Disintegration of stability

By the mid-1960s the fragile stability of Northern Ireland had begun to erode. The demographic majority that Protestants enjoyed ensured that they were able to control the state institutions, and these powers were, more often than not, used in ways that disadvantaged the Catholic minority in the region, though the extent and even the existence of discrimination in Northern Ireland remained a matter of heated debate. An active civil rights movement—partly inspired by the achievements of African Americans in the civil rights movement in United States—emerged in the late 1960s, and incidents of communal violence increased. The police occasionally used force to disperse demonstrators from the streets. The coincidence of increasingly strident demands for reform and equally fervent insistence that there should be none produced a deadly dynamic that brought Northern Ireland to the brink of civil war.

The British government sent troops “in aid of the civil power” at Stormont, Northern Ireland’s parliament. Rioting and widespread urban violence had exhausted the Royal Ulster Constabulary and undermined its capacity to secure law and order. In 1969 the Provisional movement of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) emerged out of this communal disorder. The IRA acquired arms and explosives and initiated a campaign of bombings and shootings in order to protect Roman Catholics, destabilize Northern Ireland’s institutions, weaken British resolve to maintain the union, and achieve Irish unity. In response to the violence, the authorities introduced internment without trial in August 1971 (ended 1975). However, rather than weakening the IRA’s campaign, this encouraged its intensification. Protestant unionists responded by forming their own loyalist paramilitary brigades.

In Derry on January 30, 1972, a day that became known as Bloody Sunday, a peaceful but illegal protest by Catholics against the British government’s internment policy turned violent, with British troops opening fire and killing 13 Catholic demonstrators (a 14th died several months later). Bloody Sunday continued to be a matter of considerable controversy—in particular, the army’s orders and the role of the IRA in the violence—and in the late 1990s the British government established a commission to determine the facts. In 2010 the Saville Report, the final pronouncement of that government inquiry, concluded that none of the victims had posed any threat to the soldiers and that their shooting was without justification.

The bloodiest year of the “Troubles”—as the sectarian violence was popularly known—was 1972, when 467 people, including 321 civilians, were killed; approximately 275 people were killed each year in the period 1971–76. The violence diminished in the 1980s, when about 50 to 100 political murders and assassinations occurred each year. By the end of the 20th century, more than 3,600 people had been killed and 36,000 injured; of the deaths, more than 2,000 were the responsibility of republicans, 1,000 of loyalists, and more than 350 of security forces. In the last three decades of the 20th century, more than 1,000 members of the security forces also were killed.

In March 1972 Conservative British Prime Minister Edward Heath suspended the constitution and parliament of Northern Ireland, which thereby ended Home Rule (which did not return until 1999) and restored direct rule from London. Among several initiatives to restore Home Rule, the first, known as the Sunningdale Agreement, led to the creation in 1973 of a short-lived assembly in which Catholics were given some political authority. The Sunningdale Agreement also provided for a Council of Ireland linking the two jurisdictions on the island. Nevertheless, violence continued, and the power-sharing Executive collapsed after only a few months because of a strike organized by the Ulster Workers’ Council, a committee backed by Protestant paramilitaries. The British army remained a major presence, and elements of martial law permeated the operations of the government and the courts.

Power-sharing agreements and the establishment of a fragile peace

An assembly that was intended to reflect the diversity of political opinion was established in 1982. However, it foundered and dissolved in 1986. Nationalists made clear that they would not accept a settlement solely internal to Northern Ireland, and they pushed for a significant additional all-Ireland arrangement. In response, the British and Irish governments concluded the Anglo-Irish Agreement (1985), which (to the dismay of unionists) marked the first time that the government of Ireland was given an official consultative role in the affairs of Northern Ireland. In the 1990s talks were held between all Northern Ireland’s major constitutional parties with the exception of Sinn Féin, the political wing of the Provisional IRA, which was excluded on the grounds that the IRA, like the loyalist paramilitary groups, continued to engage in terrorist activity. Frameworks for all-party peace talks—notably the Downing Street Declaration (1993), issued by the British and Irish prime ministers, John Major and Albert Reynolds, respectively—were put forward. These guaranteed self-determination for the people of Northern Ireland, promised British government recognition of a unified Ireland if a majority of Northern Ireland’s people agreed, and committed Ireland to abandoning its constitutional claim to Northern Ireland in the event of a political settlement.

