The Troubles in Ireland

In the summer of 2007, my family and I took a trip to Ireland. As a family we agreed to do a cross country trip around the beautiful country starting in Belfast and going north from there. Even though I was 17 at the time and loved the history of Ireland, I knew very little about what I was about to see in the troubled city of Belfast.

My generation is involved with two wars simultaneously, the war in Afghanistan and in Iraq. In our history class during are time in middle and in high school, we learned about the overwhelming amount of wars that have come and gone. The war that I didn’t hear about in any of my classes was The Troubles. It took place in Northern Ireland and was between the Catholics and the Protestant’s. To the right is a picture of the wall that is in Belfast, that separates the Catholics from the Protestants. You can also see a building that so happens to be a Catholic house, the house is fortified just in case of bombs.

Conflict in Ireland has been going on for hundreds of years, some may say all the way back to 12th century, but in 1606 some British settlers also named “planters” immigrated to Ireland and took control of the Plantation of Ulster, Because of this a physical and mental fight began between the Planters(Protestant’s) and the Irish(Catholics). Over the next 100 years, thousands of Catholics would be forced to move elsewhere in the country and have to resettle their lives because more and more land would be seized by the English Protestants. In fact by 1703, 90% of the land in Ireland was owned by English nobles. During that time the Catholics also had to follow by the Penal Laws, which were a series of laws passed against the Catholics, some laws included restricting rights to their ed...

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...e back in prison Sands started the hunger strikes in the prison on March 1, 1981. He and nine others died because of the hunger strike, around 100,000 people would attend Sand’s Funeral. Even though nothing was won for the British Government, support for the Provisional IRA increased significantly.

In the end the British Government would finally accept that no military solution could stop, and would turn to create a settlement agreement. It wasn’t until 1995, that the Republican and Loyalist paramilitaries announced ceasefires. After the ceasefires, the main two political parties began talks to an agreement amongst each other’s groups. The Belfast Agreement of 1998 is considered by many the end of the war, nonetheless, violence continues to this day. During the 40 year old war, over 3,600 people were lost, lives that shouldn’t have ended in the first place.