| schema:articleBody
| - Tensions between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland go back decades with more than 3,500 people killed in "The Troubles" that ended at the turn of millennium. But the history of conflict on the island of Ireland goes back centuries. The island's pagan Gaelic population assumed Christianity around the fifth century thanks to the Britano-Roman missionary Saint Patrick, today the patron saint of Ireland. After the defeat of Ulster's Gaelic clans in the Nine Years' War in 1603, the English crown confiscated their lands and brought in English and Scottish settlers in what became known as the "plantation", creating an enduring Protestant majority in the north-east of the island. The Irish population was decimated by the Great Famine of 1845-1848 when their staple food, the potato, was ravaged by blight, causing successive crop failures. Between half a million and 1.5 million people died from disease or starvation and a million more were forced to leave, many emigrating to the United States. A failed bloody rebellion in Dublin in 1916 is followed three years later by a guerrilla war for independence by a Catholic group called the Irish Republican Army. After a military stalemate, the island is split in 1921 into a Catholic-majority Irish Free State in the south and a Protestant-majority Northern Ireland, which remained within the United Kingdom. The larger southern part declares itself a republic 1949. Anger among minority Catholics in Northern Ireland over discrimination in voting rights, housing and jobs erupted into riots in 1968 with the authorities sending in the British army. It marked the start of a bloody three-decade period called "The Troubles". In 1970 the pro-Catholic Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) launched a campaign of bombings and shootings against the troops. Protestant paramilitary groups reciprocated. One of the worst incidents was "Bloody Sunday" in 1972 when British soldiers opened fire on a peaceful civil rights march in the Catholic Bogside area of Londonderry killing 14 people. The same year London dissolved the Northern Ireland parliament and imposed direct rule. An historic power-sharing government between Protestants and Catholics was set up in 1974 under the Sunningdale Agreement but this collapsed within months after strikes led by hardline Protestants and violence from loyalist paramilitaries. Another turning point came in 1981 when IRA inmate Bobby Sands and nine of his comrades died on hunger strike in the Maze Prison, where they were demanding political prisoner status. A version of the Sunningdale deal was revived in the breakthrough Good Friday Agreement signed on April 10, 1998 between Britain, Ireland and the main Northern Ireland political parties. It led to a new semi-autonomous Northern Ireland and power-sharing government between Protestant and Catholics, marking an end to the three-decade conflict. In 2005 the IRA -- which said it had stopped "all operations" in 1997 after two previous ceasefires during the peace talks -- disarmed its members. Protestant leader the Reverend Ian Paisley and Gerry Adams of Sinn Fein -- the IRA's political wing -- met on March 26, 2007 to clinch a deal that saw self-rule restored later that year. The British army also ended its nearly four-decade mission. Britain left the European Union in 2020 and the EU single market in 2021. Much of the unrest over the past week stems from unionist anger at a new post-Brexit "protocol", which they believe drives a wedge between the province and the rest of the UK, drawing it closer into Dublin's orbit. The Good Friday deal had ended border checks on the island and blurred thorny issues of identity as both the north and south were part of the EU's single market. kd-ang/eab/fg
|
![[RDF Data]](/fct/images/sw-rdf-blue.png)
![[cxml]](/fct/images/cxml_doc.png)
![[csv]](/fct/images/csv_doc.png)
![[text]](/fct/images/ntriples_doc.png)
![[turtle]](/fct/images/n3turtle_doc.png)
![[ld+json]](/fct/images/jsonld_doc.png)
![[rdf+json]](/fct/images/json_doc.png)
![[rdf+xml]](/fct/images/xml_doc.png)
![[atom+xml]](/fct/images/atom_doc.png)
![[html]](/fct/images/html_doc.png)