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RUBY:

From Schwartz Media, I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am.
For much of the 20th century Northern Ireland was marred by violence, as Irish republicans and forces aligned to the United Kingdom fought over the future of the region.

That conflict - known as the Troubles - officially came to an end with a peace agreement in 1998.
But now the violence is flaring up again, and there are concerns the fragile peace deal is on the verge of being shattered.
Today - World Editor for The Saturday Paper Jonathan Pearlman, on what's behind the new wave of violence across Northern Ireland and what might happen next.

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RUBY:

Jonathan, could you start by telling me about what's happening on the ground in Northern Ireland right now?

JONATHAN:

Yes, so over the past few weeks, we've seen violence erupt mainly in working class Unionist areas of Northern Ireland.

Archival tape -- [Riots atmos enters - sirens]

JONATHAN:

So these are areas where the population is largely Protestant and largely pro British.

Archival tape -- [Sirens, rocks hitting cars]

Archival tape -- News Reporter 1:

“Police in Northern Ireland have used water cannon tonight as more petrol bombs and fireworks were thrown on the seventh night of violence on the streets of Belfast…”

JONATHAN:

There have been some clashes involving Republicans, and that's the segment of the population that is mostly Catholic and supports unification with Ireland.

Archival tape -- [Louder sirens, bottles hitting cars]

Archival tape -- News Reporter 1:

“Police say the clashes between Catholic and Protestant communities last night were some of the worst violence they have seen in recent years.”

JONATHAN:

But there's been fighting and clashes across Northern Ireland, mainly in Derry and Belfast.

Archival tape -- Police:

“Attention, attention, this is a police warning. Disperse immediately or a water cannon will be used.”

Archival tape -- [Shouting]

JONATHAN:

We've seen things like a bus that was hijacked and burning in the middle of the street in Belfast.

Archival tape -- [People hijacking a bus - rabble]

Archival tape -- Hijackers:

“Petrol bomb it!”

JONATHAN:

petrol bombs...

Archival tape -- [Bus gets petrol bombed - crowd cheers]

JONATHAN:

police under attack...

Archival tape -- [Lots of rocks hitting police cars]

Archival tape -- Bystander:

“Oh my god!”

Archival tape -- [Sirens]

JONATHAN:

And on several occasions, rioters have broken through the peace gates that separate the Unionist and Republican neighbourhoods in Belfast.

Archival tape -- [Gates being smashed - crowd cheers]

JONATHAN:

There's been as many as 100 police officers injured. So it's been quite confronting violence across Northern Ireland in different parts of different cities.

This has really been some of the worst unrest in Northern Ireland in decades. And it's been reminiscent of the Troubles, the long period of violence in Northern Ireland that lasted about 30 years and ended up leaving almost four thousand people dead, including over a thousand civilians.

RUBY:

So things have really escalated by the sound of it. I have a pretty general sense of what the Troubles were - this period of intense violence and instability. But can you tell me more about what was happening in Northern Ireland then, and how things got to that point?

JONATHAN:

Well, it was a terrible period for Northern Ireland, for Ireland generally. But to understand the Troubles, you need to go a long way back, to the very beginnings of British invasions of Ireland and that increased - the settlement and colonisation by Britain of Ireland - increased in the 1600s.

Ireland became part of the United Kingdom. But Ireland has its own language and its culture. And there was a strong independent sentiment amongst the majority of the people of Ireland. And this ended up with a situation where in Northern Ireland most of the people were British or pro British and Protestant, and in the rest of Ireland, the majority was Catholic. And so you had this war for independence, which eventually led to Ireland becoming an independent country in the 1920s. But the fate of Northern Ireland really remained unresolved.

Archival tape -- [1960s protest atmos]

JONATHAN:

there was constant violence which really erupted in the 1960s...

Archival tape -- [1960s protest - shouting]

Archival tape -- Irish Protestors:

“That’s the British army. Professional looters. Professional robbers. Professional thieves.”

