The Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1974 and its successors was only part, albeit an important part, of the methodology used to control the Irish community. Very few terrorists were arrested and prosecuted under these Acts but they provided the British government with a wide range of effective information gathering powers. Many members of the Irish community had suffered from a lack of civil and economic rights in the North of Ireland in the past and were deeply concerned at the use of strip-searching, plastic bullets and shoot to kill policies there. But the Prevention of Terrorism Acts tended to have a chilling effect on political debate and action in the Irish community in Britain; as did a number of now notorious miscarriages of justice; such as the Birmingham Six, the Guildford Four and the Maguire Seven. At the same time, Frank Kitson’s intelligence gathering methods, referred to in his seminal text, Low Intensity Operations, were used to increase surveillance of the Irish community in Britain and much of the British media fuelled anti-Irish racism. Later the spread of similar policing tactics to other minority communities in Britain had the unintended consequence of building understanding of and support for the previously beleaguered Irish community.

Personal testimony of the daughter of Sir Anthony George Berry, a Conservative MP killed in the Brighton hotel bombing.

Operation Banner saw the deployment of over 300,000 British soldiers to Ulster during the Troubles and as such they can be seen as constituting a third community during this period. Drawing on interviews with former service personnel structured around their personal photographs, and using published memoir accounts of military deployment to Northern Ireland, this chapter explores the memory work undertaken by former personnel to make sense of their past experience. Individuals, some still teenagers and serving in a hostile environment that for many looked just like home on the UK mainland, often experienced traumatic and life changing events when deployed. Using the themes of ‘youth and experience’, ‘security and danger’ and ‘trauma and memory’ we examine the often conflicting emotions and responses of these former military personnel to their experiences of the Troubles, and the work undertaken in the present to contain and make sense of this.

This chapter examines the writing of Over the Water (first published in 1987) as a process of exploration, commemoration and resistance. It considers the narratives of a second generation Irish teenager and her mother, each constrained by the context of Britain’s occupation of Ireland and resultant attacks on the civil liberties of Irish people in Britain. Noting the importance of second wave feminism and the development of women’s presses in generating resistance to these constraints, it also considers the empowering role of the Irish in Britain Representation Group (IBRG). It celebrates the writing of fiction as a process of surviving and thriving, using the transformative power of language to imagine new spaces of resistance and hope.

An inspiration for the many student’ protests and workers’ industrial struggles of the 1960s came from the black civil rights struggle in America and the worldwide opposition to the US war in Vietnam. When a civil rights struggle then started in Northern Ireland, many sixties activists in the UK began to make this a focus for their political work. In the early 1970s a number of them came together to form the Troops Out Movement (TOM).This chapter contributes to a history of the TOM that is yet to be written. Set in the context of 1960s activism, it examines the start of TOM in late 1973 in relation to the situation that erupted in Northern Ireland. This included the Civil Rights Movement and the Unionist reaction to it, discrimination and the Special Powers Act, the work of the Campaign for Democracy in Ulster at Westminster, and early protests in the UK against British political and military involvement. The chapter goes on to discuss the TOM’s campaign for the withdrawal of British troops, our work with the Labour Movement, and our influence on public opinion in Britain, including the evidence of polls indicating popular support for British withdrawal.

This chapter examines films and television dramas dealing with the impact of the Northern Ireland ‘Troubles’ in Britain and the controversies that they generated. It begins with a consideration of early TV dramas such as The Vanishing Army (1978) and Chance of a Lifetime (1980) dealing with the experiences of the returning British soldier. This is followed by an examination of the representation of the IRA’s activities on the British ‘mainland’ in productions such as The Patriot Game (1969), Hennessy (1975), Eighteen Months to Balcombe Street (1977) and The Long Good Friday (1979) as well as an analysis of how the miscarriages of justice that emerged in the wake of the IRA’s bombing campaigns were turned into (documentary)-dramas such as Who Bombed Birmingham? (1990) and In the Name of the Father (1993). The chapter then concludes with some consideration of the ‘peace process’ and the relative scarcity of dramas dealing with the divisions and tensions that were a feature of the earlier period.

There has been a recent attempt to claim that the IRA was defeated in the early 1990s and the peace process represented their gradual surrender. The IRA’s campaign is presented as a futile and naive attempt to force the ‘Great British’ to withdraw from Northern Ireland. This chapter, by contrast, argues that the IRA’s campaign to force British withdrawal from Northern Ireland was not irrational. The British had just withdrawn from Empire and republicans tended to see Ireland as Britain’s first and last colony. Leading British politicians were ambivalent about the Union. The first public opinion poll suggesting a majority of the British public favoured withdrawal from Northern Ireland was published in September 1971. Since the mid-1970s polls have suggested consistent support for withdrawal. The demand for British withdrawal from Northern Ireland is often presented by those on the Left and Right as a pro-republican position. The ‘Bring Back the Boys from Ulster Campaign’ was launched in May 1973 among military families. It reflected ‘a real stirring’ in the nation for withdrawal, impacted on army recruitment and was motivated more by British chauvinist sentiment than Irish nationalism or republicanism This chapter will argue that this British nationalist movement for withdrawal while ultimately unsuccessful represented a powerful constraint on policy and helps to explain British scepticism about military intervention in Yugoslavia in the early nineties.

In 2006, two acts of commemoration took place to the memory of the Ulster Special Constabulary (USC). One was staged in a public site of national commemoration at the National Memorial Arboretum (NMA) in Lichfield, Staffordshire and the other was a very local service in the remote site of Mullaghfad Church, Co.Fermanagh, Northern Ireland. Both of these events were state-funded under the terms of the ‘Victims and Survivors Befriending Grant Scheme’, but engaged in very different modes of remembrance. This chapter focuses on the USC memorial at the NMA as a strategic site of memory for the Ulster unionist community. Drawing upon interviews with members of the Ulster Special Constabulary Association (USCA) present at the commemoration, it explores the active role Britain plays as a physical and symbolic site of ‘respite’ for Ulster unionists. In contrast to the private, divisive nature of memorials to the USC in Northern Ireland, the NMA site enables the USCA to locate its role in the Troubles in terms of British heroism and sacrifice, alongside memorials to other UK police units. The chapter suggests that historians should look more closely at the active role Britain plays in commemorating the Northern Irish Troubles.

This chapter gives an account of delegations of women, primarily organised during the 1980s by Labour Women for Ireland (LWI), the women’s section of the Labour Committee on Ireland (LCI), to the North of Ireland. The primary focus of the visits was to raise the profile of the campaign against strip searching of women in Armagh Jail.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyse the memoir-writing of senior Labour Party (LP) politicians who were closely engaged in developing and implementing government policy towards Northern Ireland during the administrations of Harold Wilson (1964-70 and 1974-6) and James Callaghan (1976-9). Studying the memoirs of these leading policy-makers can furnish researchers with an understanding of the lived experience of individuals attempting to deal on a day-to-day basis with the intricacies of policy in a context (after 1970) of regular, and sometimes intense, political violence.The argument presented here is that the significant degree of continuity in the Labour governments’ constitutional policy towards Northern Ireland is not always reflected in the memoir-writing of the key protagonists. It is also probable that a fuller understanding of the way in which policy towards Northern Ireland was made, and thought about, by key protagonists, may cast a brighter light on the nature of the LP as a governing party more generally.