A fragile peace: understanding Northern Ireland beyond the religious divide
- Gerard O'Boyle
- May 31
- 16 min read
By Gerard O’Boyle
From the medieval papal politics that handed Ireland to the English crown, to the bitter legacy of plantations, partition, and paramilitary conflict, the story of Northern Ireland is one of contested identities and hard-won peace. This article traces the long arc of history that led to the Troubles — and the fragile hope of the Good Friday Agreement.
Gerard was raised in Northern Ireland and after graduating in Irish Studies and History he voted with his feet to leave this troubled province. Since then he has lived and worked in four countries on three continents and is now able to view the Irish situation dispassionately. Having spent several years in the Irish Republic and England he can see it through the lenses of all the participants. Before moving to Barton-on-Sea in Hampshire, Gerard was a member of North Devon Humanists. This is an edited version of a talk he gave to Dorset Humanists.
Introduction
Northern Ireland is often seen through the lens of sectarianism — a Protestant-Catholic conflict rooted in religion. But this view, though widespread, misses the deeper historical realities. The divisions that fuelled decades of violence are rooted not in theology but in colonisation, conquest, and political dispossession. To understand the Troubles — and the uneasy peace that followed — we must go back centuries, to papal decrees, Tudor land grabs, and the plantations that reshaped Ireland’s social fabric. Only then can we begin to grasp how religion became the last visible difference in a conflict driven by power, not faith.
The lingering shadows of conflict
Although the violence that plagued Northern Ireland for decades has largely subsided since the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, peace remains a fragile veneer. Beneath the surface, old wounds fester. Bitterness, anger, and a deep-seated sense of injustice continue to simmer, ready to ignite under pressure. Like the uneasy armistice on the Korean peninsula, the absence of open hostilities does not mean that true peace has taken hold.
One of the most persistent misconceptions about the conflict in Northern Ireland is that it is, at heart, a religious dispute. But this is a fallacy. The division between Protestant and Catholic is not rooted in theological disagreement but in a long and painful history of colonisation, power struggles and contested identity. Religion, in this case, functions more as a tribal marker than a spiritual cause — a shorthand for political allegiance, cultural background, and historical memory. It is, in many ways, a historical coincidence that religious affiliation has come to so neatly map on to political identity.
To understand how this came to be, we need to rewind the clock. In the medieval world, the papacy was more than a spiritual authority — it was also a major political player. The Pope was not just the Bishop of Rome, but the head of a powerful state in its own right, owning vast tracts of land across central Italy known as the Papal States. This was one reason Italy did not become a unified country until the late 19th century: the papacy’s temporal power stood in the way of national unification.
In that era, when disputes arose between kingdoms, rulers often appealed to the Pope as a neutral arbiter. But papal neutrality was always suspect. Popes frequently ruled in favour of their homeland’s interests — unless their own political power was at stake. In 1154, a curious convergence occurred: Henry II ascended the throne of England, and Nicholas Brakespear — the only Englishman ever to become Pope — took office as Adrian IV. Eager to secure concessions for the English church and to win favour with the new king, Adrian granted Ireland to Henry, laying the groundwork for centuries of English involvement in Irish affairs.
Yet English control of Ireland remained limited for centuries. When the Tudor dynasty took the throne in 1485, English rule extended only to a small area around Dublin, known as the Pale. Beyond it, English officials imagined a land of barbarism and disorder — hence the phrase “beyond the pale.”
Up until the reign of Henry VIII, the conflict in Ireland was essentially one of coloniser versus colonised. But when Henry broke from Rome and established the Church of England, the dynamic changed. Now, religion became part of the conflict — not because the Irish objected to Protestant doctrine, but because it was being imposed by those who were also taking their land. To reject the new religion was, in a sense, to resist colonisation.
Mary Tudor’s reign saw the first major land confiscations. In 1554, she seized two counties in the province of Leinster — Offaly and Laois — and renamed them King’s County and Queen’s County. Her successor, Elizabeth I, intensified the policy. In 1586, she confiscated five of the six counties of Munster and rewarded English settlers with the land. A few years later, in 1591, she turned her attention to Ulster, beginning fort construction and military encroachments in Monaghan. The native Irish, increasingly alarmed, began to resist.
Their resistance sparked a bloody conflict that lasted over a decade. Eventually, Elizabeth sent Lord Mountjoy to crush the rebellion. His campaign was brutal: he laid waste to the land, burned crops, killed livestock, and starved the population into submission. The Irish surrendered in March 1603 — unaware that Elizabeth had died a month earlier.
