Let's see if we can avoid problems that way I like the smell of strikes in the morning. It smells like...like victory. Northern Ireland has never been a place of peace. As they say in Belfast: if they ask you what religion you are, better answer "Buddhist". Let's get on with it, today we start the first video of April Patreon, the event in which my patrons on Patreon have chosen for me throughout this month, 4 videos, 4 topics to be treated on the channel. And as a topic let's say that today we are not going lightly. So, Gianmatteo and Christian asked me to talk about the Northern Irish conflict. And the basic questions were: why is Ireland divided into two parts and why is there all this animosity between the North and the South? What was the IRA? To answer these questions we have to go back many, many centuries. Let's get started. But before we do, ladies and gentlemen, I wanted to tell you that today's video was kindly sponsored by CyberGhostVPN, a service that allows you to surf the web in complete safety. Over 36 million users have already chosen to encrypt their data traffic and mask their IP on the internet with CyberGhostVPN. Its service, certified as one of the best on the market with 5 stars on TrustPilot, is a very useful way not only to protect yourself from insecure public connections but also to bypass regionally restricted content. CyberghostVPN doesn't keep track of the logs of our activities and this guarantees browsing anonymity: you can for example access all the extra content of more than 38 streaming libraries including Netflix America or Germany or even all those Youtube videos that are usually blocked in Italy. For instance, I watch Icelandic national TV almost every day to keep myself in practice with the language without CyberGhostVPN, I would be staring at the wall all the evenings Available on major platforms and with a €1.95 monthly subscription, plus 4 months free thanks to the 84% discount CyberGhostVPN allows you to connect up to 7 devices at a time, all guaranteed by a refund of the first 45 days of subscription and 24/7 customer support.
The history of Ireland is one of the most complex and varied of all time it is the history of a secular conflict between two centers of power: the English and the Irish. In the course of time, to the autochthonous populations of Celtic culture and language, completely different from those of Germanic stock of Great Britain, various migratory waves went to the island, started around 1170 with the penetration of Normans from Wales, already occupied since 1200. Already at the time of Henry VIII, the first sovereign to bear the title of King of Ireland, and then later between 1600 and 1700 the influx of English and Scottish peasants, of Protestant religion, in the northern part of the island was so high as to assume the contours of a planned colonization, the so called plantation. The Protestant-Catholic division was one of the first reasons for hatred: with the Protestant Reformation of Henry VIII in the middle of 1500, in the whole country the persecution and the application of capital punishment against Catholics would last until the beginning of the XIX century. The massive arrival of English and Scottish Protestants was a traumatic event. The Irish monks reacted more or less in this way: Damn Scots! the English penetration coincided with the expropriation of the lands and possessions of the Irish of Catholic faith and who ended up in most cases forced to take refuge in the hinterland. The result of this process was immediately evident in the North of the country where most of the urban population ended up coinciding with the Protestant one, more than 90%, to the detriment of the Irish Catholic one that was pressed in the rural provinces with low population density. The pressures and social frustrations between the two sides, English and Irish, reached in the province of Ulster a first point of intolerable hostility in a general revolt in 1641, a revolt drowned by Oliver Cromwell in a bloodbath in favor of the English crown of the House of Stuart. The English victory decreed the beginning of a path always discriminatory: Paradoxically, the first to seek autonomy for the island, more than anything else to defend their economic interests, were the Irish Protestants who obtained at first several concessions from London, including their own dedicated parliament. However, English fears, generated by new revolts in 1798, pushed London to revoke the glimmer of autonomy granted previously; to this was added the symbolic formation of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland which put an end to any vague autonomy with the so-called Union Act in 1800. From then on there would be a reversal of fronts: to put a spoke in the wheels of the Englishmen were no longer the Protestants who chose to put on a good face with the English crown, but the Catholics, who chose to embrace the nationalist cause. The father of Irish patriotism was Daniel O'Connell, who in 1823 founded the Catholic Association an organization that aimed at independence through peaceful means; O'Connell was soon ousted from the political scene, but his ideas had already taken hold of the population. However, O'Connell's good pacifist intentions were cancelled by an unpleasant inconvenience: half a century of very serious famine caused by a wickedly devious micro-organism: this little thing here. And this thing here affected potatoes, making them inedible. Result: 1 million people died of starvation and massive emigration of displaced people from the island to North America, Australia, New Zealand... to put it simply, everywhere The substantial indifference of the English crown in front of that drama sharpened the nationalist and independentist feelings, pushing some Irish to convince themselves that behind the ruin of the crops there was the British crown itself. As a consequence of the tensions and the increase in riots, in the middle of the 19th century, a subversive and secret organization arose on the island aimed at obtaining independence from the British: the Irish Republican Brotherhood, which, as the