The Troubles

The Troubles

The Troubles was an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland during the late 20th century. The conflict began in the late 1960s and is usually deemed to have ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. More than 3,500 people were killed in the conflict, of whom 52% were civilians.

About The Troubles in brief

Summary The TroublesThe Troubles was an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland during the late 20th century. The conflict began in the late 1960s and is usually deemed to have ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. More than 3,500 people were killed in the conflict, of whom 52% were civilians, 32% were members of the British security forces and 16% members of paramilitary groups. The main participants in the Troubles were republican paramilitaries such as the Provisional Irish Republican Army and the Irish National Liberation Army. British state security forces—the British Army and RUC; and political activists and politicians. The security forces of the Republic of Ireland played a smaller role. The Troubles also involved numerous riots, mass protests and acts of civil disobedience, and led to increased segregation and the creation of temporary no-go areas. It was also characterised by the armed campaigns of Irish republican and Ulster loyalist paramilitary groups and British state forces. It became the focus for the longest major campaign in the British Army’s history of the Army. It is that its position was that its forces were neutral to the right-determination of the people of Northern Ireland to self-determination. Nationalists regarded the state forces as partisan forces of occupation or occupation. Unionists tended to support the locally recruited RUC, while the republican forces focused on republicans. There has been sporadic violence since the Good $ Friday Agreement was signed, including ongoing punishment attacks and a campaign by dissident republicans to punish the British government for its handling of the conflict.

The word ‘troubles’ has been used as a synonym for violent conflict for centuries. The term was used to describe the Irish revolutionary period in the early twentieth century. It was subsequently adopted to refer to the escalating violence in NorthernIreland after 1969. The term ‘Troubles’, however, is now used to mean the three-decade conflict between nationalists and unionists. It also refers to the uneasy peace process that brought an uneasy end to the conflict by the end of the 1990s. It has been described as an ‘irregular war’ or a ‘low-level war’ by the U.S. State Department. The U.N. Security Council has described it as a ‘conflict of the highest order’ and a ‘war of attrition’ It is sometimes described as ‘a war of attrition, a war of terror, a conflict of attrition and a war to uphold law and order’ It has also been referred to as ‘the Troubles’ or ‘the Great War of the 1980s and 1990s by the United Nations. It began during a campaign to end discrimination against the Catholicnationalist minority by the Protestantunionist government of NorthernIreland and Royal Ulster Constabulary. The authorities attempted to suppress the protest campaign with police brutality; it was also met with violence from loyalists, who believed it was a republican front. Some Catholics initially welcomed the British army as a more neutral force than the RUC.