The Troubles are difficult to talk about without stirring up anger snd passions.
The below is purely about *what happened / is happening* during the Troubles and is not concerned with advocacy for any particular viewpoint, nor does it condone the actions of military or paramilitary personnel during The Troubles.
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It’s been 25 years since the Troubles, aka the Northern Ireland conflict, nominally ended with the Good Friday Agreement.
In reality, dissident paramilitaries have continued the conflict, but at a much lower level of intensity compared to the pre-Agreement years.
The Troubles through 1998 claimed over 3500 lives and left over 45,000 wounded.
Most of these casualties were civilians.
The Troubles were and are a very interesting conflict from military and social perspectives,
and there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the way the conflict was conducted, and especially how it was (again, nominally) concluded.
This thread is for general discussion of The Troubles.
I have specific interest in questions concerning particular parts of the military and intelligence situation, but any Troubles-related discussion is welcome.
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Background: The Troubles was a period of low-intensity internal war between the late 1960s and (arguably) 1998, taking place mostly within Northern Ireland, with occasional incidents elsewhere.
A variety of non-state paramilitary belligerents fought each other and the British state, over the political / territorial status of Northern Ireland (which comprises the counties of Derry / Londonderry, Armagh, Antrim, Down, Tyrone, and Fermanagh).
The reason that Northern Ireland was (is) in contention was that, when the Irish War for Independence and subsequent Irish Civil War ended in 1923, the six counties named above, which had large populations of British-aligned “Unionists,” remained part of the UK in the Partition of Ireland.
However, this partition was not accepted as legitimate by some (“Republicans,” not to be confused with the American political party) who held that all Ireland ought to be united under the Republic of Ireland.
(Note: British occupation of Ireland had begun in the early 1600s and had already resulted in several costly wars since that time)
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UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
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The Good Friday Agreement was welcomed by a large majority of Irish citizens on both sides of the partition. The people were war-weary after decades of fighting and civilian casualties.
For those who were committed to the idea of a united Ireland, however, the Agreement was seen as a step back rather than a step forward.
The Good Friday Agreement resulted in the first ever official recognition by the Republic of Ireland, of British control of Northern Ireland, and also its first legal agreement that the status of Northern Ireland would not change except by majority vote of the people on both sides of the partition.
As Northern Ireland’s majority had been heavily Unionist since the beginning of the Troubles, and this majority had only increased as Republicans left the region due to violence, the Good Friday Agreement seemed to preclude a united Ireland for the foreseeable future.
***The Agreement also stipulated the decommissioning of the weapons of the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA, also called “Provos”), the main Republican paramilitary belligerent and the military counterpart of Sinn Fein, the Republican political party which participated in the agreement. At the time, Sinn Fein was led by Gerry Adams. Despite his denial that he had ever been a member of the PIRA, it is widely believed that Adams effectively commanded the PIRA at that time.
Likewise, the main Unionist paramilitary, the Ulster Volunteer Force (via its respective political proxy, the Progressive Unionist Party) agreed to decommission its weapons.
The paramilitary decommissioning process was nominally concluded in 2010***
One of the questions asked by angry Republicans and pro-unification people was:
WHY WOULD SINN FEIN / THE PIRA AGREE TO TERMS THAT ESSENTIALLY NULLIFIED THEIR AMBITIONS FOR A UNIFIED IRELAND?
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Throughout its existence, the PIRA was infiltrated and compromised by agents of the British state.
The extent of British compromise of the PIRA was so severe, that it appears even the head of the PIRA Internal Security Unit (which existed to detect and kill spies within the ranks), Freddie Scappaticci, was himself a British agent.
When, in an effort designed by Gerry Adams to reduce infiltration and compromise, the PIRA switched its organization strategy from a monolithic hierarchical model (like a regular army) to a cellular model of loosely-associated “Active Service Units,”
the Internal Security Unit and the quartermaster apparatus were exempt from this policy change.
WHY?
A specific military defeat, known as the 1987 Loughgall Incident,
in which a PIRA unit was ambushed and routed by British SAS personnel in an attempted operation against a Royal Ulster Constabulary (police) base, raised serious questions at the time.
The PIRA unit which carried out the Loughgall operation was made up largely of veteran Republican fighters who opposed efforts in the Northern Ireland peace process by Sinn Fein, and its leader Gerry Adams.
These PIRA hardliners were not willing to accept an electoral-politics-oriented end to the war; their position was that a united Ireland was the reason they fought, and the only acceptable outcome of the conflict.
The elimination of this unit at Loughgall removed an impediment to Adams’ political ambitions.
At the time, questions and speculation arose about whether Adams was responsible for the information leak, but these questions went essentially nowhere.
But 11 years later, when the Good Friday Agreement ended the PIRA’s armed campaign without any territorial concessions by the British, dissident Republicans again accused Adams of being a British agent.
Several of those dissident Republican groups continued to carry out attacks under names including the “Real IRA (RIRA)” and the “Continuity IRA,” but a 1998 RIRA attack at Omagh which killed 29 civilians and left hundreds injured, destroyed most of the remnant goodwill that the armed campaign still had in the Republican community.
Adams continued his political career as the head of Sinn Fein, until his retirement from the organization in 2018.
In 2002, a large number of British intelligence documents pertaining to the Troubles were stolen by Republicans; according to a BBC report aired in several parts as “The Secret History of the Troubles,” much of these documents’ content was “so inflammatory” that it was never revealed or leaked to the public.
It was widely speculated that those documents revealed British infiltration of the PIRA and Sinn Fein at the highest levels.
WAS GERRY ADAMS A BRITISH ASSET?
And if so, when did he become one?