Both the IRA and the loyalist paramilitary groups announced the cessation of military activity in 1994, though sporadic incidents continued. The major stumbling block to all-party talks was the issue of IRA decommissioning (disarmament). Discussions resumed in June 1996—though Sinn Féin was not immediately a participant because the IRA had ended its cease-fire (reinstated 1997)—and culminated in the Good Friday Agreement (Belfast Agreement), signed in April 1998. Under the terms of this accord, responsibility for most local matters was to be devolved to an elected assembly. There were institutional arrangements for cross-border cooperation on a range of issues between the governments of Ireland and Northern Ireland and for continued consultation between the British and Irish governments. In a jointly held referendum in Ireland and Northern Ireland on May 22, 1998—the first all-Ireland vote since 1918—the agreement was approved by 94 percent of voters in Ireland and 71 percent in Northern Ireland. However, the wide disparity between Catholic and Protestant support for the agreement in Northern Ireland (96 percent of Catholics but only 52 percent of Protestants voted in favour) indicated that efforts to resolve the sectarian conflict would be difficult.

In elections to a new Northern Ireland Assembly held the following month, the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), the mainstream Protestant party, won 28 seats; the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), a moderate Catholic party, won 24; Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), a hard-line Protestant party that opposed the Good Friday Agreement, won 20; and Sinn Féin won 18. In July UUP leader David Trimble was elected “first minister designate,” and the SDLP’s Seamus Mallon was elected Trimble’s deputy. Less than two months later, a bombing in Omagh by the Real IRA, an IRA splinter group, killed 29—the deadliest such incident since the start of sectarian violence in the 1960s. The IRA’s failure to decommission delayed the formation of the Northern Ireland Executive, in which Sinn Féin was to have two ministers. In December 1999 Trimble agreed, on the understanding that the IRA would fulfill its obligations to disarm, that the Northern Ireland Assembly could begin exercising its power. Nonetheless, it was only in 2001, after intense international pressure following the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States and several suspensions of devolution, that the IRA began the process of decommissioning. However, in October 2002 devolution was once again suspended amid claims that republicans were gathering intelligence information through a spy network that was operating within the government and contrary to the IRA’s cease-fire agreement of 1997.

One of the unforeseen consequences of the Good Friday Agreement was a political polarization within both the Protestant and the Roman Catholic communities. For example, Sinn Féin and the hard-line Protestant DUP began to outpoll the more moderate SDLP and UUP. Although Northern Ireland was experiencing its most peaceful era in a generation, sectarian antagonism remained deep and the future of the new institutions uncertain. Still, there was great optimism following the IRA’s announcement in July 2005 that it had ended its armed campaign and had disposed of most of its weapons and would pursue only peaceful means to achieve its goals.

Elections to the Northern Ireland Assembly were held in March 2007, and the DUP captured the most votes, winning 36 seats in the 108-member Assembly; Sinn Féin was second with 28 seats. Later that month Gerry Adams and Ian Paisley—the leaders of Sinn Féin and the DUP, respectively—reached a historic agreement to form a power-sharing government. On May 8, 2007, devolution returned to Northern Ireland as Paisley and Sinn Féin’s Martin McGuinness were sworn in as first minister and deputy first minister, respectively. Further evidence of the changing reality in Northern Ireland came in August of that year when the British military presence—which for decades had been ubiquitous—was dramatically reduced to 5,000 troops, with all responsibility for security handed over to the police. In June 2008 Paisley retired and was succeeded as leader of the DUP and as first minister by Peter Robinson (who stepped down from the latter position temporarily in 2010 in response to a political scandal). The final plank of the Good Friday Agreement was put in place in March 2010 when the Assembly voted to devolve policing and justice powers to Northern Ireland.

