Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    The Northern Ireland Troubles: Operation Banner 1969–2007
    The Northern Ireland Troubles: Operation Banner 1969–2007
    The Northern Ireland Troubles: Operation Banner 1969–2007
    Ebook140 pages2 hours

    The Northern Ireland Troubles: Operation Banner 1969–2007

    By Aaron Edwards

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    The British campaign in Northern Ireland remains one of the most controversial actions in recent history. This new book by Aaron Edwards considers the strategic, operational and tactical aspects of what become the longest ever campaign embarked upon by British troops. The 38-year campaign, codenamed Operation Banner, went through a number of phases. It began as a peacekeeping operation, morphed into a counter-insurgency operation and ending as a policing and counter-terrorism force. Banner was massive in scale. No less than 10,000 troops were on active service throughout the campaign and at one point as many as 30,000 men and women were deployed on Ulster's streets. Drawing on extensive new research, this book presents an authoritative introduction to the 'Troubles', providing a strategic analysis of the successes and failures of the campaign.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury Publishing
    Release dateJun 6, 2014
    ISBN9781472810366
    The Northern Ireland Troubles: Operation Banner 1969–2007
    Author

    Aaron Edwards

    Aaron Edwards is a Senior Lecturer in Defence and International Affairs at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. He holds a PhD in Politics and International Studies from the Queen's University of Belfast and is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society. His main research interests span modern war studies and contemporary military history and he is the author of several books, including Mad Mitch's Tribal Law: Aden and the End of Empire (2014), UVF: Behind the Mask (2017) and Agents of Influence: Britain's Secret Intelligence War Against the IRA (2021).

    Related to The Northern Ireland Troubles

    Related ebooks

    Modern History For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      How IRA And The Troubles 'Industrialised' People Smuggling In Ireland

      Dec 21, 2020

      For as long there has been a border on the island of Ireland, smugglers have exploited the lawless roads stretching from the South Armagh to North Louth region in the east, all the way to the Fermanagh frontier with Donegal in the Irish Republic in t

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Irish Republican Army

      Jan 21, 2021

      The Irish Republican Army
      6 min read

    • Article

      Northern Ireland

      Dec 22, 2022

      Northern Ireland
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Road To Partition

      Oct 28, 2021

      The Road To Partition
      9 min read

    • Article

      Healing Divisions

      May 18, 2022

      THE sun is shining on the gentle fields of Northern Ireland. The countryside is at its most beautiful and the Mountains of Mourne and Skerry Hill particularly inviting. It seems hard to believe that this most lovely land has seen some of the most vic

      2 min read

    • Article

      Reporting On The Troubles

      Oct 31, 2019

      Reporting On The Troubles
      8 min read

    • Article

      Multicultural Britain Is Born

      Sep 29, 2022

      Multicultural Britain Is Born
      5 min read

    • Article

      Fathers Of The Republic

      Sep 28, 2023

      Fathers Of The Republic
      6 min read

    • Article

      It Was 60 Years Ago Today…

      Feb 7, 2024

      If you want to get a real sense of an era, a good place to start is the display ads in the popular press. In the case of 1964, there was a good deal of talk about floor coverings, with several retailers noting that carpet prices were set to increase

      4 min read

    • Article

      Now And Then

      Nov 24, 2023

      Now And Then
      3 min read

    • Article

      Behind The Headlines

      Jul 28, 2020

      Behind The Headlines
      3 min read

    • Article

      Tudor Rebellion

      Nov 24, 2022

      On Whit Monday 1549, William Underhill and William Seagar two respectable inhabitants of the little Devon village of Sampford Courtenay - got into an argument with their vicar at the parish church. They told him that they disliked the new Book of Com

      8 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Aug 4, 2022

      David Frost with Richard Nixon, 1977. Reader Charlotte Cornish lauds the duo’s TV clash of that year In regard to Clifford Williamson’s feature on Watergate (July), it is interesting to note that this was not the first time that US president Richard

      3 min read

    • Article

      The Young Ones

      Aug 23, 2021

      The Young Ones
      3 min read

    • Article

      Despair Fuels The Flames Of Young Loyalist Anger In Northern Ireland

      Apr 11, 2021

      For the schoolboy commander who stood on the grassy hill and gave his name only as Bob, the intricacies and compromises of politics, policing, Brexit and the Northern Ireland protocol could all be boiled down to this: his side was losing, and that ha

      4 min read

    • Article

      Early Advocate For First Nations Rights

      Dec 29, 2021

      WILLIAM COOPER was born in 1861 in YortaYorta country near the confluence of the Murray and Goulburn rivers, close to the New SouthWales–Victoria border. The Yorta Yorta people had inhabited the area for thousands of years but following European sett

      3 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for The Northern Ireland Troubles

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      The Northern Ireland Troubles - Aaron Edwards

      image1

      Guide To

      The Northern Ireland Troubles

      Operation Banner 1969-2007

      Aaron Edwards

      Contents

      Introduction

      Chronology

      Background to war

      History, myth and memory in the Troubles

      Warring sides

      Brits, Provos and Loyalists

      Outbreak

      Politics in the streets

      The fighting

      From counter-insurgency to internal security

      Portrait of a soldier

      Soldiering the peace: General Sir Mike Jackson GCB, CBE, DSO, DL

      The world around war

      The international dimension

      Portrait of a civilian

      A reporter’s-eye-view: Malachi O’Doherty

      How the war ended

      Ceasefire to endgame

      Conclusion and consequences

      Bibliography

      Introduction

      For more than a generation Northern Ireland was the site of one of Europe’s most bloody and protracted recent conflicts. Between 1969 and 2007 the Troubles, as the conflict became euphemistically known, claimed the lives of around 3,700 people, with over ten times as many injured in countless bomb and gun attacks. The sectarian nature of the conflict, together with the indiscriminate character of the violence, entrenched the bitterness and hatred that continues to polarize relations between and within communities in Northern Ireland today. But what are the origins of the Troubles? How did the main protagonists fight their ‘war’? And why did political violence persist for so long? Moreover, what lessons can be drawn from the transition from the long war to – hopefully – a long peace?

