From peaceful protests to violence to terrorism: Northern Ireland’s ‘Troubles’ could show where Hong Kong is heading
- The conflict in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and ’80s, which led to a campaign of terrorism by a radicalised minority, offer a warning amid Hong Kong’s protests, due to their similar beginnings and escalation
The crowds surged through the streets, demanding basic political rights. They were met by club-wielding riot police firing tear gas and rubber bullets. The clashes became routine, reflecting the gap between an aroused populace and an isolated and unresponsive government.
This sounds very much like Hong Kong, where I live, in the summer of 2019, but in fact describes Northern Ireland 50 years ago. As the crisis in Hong Kong shows no sign of resolution, the strife increasingly resembles the early years of what became known as “the Troubles” – a conflict that lasted 30 years and left 3,000 people dead.
I covered Northern Ireland as a journalist in the 1970s and 1980s. Over the last three years, I have studied that history in detail while researching and writing a book about the life of the late Professor Kevin Boyle, a leader of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement and later a prominent human rights lawyer.
The Troubles began as a peaceful protest movement demanding that the province’s minority Catholic population be given the same political and civil rights enjoyed by the Protestant majority and other British citizens. The initial response of the North’s Protestant-dominated government, however, was indifference, hostility and support for police efforts to stifle the movement.
In Northern Ireland, the government’s unwillingness to address demands for basic civil rights also sparked clashes, with the police using rubber bullets and tear gas in largely futile efforts at crowd control. As a journalist in Belfast wrote in 1971, tear gas had “enormous power to weld a crowd together in common sympathy and common hatred for the men who gassed them”.