Her successor, James I, inherited a bankrupt crown. England had just endured a long war with Spain and a costly campaign in Ireland. The soldiers had not been paid. Looking for ways to replenish royal coffers, James seized upon a solution: confiscate the remaining Irish lands in Ulster, even those not directly owned by the local chieftains, and redistribute them. Thus began the Plantation of Ulster.
This grand scheme saw land sold to Protestant settlers — mainly Presbyterians from James’s native Scotland, along with English planters and military veterans. It was both a financial strategy and a colonial project. The crown raised money, soldiers were compensated, and the Protestant presence in Ireland was entrenched.
For the native Irish, this was nothing short of theft. They believed their lands had been unjustly taken. For the planters, the land was rightfully theirs — they had paid for it, or earned it in service. These competing claims laid the foundation for a bitter divide, one that would calcify over generations into the sectarian identities we now associate with Northern Ireland.
Settlers and natives: a divided land
By the early 17th century, four major differences separated the native Irish population from the settler communities: language, legal system, dress and culture, and religion. Over time, the first three distinctions faded. The Irish language and legal traditions were outlawed. Modes of dress became more uniform. Cultural habits gradually merged. But one difference endured — and hardened: religion.
With each passing decade, religious identity became the most visible marker of difference, the clearest way to distinguish the descendants of settlers from the native Irish population. And it carried with it the weight of everything that had come before: conquest, land seizure, displacement, and dispossession.
Between 1609 and 1613, three more counties — Leitrim, Wexford, and Longford — were confiscated and resettled with British planters. Though the settlers were always a minority in Ireland, they became the primary means through which Britain ruled the island for the next four centuries. The power structures, institutions and land ownership systems were all designed to keep them in control.
When the English Civil War broke out in the 1640s, some of the native Irish briefly regained land — and exacted revenge. A number of settlers were massacred, some reportedly forced into rivers to drown. The conflict, however, took another dark turn after the execution of Charles I. Oliver Cromwell landed in Ireland in 1649 and waged a brutal campaign marked by massacres, especially at Drogheda and Wexford. His forces targeted towns that resisted, leading to high civilian and military casualties. Following the conquest, the Parliamentarian government passed laws that dispossessed many Irish Catholic landowners and forced them west of the River Shannon into the poor lands of Connacht. The harsh policy became known in popular memory as “To Hell or to Connaught,” though there is no evidence Cromwell himself used the phrase. [Connacht is the modern preferred spelling.]
After the Glorious Revolution of 1688, the deposed King James II fled to Ireland and tried to rally Catholic support by promising the restoration of confiscated lands. But, ill-equipped and poorly armed, the Irish forces were defeated. Although the 1691 Treaty of Limerick, which ended the conflict, was not especially harsh on paper, it was swiftly undermined in practice. By the early 18th century, around 90% of Irish land was in the hands of English landlords.
This was enforced by a draconian set of Penal Laws that stripped Catholics of the right to own land, practice their religion openly, or receive an education. Even Ulster Presbyterian settlers, though Protestant, were not entirely spared — they, too, were excluded from full civic participation. Between 1717 and 1775, around 250,000 Ulster Scots emigrated to America, driven by economic hardship and religious marginalisation.
By 1728, Catholics had lost the right to vote or stand for Parliament. A slow thaw began later in the century. In 1771, Catholics were allowed to lease bogland. In 1772, access to education was restored. And in 1793, the vote was returned — though with significant caveats. Voting was public, by a show of hands, and landlords often marched tenants to polling stations to ensure compliance. Defy the landlord’s wishes, and you risked eviction.
The closing decades of the 18th century were marked by political ferment and revolutionary idealism. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, the American War of Independence, and the radical slogans of the French Revolution — liberté, égalité, fraternité — electrified reformers across Ireland. In 1791, a group of idealistic Ulster Presbyterians founded the Society of United Irishmen. Their vision was strikingly modern: to unite Catholics, Protestants, and Dissenters in a common cause and break the link with England, which they believed lay at the heart of Ireland’s troubles.
But their idealism was no match for the power of the state. The group was quickly infiltrated by government spies. Harassment and arrests followed. In 1798, a poorly coordinated uprising was launched — and swiftly crushed. The defeat paved the way for the Act of Union in 1801, which abolished the Irish Parliament and formally joined Ireland to the United Kingdom.