JONATHAN:

...and lasted all the way until the 1990s.

Archival tape -- [1996 Londonderry riots - bombs, glass shattering]

JONATHAN:

And really the violence spread across Britain.

Archival tape -- [Bloody sunday - crowd rabble]

JONATHAN:

One of the most famous events was Bloody Sunday in the early 1970s when British soldiers shot 26 civilians in Derry during a protest there.

Archival tape -- [Bloody sunday - bombs, gunshots]

JONATHAN:

So it was a really terrible period that lasted decades and involved constant violence, until finally there was a peace agreement that ended the Troubles.

Archival tape -- New Reporter 2:

“Good evening. A historic day at Stormont - after two years of talks, and after a generation of bloodshed, and decades of division and acrimony, George Mitchell ushers in what the whole island hopes will be a new era of peace…”

JONATHAN:

Under the 1998 peace agreement, Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom, but there was no border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. And there's a power-sharing agreement and really, I suppose, a fragile peace which has held and held quite well until really the scenes in recent weeks began to raise concerns about the duration and durability of that peace.

RUBY:

Right, and so when you think back to that period, it is often synonymous I think with the IRA - the Irish Republican Army. Can you tell me more about them and their role in the fight for independence?

JONATHAN:

So the IRA really dominated the Catholic Republican cause, the IRA has gone through various iterations and splintered at various times, mainly splintering over the use of violence, but effectively the IRA led the fight during the troubles against the British fighting for Northern Ireland to be a part of Ireland.

There were various famous moments in IRA history, and one of them was in 1983 when there was this incredible prison break from Maze Prison. This was a maximum security prison run by the British, which was thought to be escape proof. And the IRA managed to smuggle in some knives and guns and 38 prisoners were able to escape, it was the biggest prison break and still remains the biggest prison break in British history. And one of the leaders of that prison break was a man called Bobby Storey.

Archival tape -- Bobby Storey:

“They need to understand from us - we’ve been at this a very long time. We’re on a particular journey, Republicanism is developing across the island, we’re on a road to a new and modern and united Ireland…”

JONATHAN:

He had joined the IRA as a teenager, been active since he was very young, served his first jail term as a 17 year old. And he really became known, after that prison escape as one of the leaders.

Archival tape -- Unidentified Person:

“The escape itself had a massive effect on the struggle here. It was probably one of the biggest morale boosters and the biggest mobilising incidents…”

JONATHAN:

He once said of the jail break, we shafted Maggie Thatcher. He really saw it as a defeat of the British. It earned him heroic status in the IRA. He went on to head intelligence for the IRA in the 1990s, and later he encouraged hardliners to support the peace process. And so Storey after the peace agreement remained closely involved with Sinn Fein, which is the political party or political wing associated with the IRA.

Archival tape -- [Bobby Storey’s funeral procession - bagpipes fade in]

JONATHAN:

But last June in June last year, Bobby Storey died.

Archival tape -- Mourners:

“We gather here today, heartbroken, in this place, so special to Irish republicans…”

JONATHAN:

And what happened afterwards is really critical to the current unrest.

RUBY:

We'll be back in a moment.

Archival tape -- [Bagpipes fade out]

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RUBY:

Jonathan, we're talking about the recent outbreak of violence in Northern Ireland. Can you tell me a bit more about how this began? How the death of former IRA leader Bobby Storey comes into this?

JONATHAN:

Yes. So last June, Bobby Storey died. He was sixty four years old. He died of natural causes. But because of his status in the IRA, this was an important moment. And there's a long history of big IRA funerals. And so a lot of people came out for this funeral, about two thousand people. The issue was that this was in the middle of the Covid outbreak and there was a rule restricting public gatherings and funeral gatherings to 30 people, and that that rule had been strongly supported by Sinn Fein, by the Republicans who are members of the Northern Irish Assembly. The funeral caused public outrage - it was heavily, heavily criticised

Archival tape -- Unknown Politician 1:

“While I can understand people paying their respects in the streets, deputy, I can’t understand or accept a political rally in Milltown Cemetery…”

JONATHAN:

Including from the four political parties with which Sinn Fein shares power in Northern Ireland.

