The problems was a 30-year ethnic-nationalist conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted from the late 1960s to 1998. It is also known worldwide as the Northern Ireland conflict and has sometimes been characterized as an “irregular war” or “low-level war”. The conflict began in the late 1960s and is generally considered to have ended with the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. Although the problems occurred mostly in Northern Ireland, violence sometimes spread to parts of Ireland, England and continental Europe.
There was a violent sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland from about 1968 to 1998 between overwhelmingly Protestant Unionists (Loyalists) who wanted the province to remain part of Great Britain and overwhelmingly Roman Catholic Nationalists (Republicans) who wanted Northern Ireland to become part of the Republic of Ireland. The British Army, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and the Ulster Defense Regiment (UDR; from 1992 called the Royal Irish Regiment) were the other major actors in the conflict, and their stated purpose was to play a peacekeeping role, particularly between the nationalist Irish the Republican Army (IRA), who saw the conflict as a guerilla war for national independence, and the unionist paramilitary forces, who characterized the IRA’s aggression as terrorism.
Despite its traditional classification as a “low-intensity conflict”, the clash had the characteristics of a civil war, with street battles, dramatic bombings, sniper attacks, barricades and imprisonment without trial. Before a peaceful solution involving the governments of both Great Britain and Ireland was effectively established in 1998, resulting in a power-sharing system in Northern Ireland’s Stormont assembly, 3,600 people were killed and more than 30,000 injured.
Date: 1960–1998
Location: Northern Ireland, Ireland, England and mainland Europe
Outcome: Military stalemate, Good Friday Agreement, St Andrews Agreement