The DUP and Sinn Féin remained in control of the Assembly in the 2011 elections, in which the former increased its representation to 38 seats and the latter added a seat to reach 29. The Alliance also gained a seat, for a new total of eight seats, while the SDLP and UUP lost ground, falling from 16 to 14 seats and from 18 to 16 seats, respectively. Robinson and McGuinness remained at the head of the Executive. The election provided a measure of vindication for Robinson, who had lost his seat in the Westminster Parliament in the 2010 elections. On June 27, 2012, in an encounter widely viewed as having great symbolic importance to the ongoing reconciliation efforts in Northern Ireland, McGuinness, a onetime commander in the IRA, shook hands with Elizabeth II during a visit to Belfast by the British queen.

The stability of the government’s power-sharing Executive was threatened when conflict arose over proposed welfare reforms, especially after Sinn Féin withdrew its support for a compromise agreement in March 2015. In September Robinson “stepped aside” as first minister after an investigation into the murder of a former IRA leader revealed that at least some of the organizational structure of the Provisional IRA was still in place. Its decommissioning and the renunciation of violence had been pivotal elements of the negotiations that led to peace and power sharing in Northern Ireland, and Robinson’s protest came in response to the proof of the organization’s ongoing existence. U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron refused Robinson’s request that he call for a temporary halt in devolved power.

After some 10 weeks of negotiations, leaders of the main unionist and nationalist parties reached a wide-ranging agreement (“A Fresh Start”) in November that provided for international monitoring of de-paramilitarization and included a promise of additional funds from London to ease the burden of Northern Ireland’s transition to new benefit policies. In January 2016 Robinson resigned as first minister and leader of the DUP. He was replaced by Arlene Foster, who led the party to victory in the May election for the Assembly, in which the DUP captured 38 seats while Sinn Féin took 28. McGuinness remained as deputy minister.

Less than a year later, in early March 2017, Northern Irish voters were back at the polls for a snap legislative election necessitated by McGuinness’s resignation from the Executive in response to a scandal involving Foster and other DUP leaders. In 2012, as minister for the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Investment, Foster had overseen the introduction of the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI) scheme, a program that provided subsidies to businesses for generating their heat through renewable sources such as biomass boilers (fueled primarily by wood pellets). In February 2016 revelations of expensive, widespread abuses of the program that stood to cost the government tens of millions of pounds burst into the headlines. Amid accusations that she had badly mishandled the RHI scheme, Foster refused to step down as first minister while an investigation of the scandal was mounted, and McGuinness resigned in January 2017 as deputy first minister, prompting a snap election because the power-sharing agreement required the representation of both factions in the Executive.

Despite calls for her resignation, Foster led the DUP into the election, though McGuinness, who was battling serious illness, relinquished parliamentary leadership of Sinn Féin to Michelle O’Neill. The election also marked the reduction of seats in the Northern Ireland Assembly from 108 to 90 (a cost-cutting measure). In the event, the DUP remained the Assembly’s largest presence, with 28 members, just one more than Sinn Féin. However, for the first time since the beginning of power sharing, nationalist parties (Sinn Féin and SDLP, the latter of which captured 12 seats) formed a majority in the Assembly. The unionist UUP took 10 seats, and the centrist Alliance won eight. The winning parties had three weeks to consolidate a coalition or Northern Ireland would face the possibility of yet another election or the return of rule by Westminster.

