The Troubles
The Troubles were an ethno-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted for about thirty years, from the late 1960s to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. The conflict was fought over the constitutional status of the province: unionists and loyalists, mostly Ulster Protestants, wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom, while Irish nationalists and republicans, mostly Catholics, sought a united Ireland. Behind those positions lay centuries of settlement, dispossession and communal division dating from the seventeenth-century Plantation of Ulster, the partition of the island in 1921–22, and five decades of unionist rule marked by discrimination against the Catholic minority.
The conflict began amid a civil rights campaign in the late 1960s against discrimination in housing, employment and voting. The banning and violent policing of peaceful marches, loyalist counter-mobilisation, and the August 1969 riots led to the deployment of British troops and the emergence of the Provisional IRA. The early 1970s were the deadliest years: internment without trial, Bloody Sunday, the suspension of Stormont and the introduction of direct rule, and the Sunningdale power-sharing experiment destroyed by the 1974 Ulster Workers' Council strike. Republican and loyalist paramilitaries conducted campaigns of bombing and assassination, the security forces waged counter-insurgency, and parts of the state became entangled in collusion with loyalist groups. More than 3,500 people were killed, the great majority of them civilians, and tens of thousands were injured, bereaved or displaced.
The 1980s and 1990s saw the hunger strikes transform republican politics, the Anglo-Irish Agreement draw Dublin into northern affairs, and a slow, halting negotiation towards a settlement. The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 established power-sharing institutions in Belfast, a North/South Ministerial Council and a British-Irish Council, and replaced the Irish constitutional claim to the whole island with the principle of consent. The single worst atrocity of the conflict, the Omagh bombing, occurred four months after the Agreement and strengthened rather than weakened it.
This wiki covers the origins and chronology of the Troubles, the political, military and civil-society organisations involved, the major events and flashpoints, the places most affected, and the underlying concepts of nationalism, unionism, sectarianism and consent. It also documents the long aftermath: policing reform, paramilitary decommissioning, repeated collapses and restorations of devolved government, disputes over the past, the unresolved legacy of violence, and the ways in which the conflict is commemorated in murals, parades, literature and contested history.