name itself evoked, opposed the monarchy to the Republic. The British government, led by liberal William Gladstone, realized the impossibility of appeasing the tempers, and chose to proceed with a half-measure, giving partial political autonomy to the island in 1870 through the Home Rule initiative, a concession that symbolically guaranteed a local parliament but did not guarantee independence from the British crown. The first to be opposed to this measure were indeed the Protestant Irish, those most loyal to London, and who for the first time began to call themselves Unionists, as they were opposed to self-government and in favor of maintaining the union of the Kingdom in defense of their economic and commercial interests. Unionists feared a unified Ireland: why? The answer is clear. ending up in a predominantly Catholic country would have meant the beginning of the end of their privileges, the end of the party. And so Home Rule, having neither art nor part, displeased everyone. the Unionists, who wanted the status quo to be maintained, but also and above all the independent nationalists, who felt deceived by that project, especially when from the early twentieth century the large colonies such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand began to enjoy greater political autonomy thanks to the denomination of dominion. The situation was inflamed in the middle of the First World War, when on Easter Monday of April 1916 a group of about 1500 Irish nationalists led by James Connolly organized in Dublin a popular uprising proclaiming the birth of the Republic of Ireland. The revolt was severely repressed in blood by the British military. In the end, the British prevailed. What the British had not foreseen, however, was that the episode would have given a strong popular support to the cause of independence which, in the elections of 1918, recorded the rise of the nationalist independence party, Sinn Fein (lit. Just Us). Sinn Fein went from 7 seats to 73, leading to the collapse of the supporters of Home Rule and therefore to the collapse of those who wanted a line of soft passive autonomy from the London government. The Irish people, who until now had mostly stood by and watched, began to raise their heads, sending an unequivocal political signal. The nationalist parliamentarians of Sinn Fein refused to sit in the London Parliament and created the Irish National Assembly, which unilaterally proclaimed the independence of the island.
Sinn Fein was the lifeblood, the engine of the Irish political revolution that, as the British repressions increased in 1919-1921, began to organize militarily to respond to the attacks of the British black and tans. Black and tans referred to the color of the British soldiers' uniforms. It was in that precise moment that the soldiers belonging to the Sinn Fein party joined what would become the IRA, the Irish Republican Army. In 1920, in the midst of the clashes, the Parliament of London issued the Government Ireland Act which provided for the division of the island into two separate legal entities on the one hand the six counties of Ulster and the other the rest of the island country both with their own parliament and executive, in the case of Southern Ireland, the Dàil Eireann. To the new Irish capital, Dublin, which had experienced a great demographic growth in the last years of the 19th century, was added a new capital, this time in Northern Ireland: Belfast. The hostilities ended formally, in 21, when the English Prime Minister David Loyd George, together with the Irish leader Micheal Collins, decreed the birth of the Irish Free State. The basic problem was that that state was still not very free, despite the name. In fact, Ireland continued to be a British dominion, in a series of clauses that bound the island to the British crown in crucial areas such as foreign policy and the economy. As a result, the IRA got angry, and when the IRA gets angry, troubles come. When the British confirmed the division of Ireland into two parts, one of which, the North, was excluded from the free state of the South, IRA militants rose up against the Irish government in favor of that arrangement. To romanticize it, the story went like this: You are surrounded. Surrender! NEVER! The agreement created an irremediable fracture within the same Irish nationalist front: this originated a new war, this time civil, in which to prevail would have been in 1923 the nationalists in favor of the conditions of the separation treaty. With little more than 1 million inhabitants, the six counties with a Protestant majority that made up Northern Ireland - Antrim, Down, Fermanagh, Tyrone, Derry and Armagh - (sorry for the bad pronounciation, boys) remained even more bound to the policies of King George V. Confirming their attachment to the English crown, in 1925 the citizens of Ulster, called to express themselves in a referendum on whether or not to join the new free state of the south, decided to maintain union with London. The policy of the leader of the unionist party, James Craig, did not help to calm the Ulster people. He developed an increasingly discriminatory strategy towards the Catholic minority, who had never hidden their desire to join the new free state. Craig introduced and developed powerful limitations to the fundamental rights of the Northern Irish, provisions that would remain in force until 1974: arrests and searches without warrants, restrictions on the free movement and expression of citizens all functional to limit the margins of operation of Catholics, fearing that London might decide to achieve the unification of Ulster with the free state. An accomplice in fomenting social injustice was the so-called gerrymandering electoral model, which in practice - through a calculated revision of the constituencies - always guaranteed Protestants a majority in the city councils. Northern Ireland's entrepreneurs supported this political manipulation and were also rewarded, in an omertous way, with great concessions from the Belfast government For its part, London knew very well what was happening on the other side of the