Introduction
Introduction
Belfast, as the second largest city in Ireland, barely needs an introduction to its particular historical complexities. Partition, which made it the largest city in the north-eastern region of Ireland left under unionist control in 1921, merely amplified many of its existing anxieties and lengthy history of violent conflict. By the middle of 1922, around 25% of all fatalities in the violent conflict around Irish independence since 1919 had occurred within the city. Today we are no further removed, in time, from that steep intensification of violent conflict in the late 1960s, than those who were involved in the late 1960s were from 192022. In that light, there is a puzzling absence of detailed studies of the organisations and trends that spanned the period from the 1920s to 1960s. With some notable exceptions, we are largely bereft of detailed studies of the non-state republican and unionist organisations in the intervening period (please note, throughout the text, I have tried to consistently use ‘Unionist’ to specifically designate actions by the Unionist Party’s northern government and elsewhere ‘unionist’ where it is other members of that same political community). Similarly, historians have yet to capture a real sense of who participated in the violence of 1920-22 in Belfast on the unionist side, the depth of official knowledge and direction and what legacy that carried across into post-1922 politics. Arguably this gap in our knowledge compromises the idea that we fully appreciate the background to the intensification of violence in the late 1960s. We are better served with histories of the republican side up to the early 1920s, in recent excellent contributions from the likes of Jim McDermott (Northern Divisions) and Kieron Glennon (From Pogrom to Civil War) and an increasing availability of archival materials that permit exploration of the individual republicans involved, their motivations and interactions. And it should be noted that neither were the I.R.A. the only players on the Irish nationalist side. This book, essentially, provides a chronology of the activities of the Belfast I.R.A. from 1st November 1922 to the 22nd September 1969. That is, from when contact was broken between the I.R.A.’s Dublin-based G.H.Q. and what was then the 1st (Belfast) Brigade of the I.R.A.’s 3rd Northern Division (in 1922) and when the Belfast Battalion of the I.R.A. broke with G.H.Q. in Dublin in 1969. Largely the evidence used to construct this chronology is contemporary news reporting and other official records, such as court reports. In this respect, it is very much a subaltern
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