ABSTRACT
The Northern Ireland conflict has its roots in the failure of the British state-
building project to consolidate the territorial gains of colonization in Ireland. A
decade of intense political activity in the early 20th century, a failed armed
rebellion in 1916 and a guerrilla war by the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in
1918-21 led to the establishment of an independent Irish state. The British
Government, after a bitter but ultimately failed attempt at counter-insurgency,
withdrew its forces from most of Ireland, but the price to be paid was partition.
The particular circumstances of the settler plantations from the 17th century
onwards had led to well-organized opposition in the north-east to Irish independ-
ence, and these supporters of union with Britain were termed ‘unionists’. They
had a sufficiently strong alliance with elements of the British political establish-
ment to persuade the British Government to adopt a policy of partition, even after
they had failed to defeat the wider challenge of Irish nationalism. Irish nationalists split on the terms of the treaty offered by the United Kingdom
and fought a brief but bitter civil war. After the defeat of radical forces in the civil
war the new Irish Government was preoccupied with stability, not with the
completion of Irish unity. Unionists for their part accepted a devolved parliament
in Northern Ireland as a means of ensuring greater control over their own political
destiny. They accepted a smaller geographical area that the traditional northern
province of Ulster where their majority was very small and instead drew the
partition boundary around an area where they made up approximately 66% of the
population.1 Faced with a nationalist minority and a new southern Irish Govern-
ment, unionist political culture was grounded in a siege mentality. In this context
elites were able to control a political party that ruled in a single-party Govern-
ment, with no significant internal division, for nearly 50 years. The unionists
cemented this position by asserting a nakedly privileged position for their own
within the system. It had a strong internal class inequality, but even those at the
bottom of the unionist hierarchy still possessed advantages over their nationalist
counterparts in employment, cultural rights and security. As Richard Rose (p. 465,
in Rose, 1971-see Bibliography) put it, nationalist compliance with the new
regime, not consent, was sought.