St. George's Channel yet to counter discrimination the Parliament in Westminster did practically nothing, clearly because it was interested in keeping the situation unchanged. With the passing of the decades, first in 1937 with the approval of the new sovereign Irish constitution and then in 1948 with the approval of the Republic of Ireland Act, which would have sanctioned the republican form of the island and its exit from the British Commonwealth, the situation remained unchanged: the new Ireland, now to all intents and purposes politically and economically independent, did not yet include the Uster which had remained in the hands of the United Kingdom. And here it is important to make a clarification: this territory, although with a Protestant majority, saw that 10-15% of Catholics within it as a disruptive force, a threat to the solidity of the union with Great Britain, a threat that wanted to push Ulster with Dublin. All this lasted without major clashes until the 1960s, in a latent form. It was, however, in the so-called "O'Neill Era", named after the Northern Irish Prime Minister between 63 and 69, that things began to take a dramatic turn in that year, in fact, the Ulster Volunteer Force was born, a paramilitary corps of the Protestant Unionist faction, which would soon be stained with heinous crimes against Catholic citizenship, with the aim of opposing any movement that claimed equal rights. In August 1969, with the support of the local police, entire Catholic neighborhoods of Belfast were attacked by Protestants; Catholics, to defend themselves, gave life to a paramilitary force, which took its name from teh IRA that at the beginning of the century had fought for independence from the British. Born as a protest against British imperialism, the IRA at first was only concerned with defending Catholic citizens from raids and attacks, all this the British government hastened to send military units in the region to keep a firm grip on a territory that was in danger of getting out of hand. Northern Ireland has always had a great strategic importance for the British crown not so much for a matter of prestige as for territorial control of the waters west of the Atlantic and for greater security of its internal borders. And so, in the early 70s, Belfast became the most militarized city in Europe, the scene of clashes on a par with other cities torn apart by civil war such as Beirut, Tripoli or Damascus. The abuse and violence of the British army on the Northern Irish civilian population culminated on January 30, 1972, in the town of Derry, in the infamous Bloody Sunday, when a group of British paratroopers fired on Catholic demonstrators causing more than 14 deaths and injuries. This fact, heinous and very serious, would have triggered the reactions of the most extremist fringe of Catholics, increasing popularity and following up to an estimated number of 10,000 followers, merged in the wing called Provisional IRA, which, in an attempt to break away from the United Kingdom to achieve a single great Ireland, would have pushed the country into a real civil conflict, the second of the century. The extraordinary measures adopted by the Unionist government in 1970 (including the internment without trial of suspected terrorists) only exasperated the souls, increasing the support of Catholics to the IRA and making vain all the negotiations that took place to proceed to a peaceful resolution. The attacks of the IRA, organized in the years to come by the mind of the group, Gerry Adams, struck several British cities, both in Ireland and in Great Britain, throwing in terror the civilian population. They were mostly bomb attacks, organized in pubs or other crowded places, which cost the lives of many innocent civilians: the victims of the Northern Irish conflict, euphemistically renamed The Troubles, were estimated at about 3,500. and being in Western Europe, they were not surely few Among the most striking and famous attacks of the Troubles there were the devices placed by the IRA in August 79 on the boat of Lord Louis Mountbatten the last viceroy of India and uncle of Duke Philip of Edinburgh, and those installed in a hotel in Brighton, in the south of England, in 1984, during one of the congresses of the Conservative Party, and which, in addition to causing 8 deaths, narrowly missed the incumbent Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. Warning: we must not think that attacks and murders were exclusive to the IRA: the reaction of the English and Northern Irish Unionist government was also very harsh: let's just think about bans such as the Broadcasting ban that prevented the airing of radio and television broadcasts that were not of Unionist or British origin let's just think about the monocratic courts to summarily judge anyone suspected of terrorist offenses to the point of opening later a whole series of investigations on the actual justice put in place But let's also just think about the tortures of detainees awaiting trial or those interned directly without due process facts that would provoke protests by Amnesty International for the violation of human rights. An initiative passed into history were the numerous hunger strikes launched by prisoners, mostly republicans, then pro-Irish, in the prisons of Belfast; exemplary was the case of Bobby Sands, elected MP in Westminster, who, following the example of Terence MacSwiney 40 years earlier, would have let himself starve to death in 1981: his funeral, would have seen the participation of more than 100 thousand people, who shouted "Tiocfaidh ár lá" "our day will come", made him a hero of the Irish cause. "I am a political prisoner," Sands wrote in his diary, I am a political prisoner because I am the effect of a perpetual war that the oppressed Irish people fight against a foreign, crushing, unwanted regime that refuses to leave our land. I defend the divine right of the Irish nation to sovereign independence, and I believe in it, just as I believe in the right of every Irish man and woman to defend that right by armed revolution. That is the reason I am imprisoned, stripped