dissolved the Northern Irish parliament and established direct rule, after the unionist government refused to cede security decision making to Westminster in the wake of Bloody Sunday.
July 31: Operation Motorman. The British army moved into nationalist areas of Belfast, Derry, and other towns, with 22,000 troops, to retake “no-go” areas from republican paramilitary control.
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1973
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December: Sunningdale Agreement. An agreement among nationalist and unionist political parties outlined power-sharing arrangements for the region.
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1974
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January–May: The power-sharing government established by the Sunningdale Agreement operated.
May: Ulster Workers’ Council (UWC) strike. Unionist opposition to the Sunningdale Agreement mobilized in a major strike, large demonstrations, and riots. After two weeks, the head of the power-sharing executive resigned along with his unionist colleagues. Direct rule was restored.
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1980–1981
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Hunger strikes. Republican prisoners protested revocation of their political prisoner status with a series of hunger strikes. The strikes ended in October 1981, after ten men had died.
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1985
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Anglo-Irish Agreement. The governments of the UK and Ireland established cooperative arrangements regarding Northern Ireland. The agreement stated that the constitutional status of Northern Ireland would not change without the consent of its residents, while establishing a consultative role for the Republic in the governance of Northern Ireland.
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1994
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Paramilitary ceasefires. PIRA declared a ceasefire on August 31. The Combined Loyalist Military Command, including the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the Ulster Defense Association (UDA), declared a ceasefire on October 13.
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1996
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February 9: PIRA ended its ceasefire after progress toward peace talks stalled.
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1997
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July: PIRA resumed its ceasefire after the new UK Labour government made plans for negotiations.
September: Sinn Féin entered the multiparty peace negotiations after affirming principles of nonviolence formulated by former U.S. senator George Mitchell.
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1998
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April 10: The Good Friday Agreement (GFA) was reached in the multiparty peace talks.
May 22: Voters in Northern Ireland and the Republic endorsed the GFA.
June 25: Elections were held for the new Northern Ireland Assembly.
July 1: The new assembly met for the first time and began to operate in “shadow” form.
August 15: Twenty-nine people died following a bombing in Omagh. The bomb was placed by republicans who opposed the peace process.
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1999
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December 2: Powers of government were devolved to the new assembly.
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2000
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February 11–May 30: Devolution was suspended after disagreements about paramilitary decommissioning of weapons. After plans for decommissioning were agreed, devolution was restored in May.
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2001
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July 1: First Minister David Trimble, a unionist politician, resigned in protest at lack of progress on PIRA decommissioning. In an attempt to resolve the dispute, Britain ordered two twenty-four-hour suspensions of devolution, on August 10 and September 22.
November 4: The Royal Ulster Constabulary was renamed the Police Service of Northern Ireland, and police reform moved forward.
November 5: Devolution was restored after PIRA put forward a plan for decommissioning, and the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning (IICD) affirmed that decommissioning had begun.
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2002
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October 15: Devolution was suspended once more when unionists refused to share power with republicans due to allegations that Sinn Féin party members were spying for PIRA.
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2003
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November 26: Although the assembly was still suspended, elections were held. The more hardline republican and unionist parties eclipsed moderate parties in the elections.
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2005
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July 28: PIRA announced an end to its armed campaign, and its commitment to democratic and political organizing.
September 26: International observers affirmed that PIRA decommissioning was complete.
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2006
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Following negotiations between the largest political parties, the Northern Ireland (St. Andrews Agreement) Act (2006) dissolved the assembly and established a transitional assembly.
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2007
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March 7: Elections were held for a new assembly.
March 26: Devolution was restored to the assembly.
May 10: The assembly parties formed a power-sharing government. Sinn Féin boycotted the executive for a period because of disagreements about devolution of policing and justice powers; the executive did not meet from June 19–November 20, 2008.
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2009
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June: UVF decommissioning was completed.
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2010
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January 6: UDA decommissioning was completed.
April 12: Policing and justice powers were devolved to the assembly, with an Alliance party member serving as justice minister.
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CHAPTER 1
Whose Rights and Whose Peace?
I saw, in fact, history being written not in terms of what happened but of what ought to have happened according to various “party lines.”
—George Orwell, “Looking Back on the Spanish Civil War”
“We have peace,” declared “Séamus,” a taxi driver in national west Belfast. “And they can have their culture, or whatever they want to call it, as long as it’s not in my face. And I can have mine, and I hope I’m not in their face.”1 Séamus was explaining to me his attitude toward loyalists and the new, separate peace in Northern Ireland in May 2010, while he showed me around the West Belfast Taxi Association’s new taxi terminal in Belfast city center. The spacious new terminal, its outer walls decorated with murals from Irish legends, serves as a sort of bus station for what are locally called black taxis. Black taxi services began in the 1970s as a grassroots initiative to provide transportation in areas where widespread violence restricted buses’ regular operation. Of course, then, the taxis—one of the radical cooperatives of the period—were illegal and unlicensed. Enterprising activists drove used London hackney cabs up and down main arteries to the west of the city, charging passengers a shilling per journey.
More than a decade after the Good Friday Agreement (GFA), black taxis are legitimate. The Northern Ireland minister for regional development appeared at the new terminal’s opening in 2010. The association serves the area of nationalist west Belfast. In addition to providing cheap, reliable transportation, the association offers historical tours, nicknamed “terror tours,” in partnership with some loyalist black taxi drivers. (There are similar black taxi services in loyalist west Belfast, but they do not serve as large an area and populace.) Drivers are understandably proud of their new status. The terminal, the history tours, and recognition as a transportation provider are part of a peace dividend for west Belfast.
As the political context changed more than a decade since the GFA, Séamus’s perspective on the conflict changed as well. When our conversation turned to the Protestant drivers on the loyalist Shankill Road segment of the tours, we talked about the Shankill bomb in 1993. This Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) operation killed ten people, including the bomber and two schoolgirls.2 “It was terrible,” he said, “but I wouldn’t have said that twenty years ago. Twenty years ago I’d have been, like, ‘Fuck them’.” With this new, separate peace, sympathy, like terror tours, was possible. Having survived injuries from a loyalist attack in his youth, Séamus’s newfound sympathy was a major shift.
But
