... hich he retained a narro majority he as forced out of office in April 1969, folloing a bombing hich as blamed on the IRA but later turned, out to be the ork of loyalists. C Aspects of troubles in the 1970s and 1980s.1. The pervasiveness of violence in Northern Ireland. Civil rights turned into civil disorder. The Belfast government could not cope hen fighting broke out in the streets of Belfast. At times, the riots verged on pogroms, such as hen loyalists invaded the nationalist Falls Road. Thousands of families ere forced to leave their homes. The London government sent British troops into Northern Ireland to keep the factions apart in August 1969.1970 as a turning point in Northern Ireland. The British Army, having been elcomed initially by Catholics turned that elcome into suspicion and hatred by conducting mass house searches in nationalist areas.In 1971, Brian Faulkner became Prime Minister after his predecessor, Chichester-Clark, resigned. Faulkner made the colossal blunder of staging Operation Internment in an attempt to quell the IRA. The Army sealed off hole areas during the night raided homes, taking hundreds men for detention ithout trial. Many of the internees ere subjected to brutal treatment. The injustice as compounded by incompetence many if not most of the internees ere innocent, and many senior IRA men escaped the net. 2. Bloody Sunday January 30th 1972The last Sunday in January 1972 as Bloody Sunday. British paratroopers shot dead thirteen unarmed men, six of them under eighteen. A fourteenth died later of injuries sustained on the same day. Thirteen others, including a ido, ere ounded. All of them had been participating in an illegal but largely peaceful march against internment. The public inquiry that folloed, conducted by the British Chief Justice, Lord idgery, as a hiteash, clearing the soldiers of blame, and lending credence to their claims that the men they shot ere armed. Bloody Sunday is a potent propaganda eapon used by the IRA and Sinn Fein. It as not the first atrocity, nor did it claim the most lives more than fifty civilians ere killed by IRA bombs in 1972 alone. On that day and in the cover up that folloed, the state used the same methods as terrorist organizations like the IRA. 3. Aims and functions of the IRA The Irish Republican Army the IRA is the descendant of the most forceful military group that had fought for independence for the hole of the island of Ireland in 1921. By the end of 1969, folloing the resistance by the unionist government to the civil rights campaign, the IRA had begun to regroup, and by early 1970 its members ere confronting British troops ho had arrived on the island to assist ith riot control. The violence of the IRA gre into extensive bombing campaigns directed against civilian, public utility, and military targets. Support for the IRA as increased in August 1971, hen, in an attempt to curb the escalating violence, Internment imprisonment ithout trial as introduced, By the end of the 1970s the Republican movement realized that it needed to build up a mass political base if its campaign as to succeed, and a ne strategy as devised involving a ballot paper in one hand and the Armalite in the other. This strategy meant that the movement ould combine both political and paramilitary pressure to achieve its aims. Although the political ing, Sinn Fein, obtained only 2 per cent support in elections at that time, its success in politics in Northern Ireland has continued to increase to approximately 16 per cent of the total vote. This has enabled it to increasingly use politics, rather than violence, to make its political case for a united Ireland.4. Protestant paramilitary groupsThe threat of the use of force by the Ulster Volunteer Force UVF, a Loyalist paramilitary group, in the early 1900s as a consistent factor in the opposition to Home Rule for Ireland. In the 1960s a ... Download