From famine to franchise
The 19th century was a grim chapter in Irish history. The 1841 census recorded a population of over eight million. Just a few years later, the Great Famine in Ireland (at its peak 1845–47) devastated the island. Over a million people died. Millions more emigrated, especially to America. By the time of the 1911 census, Ireland’s population had dropped to under 4.4 million.
It was a time of hunger, mass eviction, and landlord tyranny. In 1868, William Gladstone became British Prime Minister and declared that his mission was “to pacify Ireland”. His first major reform was the disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Ireland. From that point on, all religious communities were exempt from paying tithes to a church many did not belong to.
Political movements began to gain ground. The Home Rule League, founded in 1870, called for the restoration of the Irish Parliament. In 1873, the Land League was established to fight for fairer conditions for tenant farmers. One of their most effective strategies was a coordinated refusal to take the place of evicted tenants — a tactic that would come to be known as a “boycott”, after the first landlord it was used against: Captain Charles Boycott.
The 1872 Ballot Act introduced secret voting, a significant victory for democracy. The Conservatives and Liberals pursued different approaches: the former focused on land reform to “kill Home Rule with kindness”, while the latter pushed directly for self-government. Gladstone introduced three Home Rule Bills. All were defeated.
Land reforms slowly continued. The 1881 Land Act introduced the “three Fs”: fair rent, fixity of tenure, and freedom to sell a tenancy. But it gave no guidance on what counted as “fair”. In 1903, the Wyndham Act offered loans to tenants so they could purchase their farms.
In 1886, a Home Rule Bill passed in the House of Commons but was rejected in the Lords. Unionists — mainly descendants of the Ulster settlers — were alarmed. The idea of being ruled by a Catholic-majority parliament terrified them. Seizing the moment, Conservative politician Lord Randolph Churchill travelled to Belfast, inflamed Unionist fears, and declared: “Home Rule will be Rome Rule”. Upon his return to London, he boasted that he had “played the Orange card” — and hoped it would turn out to be an ace.
Another Home Rule Bill was introduced in 1912. Ulster Unionists responded with fury, signing a Solemn League and Covenant vowing to resist it by any means necessary — even armed rebellion. They began importing weapons from Germany and drilling paramilitary forces. Irish nationalists soon followed suit, forming the Irish Volunteers. When the British Army was ordered to move against the Ulster Volunteers, some officers mutinied, refusing to act against men they sympathised with. The government backed down.
The Home Rule Bill eventually passed, but with a significant amendment: four of Ulster’s nine counties — those with a clear Unionist majority — could opt out for six years. The bill was never implemented. Just as it was about to come into force, World War I broke out.
In 1916, with the war still raging, a small band of Irish republicans staged an uprising in Dublin. Around 200 men occupied key buildings in the city. The Easter Rising was crushed within a week, and the rebels were jeered by Dubliners as they were led away in chains. But then came the executions. Over a five-week period, British authorities shot every leader of the rebellion — including one so gravely wounded he had to be tied to a chair. The harsh response shifted public opinion dramatically.
In the December 1918 general election, Sinn Féin — which now openly called for Irish independence — won a landslide: 73 of Ireland’s 105 seats, including a slim majority in Ulster’s nine counties. The once-dominant Irish Parliamentary Party, which had campaigned for Home Rule, was wiped out, winning only seven seats. Unionists won 25.
Sinn Féin MPs refused to take their seats at Westminster. Instead, they convened a rival parliament in Dublin. The British government responded with force, triggering the Irish War of Independence. Though hopelessly outmatched, Irish guerrilla units led by Michael Collins waged an innovative campaign of ambushes and intelligence warfare. Many historians consider it the first modern example of guerrilla tactics used successfully against a colonial power.
Partition and the path to violence
In 1920, the British government passed the Government of Ireland Act, partitioning the island into two distinct entities: Northern Ireland — comprising six of Ulster’s nine counties — and the rest of the island, which would eventually become the Republic of Ireland. The border was no accident. It was carefully drawn to include only those counties with a Unionist majority and exclude those with a nationalist majority, ensuring a built-in Protestant majority for the new state of Northern Ireland. Unionists in the three Ulster counties excluded from the new entity — Cavan, Monaghan, and Donegal — felt betrayed. But pragmatism won out. As the Belfast Newsletter put it at the time: “Better to save two-thirds than for all to drown.”
