ABSTRACT
Britain in 1971 faced a revolt, this time within the United Kingdom, directed by the Provisional Irish Republican Army, an organization that had not even existed two years before. The Irish template might not fit everywhere exactly, but even a revolt within the United Kingdom rather than on the edge of Empire was not alien to distant observers, old rebels, experienced journalists, or military officers who saw, if uncertainly, the analogy. In 1921 Lloyd George and his advisers managed to separate six of the nine counties of historic Ulster from the rest of Ireland and establish the Province of Northern Ireland with a regional government at the huge marble hall at Stormont outside Belfast. The British response to the revolt in Northern Ireland coincided to a remarkable degree with those of the generation of imperial dissolution. The British had experienced all sorts of problems in Ulster.
