Northern Spy

The Troubles were a period of violent civil conflict in Northern Ireland, beginning in the 1960s and officially ending in 1998 with the Good Friday Agreement. What motivated the conflict can be dated back centuries, however, specifically to the 16th and 17th centuries. Following the Tudor conquest of Ireland, British colonial expansionism pushed for Protestant settlers (typically of English and, later, Scottish descent) to demographically dominate the largely Catholic Irish people. Lands were confiscated, discriminatory laws were imposed, and Catholic rights were restricted in favor of Protestant ones. The plantation of Ulster—an organized colonization of the province of Ulster—in the 17th century would denote the beginning of the large rift between Protestants and Catholics up until and beyond the Troubles. In a short span of time, Protestants outnumbered Catholics and were able to wield greater economic and political influence in the area.

The skewed power dynamics persisted for centuries and became especially stark after the Irish War of Independence (1919-1921). As a province of nine counties, Ulster is located in the northern area of Ireland, and after the signing of the Government of Ireland Act (1920), six of those counties were partitioned from the Republic of Ireland, kept as part of the United Kingdom, and formed what is now known as Northern Ireland.