Northern Ireland Civil Rights Movement
In October 1988, Fortnight, the leading and longstanding current sociopolitical affairs review in Northern Ireland, celebrated 20 years of the regional civil rights movement (hereafter, CRM), by offering a meticulous discussion on the topic. The editorial started like this: “For, warts and all, the Civil Rights Movement was the only moment this century when a politics that was defined by something other than unionism or nationalism seemed suddenly to be possible” (Fortnight, Oct. 1988: 3). 
 
 
Keywords: 
 
Northern Ireland; 
United Kingdom of Great Britain
Unionist Divisions, The Onset Of The Northern Ireland Conflict, And ‘Pressures On O'neill’ Reconsidered
Geoffrey Warner’s careful reading of a subset of the documentation relevant to the outbreak of conflict in Northern Ireland, which recently appeared in this journal, undoubtedly offers valuable contributions to academic understanding of these bewildering events. It seems unfair thus to single Warner out for criticism. Nonetheless, the appearance of his article forms an opportunity to try to correct defects in the body of the overpopulated field of literature concerned with the outbreak of that conflict, defects which it epitomises, although with an unusually high number of redeeming qualities. Too often such interpretations are both under-theorised and influenced by a selective reading of sources. This paper will endeavour to offer a more rounded and theoretical view. After considering some of the key weaknesses of Warner’s approach, a model of state crisis will be used both to interpret the onset of conflict in Northern Ireland and to categorise and interpret the weaknesses of many previous analysts’ arguments concerning its onset. It will be argued that key deficiencies of much existing work pertain to understandings of the role of republicanism and of the emergence of provisional republicanism in particular, although some research undoubtedly exaggerates other factors. Correspondingly, the understanding advanced here, nourished by a variety of sources, will draw attention to the role of a range of factors; but it will particularly emphasise that fissiparous tendencies within unionism meant that averting or navigating the crisis in late 1960s Northern Ireland was in fact much more difficult than is often suggested with the benefit of hindsight. Unionism’s fissiparousness was the product of a multiplicity of influences, and it will be suggested here that the roles of territory and religion in unionist politics need to be emphasised, as well as social and ideological sources of division. Fractiousness within unionism was a critical obstacle to any unionist government meeting political or economic pressures for reform from within or without Northern Ireland. In the event the nature of those pressures for reform intensified opposition within unionism and made such obstacles fatal. Notwithstanding Warner’s intimations, an earlier move to direct rule of the Province by the UK government is unlikely to have made this internal problem within unionism easier. Academic underestimation of this obstacle to an early resolution within Northern Ireland may in some cases—Warner’s included—be borne of an assumption that in any given political confrontation attitudes that are reactionary or distasteful may on account of those very attributes be faced down. In fact, if there ever was scope for such a comforting assumption, the most recent political evolutions within Northern Ireland—and especially within unionism—offer less reasonable scope for it than ever.
Putting Pressure on O'Neill
Apart from the memoirs of participants, with all their inherent limitations,1 there is little scholarly discussion of the extent and outcome of the pressure which the British government sought to e...