terrorism, Irish

The use of systematic violence in the conflict over British government in Ireland has occurred on a sporadic basis for centuries. Irish nationalism seeks separation and home rule while Protestant unionism wishes to maintain the link between Britain and Ireland. Both sides have resorted to physical force as a legitimate course of action. Terrorists associated with Irish republicanism, the revolutionary wing of nationalism, view themselves as patriotic freedom fighters acting to remove the invading British from the illegal occupation of Ireland. Terrorists associated with loyalism, the militant side of unionism, claim to be simply responding to the threat of the republicans.

‘The Troubles’ of Northern Ireland During the violence that erupted between the Protestant and Catholic communities in Northern Ireland at the end of the 20th century, a number of terrorist groups emerged on both sides of the sectarian divide. Overall they have been responsible for the death of around 3,000 people since 1968.

Republican terrorist groups On the republican side there were two main groups: the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and the smaller but more hard-line Irish National Liberation Army (INLA), a left-wing offshoot of the IRA founded in 1974. The IRA was the most active and notorious terrorist group, with actions such as the bombing of Belfast city centre on Bloody Friday in 1972, which killed 11 people; the bombing of the Conservative government's party conference in Brighton in 1984; and the bombing of shoppers in Warrington, England in 1996. All of these acts formed part of the concerted IRA campaign to force the British government to leave Ulster and allow a united Ireland.

In more recent years a number of dissident republican terrorist groups have come to the fore, including the Continuity IRA and the Real IRA. These represent offshoots of the more hardline elements of the mainstream IRA. They reject the Northern Ireland peace process of the late 1990s. The Real IRA was responsible the car bomb in Omagh, County Tyrone, which killed 28 people in August 1998, the largest number killed in a single incident in the history of the modern conflict in Northern Ireland. The group announced a ceasefire shortly afterwards.

Loyalist terrorist groups On the loyalist side there is more fracture among the terrorist groups. The original paramilitary group of ‘the Troubles’ was the Ulster Defence Association (UDA). Over the 30 years of ‘the Troubles’, a number of other smaller groups sprang up including the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF). These groups have engaged in a campaign of terror, with random killings and actions such as the attack on an IRA funeral in Belfast in 1986; the bombing of a fish and chip shop on the Shankhill Road, Belfast, in 1993, that left 10 dead; and, in 1998, the murder of two children in a house that was firebombed because their parents were of a mixed Catholic and Protestant marriage.