      Although the conflict between Protestant Unionists and Catholic Nationalists has its roots in the settler–native confrontations of the 17th century, its most recent phase can be traced to the partition of Ireland and the formation of a separate Northern Ireland in the 1920s, and the subsequent hold over politics, culture and society enjoyed by the Ulster Unionist Party until the collapse of the Stormont administration in 1972. In the late 1960s a conglomerate of Catholics, nationalists, Republicans and agnostic socialists – along with a handful of Protestants – opposed to Unionist dominance founded the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA). The organization aimed ‘to bring to Northern Ireland effective democracy, and to end all the forms of injustice, intimidation, discrimination and deprivation, which result from the partisan rule of the Stormont regime’. Many activists were exercised by what they saw as the local Unionist regime’s discriminatory policies towards them in jobs, housing and electoral politics, while a minority of extremists were intent on sparking civil unrest and anarchy. The storm whipped up by NICRA protest marches would lead to a groundswell of support for a radical redistribution of these civil rights, eventually bringing both communities into direct confrontation with one another.

      The NICRA marches sparked off counter-demonstrations led by fundamentalist Protestant preacher the Revd Ian Paisley, whose oratory sent crowds into frenzied hysteria when civil rights marches passed through predominantly Unionist areas. Heavy-handed responses by militant Loyalists and elements of the local Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and the auxiliary Ulster Special Constabulary (USC, or ‘B’ Specials) provoked further unrest and violence. The reformist impulse behind the initial civil rights marches soon gave way to a mushrooming of militancy. Protestants were jettisoned from NICRA’s ranks, and as the province spiralled further into sectarian clashes and civil disorder the Irish Republican Army (IRA) emerged as the cutting edge of Catholic defenderism.

      In the heightened atmosphere of the Orange Order’s annual marching season during the summer of 1969, nationalist protestors soon found themselves in open conflict with their Protestant neighbours and the police. Widespread sectarian rioting led to the formation of vigilante groups as respective communities clashed on the streets of Northern Ireland. The Troubles, which had lain subdued since the 1920s – with only the occasional glimmer of violence – had been reignited.

      Few actions in the Troubles were as momentous as the intervention of British troops. Ordered into the province on 14 August 1969 by Home Secretary James Callaghan, following a request by his counterpart in the Northern Ireland government, the troops’ task was to ‘provide military assistance to the civil power’. Despite its initial peacekeeping posture the British Army was very quickly thrust into the midst of a vicious cycle gripping Northern Ireland’s streets. Between 1971 and 1997 Britain saw 770 of its armed forces personnel killed and countless wounded. Approximately 250,000 soldiers qualified for the Northern Ireland clasp of the Army’s General Service Medal, and Operation Banner became the longest campaign in British military history.

      In both political and military terms Operation Banner was one of the most significant interventions in modern times. It lasted longer than the Palestine deployment under the British Mandate (1920s to the 1940s) and was infinitely more complex and controversial than the Aden campaign of the 1960s. Politically, many high-profile atrocities – such as the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets by the various terrorist groups – provoked universal outrage. The knee-jerk reactions of the Security Forces – made up of the RUC, the locally recruited Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR, later the Royal Irish Regiment Home Service Force), and the British Army – from time to time also served to generate international furore and led to high-profile inquiries. The Parker and Compton Inquiries investigated allegations of the ill-treatment of terrorist suspects, while the Saville Inquiry was appointed to determine responsibility for the events of ‘Bloody Sunday’, when soldiers shot dead 14 people. These investigations portrayed Britain and her Security Forces in a poor light and, arguably, handed propaganda victories to militant Republicanism.

      Many Catholic nationalists joined the IRA, a clandestine organization with a long lineage stretching back to the separatist Fenian Movement and the Irish Republican Brotherhood. In 25 years of violence, Republican paramilitaries (mainly the IRA) were responsible for the murders of over 2,000 people – mostly Protestants. Loyalist paramilitary groups – founded primarily in response to the escalation of Republican violence – killed over 1,018 people, mostly Catholics. The Security Forces were responsible for approximately 363 deaths. Despite the highly sophisticated propaganda campaigns undertaken by terrorists, the sad truth was that most victims of the Troubles were ordinary Protestants and Catholics. Even with the running-down of their respective military campaigns and the onset of the ‘peace process’ in the 1990s, paramilitaries continued to harass their respective communities with intimidation, threats, violence and murder.

      While the 1998 Belfast (or ‘Good Friday’) Agreement saw the main Unionist and nationalist traditions reach a political accommodation, violence continued on the streets until the decommissioning of IRA weapons in 2005. Power-sharing institutions were finally devolved by the British government to the local Stormont Assembly in a deal between Ian Paisley’s Democratic Unionist Party and Gerry Adams’ Sinn Féin in May 2007. Meanwhile, it had been announced in July 2006 that due to the winding up of the IRA’s campaign the year before – and in the spirit of ‘normalization’ – the British Army would be terminating Operation Banner in July 2007. The statements that Loyalist paramilitaries were ending their terror campaigns served further to bolster the fledgling power-sharing executive at Stormont. All of these developments acted as the adhesive binding together the peace and political processes in the decade after the signing of the Belfast Agreement.

      Chronology

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1