Between 1920 and 1922, intercommunal violence surged. In just two years, 636 people were killed, the majority of them Catholics or nationalists. And then, for the next fifty years, Northern Ireland became a de facto one-party state. The Unionist-dominated Parliament at Stormont ruled without any meaningful oversight from Westminster, enjoying almost total autonomy. That autonomy was swiftly used to entrench Unionist power. In 1922, proportional representation was abolished for local government elections, replaced with first-past-the-post — a system that favoured majority rule. In 1929, the same change was made to elections for Stormont itself. Alongside gerrymandered electoral boundaries, the absence of universal suffrage in local government ensured nationalist voices remained marginalised.
Discrimination was rife. Nationalists were consistently denied jobs in both public and private sectors. Public housing was allocated with clear bias. As only ratepayers had the right to vote in local elections, many adult nationalists — unable to secure homes — remained disenfranchised. Meanwhile, business owners were awarded multiple votes based on the value of their commercial rates. It was a system built to preserve Unionist dominance. In Derry, Northern Ireland’s second-largest city, with a clear nationalist majority, the council remained Unionist until the 1970s.
Unemployment and emigration further suppressed the nationalist population. Despite the heavy-handedness, the region remained relatively peaceful between 1924 and 1968 — largely because nationalists had no political means to push for change. Their grievances were ignored or dismissed.
In 1965, a symbolic decision reignited tensions. Northern Ireland was to get its second university. Despite Derry’s clear need and nationalist majority, the government awarded it to Coleraine — a staunchly Unionist town. The message was clear.
By the mid-1960s, a new generation of nationalists began to rise. Beneficiaries of the 1944 Education Act, they were better educated and politically aware. Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement in the United States and student activism in Europe, they began to demand basic rights: fair housing, equal voting rights, and an end to discrimination. The first civil rights march took place in August 1968, prompted by a scandal: a 21-year-old single woman, secretary to a Unionist councillor, was awarded a council house over a nationalist family with five children. On October 5, a planned march in Derry — the city where injustice was most glaring — was banned. The police responded with brutality. Cameras captured the scenes. Northern Ireland was suddenly in the headlines across Britain and around the world.
More marches were banned, and counter-demonstrations organised by Unionists — often joined by off-duty policemen and members of auxiliary forces — led to frequent confrontations. As tensions escalated, some in the nationalist community began quoting John F. Kennedy: “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable.” And so began the Troubles — a thirty-year conflict that would leave more than 3,500 people dead. Of those, over 2,000 were killed by the IRA, over 1,000 by loyalist paramilitaries, and more than 350 by the British Army and police.
The descent into chaos
For many Unionists, the civil rights campaign was seen not as a plea for equality, but as a veiled attempt to dismantle the state. In August 1969, after a civil rights march in Derry ended in violence, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) fired over 1,100 canisters of CS gas into the nationalist Bogside. In one incident, police pursued a suspect into a house — he escaped out the back, but they beat the homeowner to death. Rioting spread to Belfast, where loyalist mobs attacked nationalist neighbourhoods. Dozens of streets were burned. Thousands were displaced. The IRA, largely defunct at the time, was mocked as standing for “I Ran Away.”
British Home Secretary James Callaghan deployed troops. Initially, they were welcomed in nationalist areas — greeted with tea and sandwiches, seen as a buffer against loyalist violence. But as General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, would later observe: occupying armies live two lives — first as liberators, then as oppressors. A dramatic example of misdirection came in 1969 when the Silent Valley Reservoir was blown up. Blamed on the IRA, it later turned out to be the work of loyalist extremists — a false flag designed to provoke a government crackdown on civil liberties.
One of the most consequential mistakes came when the army was placed under the control of the Unionist Home Affairs Minister at Stormont. The force was quickly used in a partial, sectarian way. In July 1970, 3,000 troops sealed off the Lower Falls — a nationalist area in Belfast — imposed a three-day curfew, and conducted house-to-house searches. The IRA, sensing an opportunity, rearmed and rebranded itself as a defender of the Catholic community, using this legitimacy to wage a renewed campaign for Irish reunification. Unionist leaders pointed to the rising violence as evidence that the civil rights movement had never really been about civil rights at all — it was a Trojan horse for separatism.
The British government began to force reforms on an unwilling Stormont regime. In response to the deepening crisis, three new political parties emerged: the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), led by the firebrand preacher Ian Paisley; the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP), which gave moderate nationalists a political home for the first time; and the Alliance Party, a centrist voice seeking to bridge the sectarian divide.
