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, just over half of them civilians, and tens of thousands were injured, bereaved or displaced. The Provisional IRA alone killed 1,696 people, far more than any other group.
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. The past remained live in the 2020s. The 2023 Legacy Act was struck down in part by the courts and is being replaced by a Troubles Bill negotiated between London and Dublin, with the Oireachtas beginning pre-legislative scrutiny of the Irish side of the framework in September 2026; the long-delayed public inquiry into the murder of the solicitor Pat Finucane, which opened that June, remained in its opening phase with findings still pending and became the subject of a fresh legal challenge over core participant status. The Omagh bombing inquiry reopened its examination of how the 1998 attack was carried out and by whom, while a settlement by the Ministry of Defence in the case of a man shot by the British Army in 1972 illustrated the fragmentary nature of redress for victims. Most seriously, the Parades Commission's decision to reopen Portadown's Garvaghy Road to an Orange march produced the most significant parading stand-off since the 1990s, testing the stability of the power-sharing Executive and drawing a rare display of unity from the Dáil; the dispute led to a large-scale police investigation into the blocking protest, to a compromise proposal from the Northern Ireland Secretary that the Orange Order rejected, and to the collapse of five days of Hillsborough Castle talks on 1 October, with a Court of Appeal ruling still pending. The stand-off also drew an unusual intervention from fourteen US congress members and a commitment of intensive engagement by the Irish government, leaving unresolved the underlying question of how a route closed for nearly three decades should be handled.