naked, tortured." In all those years the long trail of bloodshed did not produce any concrete result either for the independence cause, which wanted above all the withdrawal of the British from the island and that instead found itself increasingly deprived of its militants because of the hundreds of arrests, or for the conservative governments themselves, which were given to a war without quarter against the IRA, which, in the meantime, had organized itself by creating a handful of selected men the Unknowns, with the task of eliminating and burying in the countryside any individual suspected of betraying the group with the British Secret Service The British SAS used any means to find shelters and members of the IRA: Her Majesty's Army even went so far as to set up a fake door-to-door laundry service: code-named Operation Four Square Laundry. The Secret Service picked up the clothes in a van, washed them and returned them; what made it different from a normal laundry was that the clothes were all tested for gunpowder residue on the fabric. And then there was some genius from the Fourteen Intelligence Company who opened a massage parlor in Belfast to pick up information from the conversations of the customers lying on the couch. Pure genius. In essence, the situation in Belfast was that of a potentially endless Mexican standoff where everyone, police and IRA, acted in secret. Some leaders of the IRA and Sinn Feinn, its real political arm, began to look for a way out: these men had begun their revolutionary career in the streets of Derry and Belfast in 1968, but in the 90s, now in their sixties and with nothing more to prove, they chose the path of negotiation in anticipation of the future, a future where young people - decimated by unemployment and uncertainties of tension - seemed to have no hope. Many IRA members, however, argued that if the IRA could not win the "armed struggle," it could not lose it either. That way, they said, victory would go to the most influential international actor, namely the British crown. To this must be added the fact that several leaders and members of the IRA, including Rose Dugdale and Eddie Gallagher, were doing a lot of business with counterfeiting and other forms of organized crime as well as with smuggling paintings (famous was the theft of works by Goya, Rubens and Vermeer for a total of over 8 million pounds). Ending the struggle meant giving up all that and for many it was unthinkable. Despite these difficulties, in the end, compromise prevailed over the diehards thanks also to the arrival of a political class more open to dialogue. Of symbolic value was the Downing Street Declaration, a declaration sanctioned by Sinn Fein and the British government, according to which Ulster could join the Republic of Ireland, only if the majority of its population was in favor of this move. Thus, on April 10, 1998, the so-called Good Friday Agreement was signed in Belfast by all the factions involved - British, Irish, Protestants, Catholics; In 2005 the IRA officially laid down its arms, handing over its arsenals - all filled with weapons of Libyan origin, while two years later the British army left Ulster. Nevertheless, the peace process is not absolute in itself; this was well demonstrated by the fact that in the midst of negotiations events such as the attack on London Docklands in 1996 after 18 months of ceasefire, would serve as a warning to the entire local population. Today the IRA continues to exist, despite being reduced to a few hundred members due to numerous arrests and although it has been responsible for some attacks (fortunately without victims), such as the one against the headquarters of MI5 in Belfast on October 5, 2010. But for now, IRA seems still dormant Although the peace agreements have given Ulster decades of peace and new development, the IRA still declares that its official goal remains the independence of Ulster from London. Casting doubt and concern today is the recent exit of the United Kingdom from the European Union: with Brexit, a not insignificant imbalance has been created, with on the one hand Ireland remaining within the borders of the Union and on the other Ulster, anchored to the United Kingdom, completely outside the European integration process. Northern Ireland has not yet fully come to terms with its past and talking about the IRA is still taboo in public discourse. Complicating matters is the fact that Ulster, at the time of the referendum, voted with a majority - over 55% to remain in the European Union, a vote that consistently followed that of Scotland where 67% voted in favor of remainining in the EU. With an increasingly fractured Britain, a reunified Ireland could perhaps be a scenario that future generations could see coming. At the moment discussions are still open, especially those aimed at maintaining a special zone of free movement of goods and people between the two Irelands. However, the specter of the IRA and social unrest continues and will continue to hover over thePoblacht na hÉireann, in the Republic of Ireland, for a long time to come. A huge thanks to you all for having accompanied me in this Irish story until the end I hope you enjoyed the video, and I remind you that this video was made in collaboration with CyberGhostVPN For the special offer of 1.95€ for all subscribers to the channel, find the link in the description as always I can not do anything else but thank you all for listening next week we'll be back with a second video from April Patreon, this one too won't be exactly light as you'll see In addition, I anticipate now that in May, covid permitting, I will go down in Puglia and Basilicata to make two video reports of "Hidden Italy" (Italia Nascosta) I won't anticipate you anything, it's better this way, also because this is also pretty heavy stuff but if I can cover the travel expenses, I can do it only thanks to all those who are supporting the channel with a subscription on Youtube, on Patreon or with single donations and who are showing an incredible attachment and affection to this project. Thank you very much. See you soon. Per aspera ad astra.