On 9 August 1971, the government introduced internment without trial — a disastrous move. Under cover of the notorious Special Powers Act, 350 people, almost all of them nationalists, were dragged from their beds in pre-dawn raids. Over the next two days, ten unarmed civilians were killed by British troops, including a priest tending to the wounded and a pregnant woman. An 11-year-old boy suffered life-altering injuries. In protest, moderate nationalists walked out of Stormont.
Then came Bloody Sunday. On 30 January 1972, a peaceful march against internment in Derry ended in bloodshed. British paratroopers opened fire, killing 14 unarmed civilians. Public outrage was overwhelming. In March 1972, the UK government — recognising that Stormont could no longer maintain control — suspended the Northern Ireland Parliament and imposed direct rule from London.
Stalemate and struggle
The years that followed were marked by horror. Atrocities became a grim routine. The IRA targeted British soldiers, police, and economic infrastructure. Loyalist paramilitaries, unable to identify IRA members, simply targeted Catholics at random. There was widespread collusion between loyalist groups and elements of the police and security forces. Intelligence was leaked. Operations were aided. Some officers even joined loyalist murder squads or set up roadblocks to facilitate their getaways.
Investigations into this collusion were consistently obstructed. Files vanished. A fire destroyed vital evidence. High-profile inquiries — such as those led by John Stalker and Sir John Stevens — were sabotaged. Whistle-blowers were discredited or removed on fabricated charges. Justice was buried beneath layers of official denial.
In 1973, Secretary of State Willie Whitelaw brokered the Sunningdale Agreement, which introduced a power-sharing executive and a cross-border Council of Ireland. It lasted just five months. The Labour Party won the general election, and hardline Unionists — led by Ian Paisley — incited the Ulster Workers' Council to launch a general strike. Power stations shut down. Loyalist gangs enforced the strike with violence and intimidation. The British government stood aside. The experiment in power-sharing collapsed.
Another attempt was made with the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement. Though it did little to stem the violence, it marked a turning point in British-Irish relations. For the first time, the Republic of Ireland was given an official advisory role in Northern Irish affairs. It was a small but symbolic step toward mutual cooperation — and would lay the groundwork for what was to come.
From stalemate to settlement
By the early 1990s, it had become clear to all sides that the conflict in Northern Ireland could not be won through violence. The British Army could not crush the IRA, but the IRA could not drive out the British or force reunification. The military stalemate, combined with a growing recognition of the human and economic costs of continued conflict, created the space for a new approach. At the same time, the electoral success of Sinn Féin convinced the republican movement that political power might achieve what bombs could not.
A fragile but significant shift began. In 1994, the IRA announced a ceasefire. Loyalist paramilitaries followed suit. Talks began, haltingly, and with many setbacks. But they laid the foundation for a historic breakthrough. In April 1998, after months of tense negotiations chaired by US Senator George Mitchell, the Good Friday Agreement was signed. It marked the formal end of the Troubles and ushered in a new era of shared governance and constitutional compromise. The agreement required mutual ceasefires, decommissioning of weapons, and fundamental reforms to policing, including the replacement of the Royal Ulster Constabulary with the more representative Police Service of Northern Ireland (PSNI).
The political architecture of the deal was ambitious. Northern Ireland would have a devolved power-sharing government, where unionist and nationalist parties would govern together. The status of Northern Ireland as part of the United Kingdom was confirmed, but with the crucial proviso that a united Ireland could come about in the future if a majority in the North voted for it. The Irish government dropped its constitutional claim to the North, while the UK committed to acting with “rigorous impartiality”.
For a time, the centre held. But in the 2003 elections, the moderate Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) and the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) — both of whom had helped deliver the Good Friday Agreement — were overtaken by more hardline rivals. The Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), founded by Ian Paisley, and Sinn Féin, the political wing of the republican movement, became the dominant voices in their respective communities. Ironically, it was the parties most reluctant to endorse the peace process who would go on to benefit from it politically.
Today, Northern Ireland’s politics remain deeply polarised. Unionists — mostly conservative — and nationalists — often aligned with Labour values — continue to reflect the historical, cultural, and ideological divide. Yet despite the dysfunction, despite the stalemates and suspensions of Stormont, and despite the deep scars left by decades of violence, the peace has largely held.
The Troubles claimed thousands of lives, destroyed communities, and cast a long shadow over generations. But they also forced the people of Northern Ireland — and their leaders — to confront the painful legacies of history. The peace that now exists may be imperfect, but it is still peace.
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