LONDON (AP) – Young people have thrown rocks, fireworks and petrol bombs at police and set fire to hijacked cars and a bus during a week of violence on the streets of Northern Ireland. Police responded with rubber bullets and water cannons.
The streets were quieter Friday night as community leaders called for calm after the death of Prince Philip, Queen Elizabeth II’s 99-year-old husband. But small gangs of youth pelted police with objects and set a car on fire during sporadic outbreaks in Belfast.
The chaotic scenes have brought back memories of decades of Catholic-Protestant conflict known as “The Troubles”. A 1998 peace deal ended widespread violence, but failed to resolve deep-seated tensions in Northern Ireland.
A look at the background of the new violence:
WHY IS NORTHERN IRELAND AN AFFECTED COUNTRY?
Geographically, Northern Ireland is part of Ireland. Politically it is part of the United Kingdom.
Long dominated by its larger neighbor, Ireland broke loose about 100 years ago after centuries of colonization and an uneasy union. Twenty-six of the 32 provinces became an independent country with a Roman Catholic majority. Six provinces in the north, which have a Protestant majority, remained British.
The Catholic minority in Northern Ireland was discriminated against in terms of jobs, housing and other areas in the Protestant-run state. In the 1960s, a Catholic civil rights movement demanded change, but faced a harsh response from the government and the police. Some people on both the Catholic and Protestant sides formed armed groups that escalated violence with bombings and shootings.
The British Army was deployed in 1969, initially to keep the peace. The situation worsened into a conflict between Irish Republican militants seeking to unite with the South, loyalist paramilitaries trying to hold back Northern Ireland’s British and British forces.
During three decades of conflict, more than 3,600 people, mostly civilians, were killed in bombings and shootings. Most were in Northern Ireland, although the Irish Republican Army also fired bombs in London and other British cities.
HOW DID THE CONFLICT END?
In the 1990s, after secret talks and with the help of diplomatic efforts from Ireland, Great Britain and the United States, the fighters reached a peace agreement. During the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, paramilitaries laid down their weapons and established a Catholic Protestant power-sharing government for Northern Ireland. The question of Northern Ireland’s eventual status was put on hold: it would remain British as long as the majority wanted it, but a future referendum on reunification was not ruled out.
While the peace has largely lasted, small splinter groups from the Irish Republican Army have occasionally carried out attacks on security forces and there have been outbreaks of sectarian street violence.
Politically, the power-sharing scheme has seen periods of success and failure. The Belfast government collapsed in January 2017 due to a failed green energy project. It remained suspended for more than two years amid a rift between British Unionist and Irish Nationalist parties over cultural and political issues, including the status of the Irish language. The Northern Ireland government resumed work in early 2020, but deep distrust on both sides remains.
HOW DOES BREXIT HAVE COMPLICATED THINGS?
Northern Ireland has been called the “problem child” of Brexit, the UK’s separation from the European Union. As the only part of the UK that has a border with an EU country – Ireland – it was the trickiest issue to resolve after Britain narrowly voted to leave the bloc of 27 countries in 2016.
An open Irish border, over which people and goods flow freely, supports the peace process, allowing people in Northern Ireland to feel at home in both Ireland and the UK
The British Conservative government’s insistence on a “hard Brexit” that took the country out of the EU’s economic order meant creating new barriers and controls on trade. Both Britain and the EU agreed that the border should not be in Ireland due to the risk that the peace process would pose. The alternative was to put it metaphorically in the Irish Sea – between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK
That arrangement has alarmed British unionists, who say it weakens Northern Ireland’s position in the UK and could bolster calls for Irish reunification.
WHY HAS THE VIOLENCE BREAKED OUT NOW?
The violence has mainly taken place in Protestant areas in and around Belfast and Northern Ireland’s second city, Londonderry, although the disturbances have spread to Catholic quarters.
Britain left the EU’s economic embrace on December 31 and the new trade deals quickly became irritating to Northern Ireland unionists wishing to stay in the UK Early trade disruptions exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic led to a number of empty supermarkets, some alarm was ringing. Border personnel were temporarily withdrawn from Northern Ireland ports in February after threatening graffiti appeared to target dockworkers.
There was anger that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who has long maintained that there would be no new trade controls as a result of Brexit, had downplayed the magnitude of the changes by leaving the EU. Some in the British loyalist community in Northern Ireland feel their identities are under threat.
“Many loyalists believe that Northern Ireland is de facto not as much a part of the UK as it was,” Henry Patterson, a professor of politics at Ulster University, told Sky News.
Unionists are also upset over a police decision not to prosecute politicians from the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party who attended the funeral of a former Irish Republican Army commander in June, despite the limitations of the coronavirus.
Meanwhile, banned armed groups continue to operate as criminal drug gangs and continue to exert influence in working class communities – although the main paramilitaries have denied their involvement in the recent unrest.
Many of those involved in the violence were teenagers and even children as young as 12 years old. They grew up after the troubles, but live in areas where poverty and unemployment remain high and where sectarian divides have not healed. Two decades after the Good Friday peace agreement, concrete ‘walls of peace’ still separate the Catholic and Protestant working-class areas of Belfast.
The coronavirus pandemic has added new layers of economic damage, school interruptions and lockdown-induced boredom to the mix.
Despite calls for peace from political leaders in Belfast, London, Dublin and Washington, the knot of problems can prove difficult to resolve.
“These are multiple deprivation areas with a sense of not losing much,” said Katy Hayward, a professor of politics at Queen’s University, Belfast. “And when (people) are mobilized by social media telling them ‘Enough is enough, now is the time to defend Ulster,’ then many of them respond – too much – to it.”