With the negotiations seemingly going nowhere, the deadline for forming a new Executive was extended to June 29, to follow the snap general election for the House of Commons that Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May had called for June 8 in pursuit of a mandate for her negotiations with the European Union (EU) on Britain’s withdrawal from that organization (“Brexit”), scheduled for 2019. Voting in Northern Ireland produced a heightened level of political polarization, as representation in Westminster clustered around the DUP (10 seats, a gain of two) and Sinn Féin (seven seats, a gain of three), with the middle-ground parties losing all their seats (the SDLP lost three seats and the UUP lost two). More broadly, the election proved to be disastrous for the Conservatives, who lost their legislative majority in Parliament. Clinging to power, May formed a minority government and sought support from the DUP, pursuing not a formal coalition but a “confidence and supply” arrangement, through which the DUP’s support on key issues and votes of confidence would give the government 328 votes, two more than the number needed for a majority. The prospect of a too-cozy relationship between the Conservatives and the DUP, however, brought criticism that it would jeopardize the neutral position by the government on Northern Ireland widely thought to be necessary to preserve power sharing.

The negotiations on forming a new Executive shifted their emphasis from the controversy surrounding the handling of the RHI scheme to other issues. Most prominently, Sinn Féin sought to overcome DUP opposition to same-sex marriage and to gain concessions regarding the elevation of the Irish language to parity with English. As the protracted negotiations dragged on, in September 2018 Northern Ireland reached its 589th day without an Executive, breaking Belgium’s record for the longest peacetime period spent without a government in place. In the meantime, the issue of how to maintain an open border between Ireland and Northern Ireland after Britain’s departure from the EU was at the centre of debate regarding the withdrawal agreement negotiated by May’s government with the EU. There was widespread opposition to the so-called Ireland backstop component of the agreement, which stipulated that a legally binding customs arrangement between the EU and Northern Ireland would go into effect if the U.K. and the EU could not reach a long-term agreement by December 2020. Opponents of the backstop became even more exercised in December 2018 after it was revealed that, according to Attorney General Geoffrey Cox’s legal advice for the government on the Brexit agreement, the terms of the backstop plan could endure “indefinitely,” with the U.K. legally blocked from terminating the agreement without EU approval if the U.K. and EU did not agree on the details of their separation.

May’s failure to win parliamentary approval for her version of the withdrawal agreement ultimately resulted in her resignation and the ascent of Boris Johnson as Conservative Party leader and prime minister in May 2019. Blocked by Parliament from leaving the EU without an agreement (“no-deal Brexit”), Johnson renegotiated the deal, replacing the backstop with a Protocol on Ireland/Northern Ireland that would keep Northern Ireland aligned with the EU for four years but allow Stormont to opt out of the arrangement at the end of that period. Johnson then secured a mandate to push his version of Brexit across the finish line when the Conservatives triumphed in a snap election in December 2019 that restored the party to a commanding majority in the House of Commons and eliminated its need for DUP support. The election also seemed to reveal a Northern Ireland electorate that was frustrated by the inability of the DUP and Sinn Féin to restore the power-sharing Executive. Support for both parties declined in the election (by more than 5 percent for the DUP and nearly 7 percent for Sinn Féin), though Sinn Féin managed to hang on to a total of seven seats while the DUP lost two seats. The centrist Alliance party was the biggest beneficiary, rising from the fifth most popular party to the third as its share of the vote doubled from the last parliamentary election, climbing to nearly 17 percent.

In the meantime, the deadline loomed for the end of the most recent extension of rule from Westminster in the absence of a functioning Executive. Rather than pursue another extension, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Julian Smith announced that he would call an election for the Northern Ireland Assembly if the Executive were not restored by January 13, 2020. By this point the levers of the Northern Ireland government had been operated by civil servants for nearly three years, and, without an Executive to respond to it, a health crisis had mushroomed that included a critical shortage of nurses and long waiting lists for visits to specialist doctors. In the face of this crisis and fearing a further loss of support in an election for the Assembly, both Sinn Féin and the DUP sought compromise in the negotiations that had been going on for some nine months between the Irish and U.K. governments and Northern Ireland’s five leading political parties.

