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Abstract
This thesis argues that confrontation between the nationalist community and British troops in Northern Ireland was virtually inevitable, despite the celebrated honeymoon period‟ that followed the deployment of troops in August 1969. The thesis will show that the army‟s attitudes, experience and culture led it to move rapidly from a neutral, peacekeeping‟ posture to counter-insurgency operations before an insurgency had begun. It will also show that the deployment itself was the culmination of a series of ill-conceived and usually counterproductive decisions by British governments torn between a deeply-ingrained fear of becoming involved in Irish conflicts and a belief that Irish problems could be solved by exporting British norms and institutions. Such poor decisions continued after the deployment and helped to create a vacuum that the army filled with a strategy derived from its own recent experiences of colonial policing operations. The settlement of 1921-22 led British authorities to believe that the Irish question had been permanently removed from British politics. However Britain‟s abdication of its constitutional responsibilities for Northern Ireland allowed the Unionist government to institutionalise sectarian discrimination while limiting the Westminster government‟s options for future intervention. When the province erupted into violence in 1968 Britain continued to hope that the problem could be resolved without British intervention. But when the Stormont government coercion against nationalist protest led to endemic sectarian violence, the British government found it had no choice but to send in the army. While this British army was experienced at using force to restore order in colonial conflicts it was utterly unsuited to aid the civil power within the United Kingdom. Moreover, key elements of the army nursed a latent hostility to any manifestation of Irish nationalism. The result was that early attempts at maintaining good relations with the nationalist community in Belfast did not last, and because of its confrontational approach the army quickly became associated with the despised Unionist government. This process culminated in July 1970 when the newly-elected Conservative government gave the army its head, allowing it to instigate a counter-insurgency campaign before any insurgency existed.