60's Onwards No Militant/Subversive Irish Republicanism In Ulster!

The 1950s IRA Border Campaign ended, they said because of lack of interest from ordinary people in Ulster who would have been (the Catholics) their natural source of support. BTW they deliberately did not target The RIC, who were the highly biggotted sectarian police force of Northern Ireland at the time during their abortive campaign and there was internment in the Irish Republic during it!
It is said that modern militant Irish Republicanism i.e. IRA, Official IRA, Provisional IRA, Irish National Liberation Army, Irish People's Liberation Organisation all have their genesis in the Civil rights movement being attacked by the powers that be in Northern Ireland and that there was no other realistic option accept to go down the militant route for ordinary downtrodden catholics. Also the Education Act 1948, providing free Second Level education for all, ultimately made the catholics forget what had been their place hitherto as Second class and sometimes Third class 'Citizens' there!
What If there was no IRA et al, would Northern Ireland be in as good a shape as it is now, especially for Catholics?
I strongly suspect that given the Afrikaner style abuse that 40% of the population had been subjected since the foundation of that statelette that the violent response was absolutely inevitable!
 
EDIT; Sorry it's taken me a bit longer to do this than I thought! BTW it was the RUC in the 1950's the RIC had been disbanded some years previously! ;)

There's no doubt that had the Stormont Government not attempted to treat NICRA as a subversive organisation then the downward spiral in community relations that led to the Troubles could easily have been avoided. For that to happen you need either for the Unionists to be more sympathetic to Nationalist greivances, Terence O'Neill and others in his Cabinet certainly were but Bill Craig, a total sectarian bigot who was the Minister of Home Affairs and banned the October 1968 Derry Civil Rights march that began the downward spiral certainly was not. So one potential POD is to not have him in that position. Another possibility is to have Britain take a much more firmer hand on NI, after partition NI was basically left to it's own devices and Britain didn't intervene when Stormont abolished STV for elections replacing it with gerrymandered FPTP seats that remained largely unaltered until abolition. When Wilson finally woke up to the situation in NI in the mid 1960's largely due to the efforts of Gerry Fitt he began putting pressure on O'Neill to reform the state, while O'Neill did move in that direction he was facing opposition in his party and from Paisley and he simply wasn't the type of political streetfighter needed to push the reforms through.

Had the NICRA got it's way earlier then the conditions that PIRA were able to exploit after 1969 simply wouldn't have existed. The IRA Leadership under Cathal Goulding had effectively renounced the armed struggle after the failure of the Border Campaign and were moving towards Marxist politics. They were trying to subvert the NICRA by the use of entryist tactics but they were not planning an armed campaign at this time as Craig feared, simply trying to steer NICRA towards their political agenda. I don't think a more aggressive Border Campaign would have fared any better as there would have been a more aggressive security response and the evidence of the time is that there was little support for an armed campaign among wider Nationalism at that time.

There are other potential POD's that I think could have averted the rise of militant Republicanism, firstly if Stormont had simply never existed and NI had been under direct rule from day one. That's not implausible at all, the Unionists were opposed to Home Rule on principle and only had it imposed on them by Britain most likely as a way of "getting rid of the Irish question" once and for all. The other is if Stormont had become to reform before the 1960's, there is a possible POD for that, about 10 years ago I read the memoirs of Ken Bloomfield the former head of the NI Civil Service, Bloomfield started his career in Stormont's Finance Ministry in the early 1950's. NI at that time was headed by Basil "I would never have a Fenian about the place" Brooke, to describe Brooke's tenure as one of immobility and lethargy in government is a serious understatement. Bloomfield wrote that when he joined the Finance Ministry it was anticipated that Brooke would retire in the mid 1950's to be succeeded by the Finance Minster Maynard Sinclair who it was felt was more liberal, in Ulster Unionist terms, than Brooke. Sadly Sinclair was among those killed in the Princess Victoria Disaster in 1953, Bloomfield said that without an heir apparent Brooke was left to stagger on until 1963. I've always been interested in what might have happened had Sinclair lived but I've never been able to discover enough about him to know if Bloomfield's opinion of him was correct.

Sorry to go on a bit but being from NI it really angers me to think about just how easily the Troubles could have been avoided with just a little more foresight or if Unionists had just heeded Carson imploring them after partition to treat Nationalists with respect. :(
 
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As I said it was absolutely inevitable Republicans would be forced to go down a militant route analguous to the ANC really! BTW apologies for calling the sectarian police force AKA RUC as RIC. Had they layed back and thought of England where would they be today? -still massively downtroden and even more forgotten about by their fake Republican brothers and sisters down South!
 
As I said it was absolutely inevitable Republicans would be forced to go down a militant route analguous to the ANC really! BTW apologies for calling the sectarian police force AKA RUC as RIC. Had they layed back and thought of England where would they be today? -still massively downtroden and even more forgotten about by their fake Republican brothers and sisters down South!

That is exactly what arseholes like Craig and Paisley couldn't understand. By reacting so hysterically against the NICRA and trying to crush it, they pushed people who otherwise would have had little time for physical force Republicanism into supporting it because the democratic route wasn't delivering.

Had NICRA achieved it's goals earlier and without the attempts by Stormont to crush it, the IRA wouldn't have been able to attract as much support.
 
As I said it was absolutely inevitable Republicans would be forced to go down a militant route analguous to the ANC really! BTW apologies for calling the sectarian police force AKA RUC as RIC. Had they layed back and thought of England where would they be today? -still massively downtroden and even more forgotten about by their fake Republican brothers and sisters down South!

I am getting kind of fed up by the "it was inevitable blah blah blah" used by Marxoïds to justify the usage of violence, riots and disobeyance of the law with regards to almost everything.

Nothing is inevitable, especially in politics. Had the British government gotten involved in Northern Ireland during the late fifties and early sixties, the rug could have pulled under the Republican extremists. I would also had that the vast majority of the catholic population of Nothern Ireland did not want to riot or to disobey the law and did not want to see Northern Ireland annexed by the south. Indeed, they were very much aware that the various benefits and allowances they recieved would end upon becoming citizens of a much poorer Republic of Ireland.
Cross community parties like the Northern Irish Labour and Liberal Parties were on a slow but steady rise. Turnout during the elections was also rather low, as it still is there.

Extremists like Paisley would have been a problem, but a determined effort by the British government and local moderate politicians should be able to muzzle him. Stripping Stormot of its powers and treating Northern Ireland like any other part of the United Kingdom would remove a lot of powers from the hands of the unionists. This did happen OTL during the period of direct rule by the way, where anti-discrimination laws and such were passed courtesy of the British Parliament. The Troubles and a cosy-cosy relationships between the Conservatives and the Unionists prevented this from being implemented in full however.
 
Could a Sunningdale like agreement have been thought of, implemented and worked, if there was no militant Irish republicanism, obviously the prescence of such helped undermine the agreement in the first instance!
 
Somebody started making a TL on here about a successful NI Labour Party pushing a moderate reformist agenda ("Our Man in Stormont" I think) but it didn't get very far.

I'd love to see some more detailed work on this area of history as I'm interested but ignorant of the whole thing
 
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