister and Deputy First Minister is essentially just ceremonial, it is still a potent sign of how things have changed in the North in recent times.

That brings us pretty much up to the present day. In a couple of entries I plan to take the time to discuss the current state of affairs on both sides of the Irish border, in terms of militaries, paramilitaries and whatever else could be said to fall under the remit of this series. Until then, it is enough to say that while residual tensions in Northern Ireland are unlikely to ever fully dissipate, it is heartening to see that continued political disputes have by and large stayed political: at the present time the likelihood of a resumption of Trouble-era levels of violence seems remote. Instead such things have been reduced to the point of being an irregular problem, still to be taken with the utmost seriousness when they occur, but no longer to be considered a clear and present danger to the Northern Irish state or its political processes. It was a very long road to get to that point, but it is something to celebrate having gotten there.

To read the rest of the entries in this series, click here to go to the index.