LONDON (AP) – Young people hurled bricks, fireworks and petrol bombs at police and set fire to hijacked cars and a bus during a week of violence in the streets of Northern Ireland. Police responded with rubber bullets and water cannons.
The streets were quieter on Friday night as community leaders called for calm after the death of Prince Philip, the 99-year-old husband of Queen Elizabeth II. But small gangs of youths pelted police with objects and set a car on fire during sporadic outbreaks in Belfast.
The chaotic scenes evoked memories of decades of Catholic-Protestant conflict, known as ‘The Troubles’. A 1998 peace deal ended large-scale violence, but did not resolve the deep-rooted tensions of Northern Ireland.
A look at the background to the new violence:
WHY IS NORTHERN IRELAND AN INVOLVED COUNTRY?
Geographically, Northern Ireland is part of Ireland. Politically, it is part of the United Kingdom.
Ireland, long dominated by its larger neighbor, was liberated a hundred years ago after centuries of colonization and an awkward union. Twenty-six of its 32 provinces became an independent country with the Roman Catholic majority. Six provinces in the north, with a Protestant majority, remained British.
Northern Ireland’s Catholic minority experiences discrimination in employment, housing and other areas in the Protestant government. In the 1960s, a Catholic civil rights movement demanded that it be changed, but the government and police received a harsh response. Some people from both the Catholic and Protestant sides formed armed groups that increased violence with bombings and shootings.
The British Army was deployed in 1969, initially to keep the peace. The situation worsened in a conflict between Irish republican militants seeking to unite with the south, loyal paramilitary parties trying to keep Northern Ireland British, and British troops.
During three decades of conflict, more than 3,600 people, the majority of whom are civilians, have been killed in bombings and shootings. Most were in Northern Ireland, although the Irish Republican Army also set off bombs in London and other British cities.
HOW DID THE CONFLICT END?
By the 1990s, after secret talks and with the help of diplomatic efforts by Ireland, Britain and the United States, the fighters had reached a peace agreement. In the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, the paramilitaries laid down their arms and formed a Catholic-Protestant power-sharing government for Northern Ireland. The issue of Northern Ireland’s eventual status has been postponed: it will remain British as long as it is the majority’s wish, but a future referendum on reunification is not ruled out.
While peace continued for the most part, small splinter groups of the Irish Republican Army occasionally carried out attacks on security forces, and there were outbreaks of sectarian street violence.
Politically, the arrangement of power-sharing had periods of success and failure. The Belfast administration collapsed in January 2017 due to a green energy project. It was 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. Northern Ireland’s government resumed at the beginning of 2020, but there is still great mistrust on both sides.
HOW DOES BREXIT COMPLICATE THINGS?
Northern Ireland is being called the ‘problem child’ of Brexit, the British divorce of the European Union. As the only part of the UK that has a border with an EU nation – Ireland – it was the most difficult issue to resolve after Britain narrowly voted in 2016 to leave the bloc of 27 nations.
An open Irish border, across which people and goods flow freely, supports the peace process so that people in Northern Ireland can feel at home in Ireland and the United Kingdom
The British Conservative government’s insistence on a ‘hard Brexit’ that took the country out of the EU’s economic order led to the creation of new barriers and trade controls. Both Britain and the EU agreed that the border should not be in Ireland due to the risk posed by the peace process. The alternative was to put it, metaphorically, in the Irish Sea – between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK
The arrangement has shocked British trade unionists, who say it could weaken Northern Ireland’s place in the UK and strengthen calls for Irish reunification.
WHY HAS VIOLENCE USED NOW?
The violence was widespread in Protestant areas in and around Belfast and the second city, Northern Ireland, in London, although the unrest was spreading in Catholic neighborhoods.
Britain left the EU’s economic embrace on 31 December and the new trade arrangements quickly became an annoyance to union members in Northern Ireland who want to stay in the UK. . Border guards were temporarily withdrawn from ports in Northern Ireland in February after threats of graffiti working on ports were revealed.
There was anger that British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who had long insisted that there would be no new controls on trade as a result of Brexit, diminished the extent of the changes left by the EU. Some in the British loyal community of Northern Ireland feel that their identity is being threatened.
“Many loyalists believe that Northern Ireland is de facto just as much a part of the United Kingdom as it was,” Henry Patterson, professor of politics at Ulster, told Sky News.
Trade unions are also angry at a police decision not to prosecute politicians from the IRA-linked Sinn Fein party that attended the funeral of a former Irish Republican army in June, despite coronavirus restrictions.
Meanwhile, banned armed groups continue to operate as criminal drug gangs and continue to exert influence in working-class communities – although key paramilitaries have denied 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 problems, but live in areas where poverty and unemployment remain high and where sect differences have not been cured. Two decades after the Good Friday peace treaty, concrete “peace walls” still separate Catholic and Protestant areas of Belfast from the working class.
The coronavirus pandemic caused new low economic damage, education disruptions and boredom through boredom.
Despite calls for peace from political leaders in Belfast, London, Dublin and Washington, the knot of problems can be difficult to resolve.
“These are areas of multiple hardship with the feeling that there is not much to lose,” said Katy Hayward, a professor of politics at Queen’s University in Belfast. “And when (people) are mobilized by social media that tells them ‘Enough is enough, now is the time to defend Ulster’, then many of them – too many – react to it.”