The result was the “New Decade, New Approach” deal, acceded to on January 10, 2020. While the agreement did not include a stand-alone Irish language act, it did establish a language commissioner to deal with the Gaelic and Ulster Scots languages and their “associated culture and heritage.” Both languages also were approved for official government use. With the deal in place, no election was held, Foster returned to office as first minister, and Michelle O’Neill, who had replaced McGuinness as the leader of Sinn Féin, became deputy first minister.

Dissatisfaction gradually swelled within the DUP over the Brexit Northern Ireland protocol, which in effect created a customs border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K., and in April 2021 a widespread mutiny within the parliamentary party forced Foster to resign her leadership in May and to step down as first minister in mid-June. Edwin Poots emerged from the subsequent leadership battle as the head of the party. DUP lawmakers rebelled again when Poots assented to Sinn Féin’s demands regarding the furthering of the Irish language legislation in exchange for the party’s support for Paul Givan, Poots’s candidate as first minister in the new Executive, which had to be reconstituted after Foster’s resignation. Some three weeks after becoming leader of the DUP, Poots too was forced to step down. He was replaced by Sir Jeffrey Donaldson, a member of Parliament who planned to later relinquish his seat in Westminster in order to become first minister. In the interim Givan became the caretaker first minister in the new Executive with O’Neill.

All the while, Northern Ireland, like the rest of the U.K. and the world, sought to mitigate the spread and economic consequences of the global coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 pandemic, which arrived in Northern Ireland in March 2020; the first cases of the contagion had been reported in China in December 2019. As elsewhere, the cresting and receding waves of the virus and the potentially deadly disease caused by it, COVID-19, were met with the imposition and rescinding of protective measures such as mask wearing, social distancing, and economic lockdowns, along with testing and tracking. The vaccination response in Northern Ireland was relatively swift but not as comprehensive as in the rest of the U.K. By August 2021 nearly 77 percent of those aged 16 and older in Northern Ireland had received two vaccine doses, whereas the comparable figures in England, Scotland, and Wales were more than 77 percent, 79.5 percent, and more than 83 percent, respectively.

In September 2021 the DUP’s intensifying displeasure with the Brexit Northern Ireland protocol and demands for changes to it began taking the form of threats by Donaldson to withdraw the DUP from the Executive, which became a reality in February 2022 with Givan’s resignation as first minister. Once again Northern Ireland found itself without a functioning Executive, though this time the clock ticking on the deadline for its reconstitution was not as loud, because regularly scheduled elections for the Assembly were set for May. Those elections proved to be historic, as Sinn Féin, conducting a campaign that downplayed the issue of unification with Ireland and focused instead on the high cost of living and concerns with the health care system, won the largest number of seats in the Assembly—27, compared with 25 for the DUP—setting the stage for it to assume the post of first minister for the first time. The other big winner in the election was the centrist Alliance Party, which gained nine seats to increase its presence in the Assembly to 17 seats. Whether the DUP eventually would opt to rejoin the Executive with representation as the deputy first minister was an open question, putting the future of power sharing in doubt. Just days after the election, Donaldson announced that the DUP would block the formation of a new Executive unless its concerns regarding Brexit protocol were addressed.

It took two years for the DUP and Westminster to reach an agreement on changes to the rules governing the movement of goods between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K., but in early February 2024 the British House of Commons approved legislation that reduced paperwork and eliminated checks on more than 80 percent of all goods passing between Northern Ireland and the rest of the U.K. The agreement, which also affirmed Northern Ireland’s constitutional status as a constituent unit of the U.K., set the stage for the restoration of the Executive on February 3. In a development of no small historical importance, O’Neill became the first member of Sinn Féin to serve as first minister. The DUP’s Emma Little-Pengelly assumed the post of deputy first minister.