Archival tape -- Unknown Politician 2:

“For Sinn Fein, however, they chose to act in a way that breached the regulations on funerals at that time, and in so doing, happily sent a signal to everyone else in Northern Ireland that it was one rule for them, and one rule for the rest of us.”

JONATHAN:

That was in June last year. At the end of March, prosecutors announced that they were not going to charge any of the Sinn Fein politicians who'd attended the funeral. They said that the public health rules had been unclear.

This decision not to prosecute after you know these televised images of this well attended funeral led Unionists to start clashing with police, and what we've seen since is some of the worst violence in Northern Ireland in years.
But while the Bobby Storey funeral was really the spark for that latest violence that we've seen, a deeper cause really was the ongoing tensions that have been stirred up by Brexit.

RUBY:

Mm, can you explain that for me? How does Brexit come into this?

JONATHAN:

So the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 resulted in effectively no border between Northern Ireland and Ireland. But Brexit has really messed this arrangement up in ways that it seems like nobody foresaw. The problem is that Ireland is part of the EU and Northern Ireland is now no longer part of the EU. So this creates obvious problems because Ireland and the EU have no tariffs, just like Britain used to. But now, effectively, Britain has left the EU.

Tariffs have been reintroduced, regulations have been introduced, and it creates a real problem because the decision became about whether to impose some sort of border controls between Northern Ireland and Ireland or whether to do what they have done, which is to effectively create some sort of trade border in the Irish Sea.

Archival tape -- Boris Johnson:

“There will not be checks on goods going from Northern Ireland to Great Britain, because we’re the government of the United Kingdom, and we will not institute or implement or enact such checks…”

JONATHAN:

And even though Boris Johnson promised and he continued to promise as late as last year that there would be no border in the Irish Sea, Brexit has meant that a border had to go up. And that's where it's gone up because putting up a hard border between Northern Ireland and Ireland would just be too...contentious.

Archival tape -- Unknown person:

“He insisted there’d be no checks on the border between the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland, well, it’s not quite like that in this document…”

JONATHAN:

But this has really outraged the Unionists because it's creating a de facto separation between Northern Ireland and the rest of Britain.

RUBY:

Right, so there’s a fear here that Northern Ireland is becoming more removed from the UK because of this border in the Irish Sea. So, despite the Good Friday agreement, which ended the Troubles, these border issues they’re back in play?

JONATHAN:

Well, the concern of the Unionists is that Northern Ireland will one day be unified with Ireland and that Northern Ireland will no longer be part of Britain. And that trade border in the Irish Sea is really emblematic of the beginnings of a shift towards that.

JONATHAN:

But Brexit has seen a rise in independent sentiment in Scotland. You know it's really showing fractures in the United Kingdom. The Irish Sea barrier is part of that.
So the Unionists are just watching as Brexit is undermining the arrangements that have really guaranteed that their security and they're now fearing the demise of Great Britain, which they saw themselves as part of.

RUBY:

Jonathan, thank you for your time.

JONATHAN:

Thanks Ruby.

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RUBY:

Also in the news today...

The snap lockdown in Perth ended at midnight last night, after Western Australia recorded no new community cases of coronavirus in the preceding 24 hours.

Premier Mark McGowan said that almost 30,000 tests had been conducted in the state since Friday.

And Nomadland has swept the major awards at the 93rd Academy Awards yesterday, picking up the Oscars for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress.

The win makes director Chloe Zhao the first woman of colour to win Best Director, and only the second woman ever to win it.

I’m Ruby Jones, this is 7am, see you tomorrow.

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