Northern Ireland
Northern Ireland
West Belfast 1983
© Light Infantry
OPERATION BANNER
In 1969 a surge in violence in Northern Ireland (NI) against Catholics by Protestants led to British troops being sent into NI to assist the RUC in stopping the violence. This became Operation Banner. The troops were initially welcomed by the Catholic community; however, this developed into opposition, and the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA), a militant break-away from the IRA which had been quiet since the 1962 cessation of the Border Campaign, began to target British troops. The first British soldier to die in the conflict was Gunner Robert Curtis, who was killed in February 1971. The Army's operations in the early phase of its deployment had it placed in a policing role, for which, in many cases, it was ill suited. This involved seeking to prevent confrontations between the Catholics and Protestants, as well as putting down riots and stopping Republican and Loyalist paramilitary groups from committing terrorist attacks.
Welsh Guards take cover as an IRA bomb goes off.
© Welsh Guards Forum
However, as the Provisional IRA campaign 1969-1997 grew in ferocity in the early 1970s, the Army was increasingly caught in a situation where its actions were directed against the IRA and the Catholic Irish nationalist community which harboured it. In the early period of the conflict, British troops mounted several major field operations. the first of these was the Falls Curfew of 1971, when over 3,000 troops imposed a 3 day curfew on the Falls Road area of Belfast and fought a sustained gun battle with local IRA men. In Operation Demetrius in June 1971, 300 paramilitary suspects were interned, an action which provoked a major upsurge in violence. The largest single British operation of the period was Operation Motorman in 1972, when about 21,000 troops were used to restore state control over areas of Belfast and Derry, which were then controlled by republican paramilitaries. The Army's reputation suffered greatly from an incident in Derry on 30 January 1972, Bloody Sunday in which 13 Catholic civilians were killed by The Parachute Regiment. The biggest single loss of life for British troops in the conflict came at Narrow Water, where eighteen British soldiers were killed in an PIRA bomb attack on 27 August 1979, on the same day Lord Mountbatten was assassinated by the PIRA in a separate attack. In all almost 500 British troops died in service in Northern Ireland, the last of whom were killed in 1997. Most of these deaths however occurred in the early 1970s, when British troops were placed at the forefront of the conflict and had little experience in dealing with a low intensity conflict in a predominantly urban, heavily populated area.
By the late 1970s, the Army was replaced to some degree as "frontline" security service, in preference for the local Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Ulster Defence Regiment (raised 1970) as part of the Ulsterisation policy. By the 1980s and early 1990s, Army casualties in the conflict had dropped. Moreover, British Special Forces had some successes against the PIRA - see Operation Flavius and the Loughall ambush. Nevertheless, the conflict tied up over 12,000 British troops on a continuous basis until the late 1990s and was ended with the Good Friday Agreement which detailed a path to a political solution to the conflict.
Sanger (www.jonathanolley.com)
In 1980, the SAS emerged from its secretive world when its most high-profile operation, the ending of the Iranian Embassy siege in London, was broadcast live on television. By the 1980s, even though the Army was being increasingly deployed abroad, most of its permanent overseas garrisons were gone, with the largest remaining being the BAOR in Germany, while others included Belize, Brunei, Gibraltar, and Hong Kong.
Other Wikipedia articles:
The Troubles The Enemy IRA Campaign
