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The Troubles is a generic term used to describe a period of sporadic communal violence involving paramilitary organisations, the police, the British Army and others in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s until the mid- 1990s. It could also be described as a many-sided conflict, a guerrilla war or even a civil war. The Provisional IRA claimed their violent campaign was armed resistance to British occupation. The Troubles were another chapter in the long-running hatred between Northern Ireland's Protestant and Roman Catholic factions. Brought to an end by a peace process which included the declaration of ceasefires by some paramilitary organisations, the withdrawal of most troops from the streets and the creation of a new police force in a series of reforms, most notably the Belfast Agreement (commonly known as the Good Friday Agreement).
Though the number of active participants in the Troubles was small, and the paramilitary organisations that claimed to represent the communities were, in reality, unrepresentative of the general population, the Troubles touched the lives of most people within Northern Ireland on a daily basis, while occasionally spreading to Great Britain and the Republic of IrelandThe Republic of Ireland ( Irish: Poblacht na hEireann is the common term for a state which covers approximately five-sixths of the island of Ireland, off the coast of northwest Europe. It is the western-most state of the European Union. The remaining sixt. Between three and four thousand people (many of them civilianA civilian is a person who is not a member of a military. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention it is a war crime to deliberately attack a non-combatant civilian or wantonly and unnecessarily destroy or take the property of a civilian. However, civilian props) died as a result of the violence. This is a small number numerically but, as a proportion of the total population, it is the equivalent of one hundred thousand people out of the population of the United Kingdom. Many had their political, social and communal attitudes and perspectives shaped by the Troubles.
Though not itself part of the Troubles, the Civil Rights campaign in the mid to late 1960s in Northern Ireland, which was largely modelled on the American Civil Rights campaignsThe civil rights movement in the United States has been a long, primarily nonviolent struggle to bring full civil rights and equality under the law to all Americans. It has been made up of many movements, though it is often used to refer to the struggles of Martin Luther King and others in the United States, was seen by some in the Unionist community as the starting point for the Troubles, they argue that it lead to a destabilisation of government and created a void filled later by paramilitary groups. Others, mainly though not exclusively nationalist, disagree, arguing that the Civil Rights campaign was a reaction to a corrupt system of government, the failure in the system causing the collapse in law and order that was the Troubles. All are agreed that the Troubles does include the Bloody SundayBloody Sunday can refer to any of the following historical events (in chronological order): Bloody Sunday (1887), violence in London on 13 November 1887. Bloody Sunday (1900), a day of high casualties in the Boer War on 18 February 1900. Bloody Sunday (19, Bloody FridayBloody Friday is the name given to the 21st of July, 1972, due to bombing by the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) in and around Belfast, Ireland on that day. 22 bombs were planted and, in the resulting explosions, 9 people were killed and a further, InternmentThe word internment is generally used to refer to the imprisonment or confinement of people without due process of law and a trial. It also refers to the practice of neutral countries in time of war to hold belligerent armed forces and equipment which ent without trial, the suspension of the unionist-dominated Stormont Home Rule government, the campaigns of violence by the various paramilitary organisations, including the Dublin and Monaghan Bombings (though some question whether those bombings were the actions of paramilitaries or of renegade figures within the British Secret Service), the La Mon bombing, the killing of Earl Mountbatten of Burma and his family, the assassination of Sir Christopher Ewart-Biggs, the then British Ambassador to the Republic of Ireland, the attempted assassination of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and most of her cabinet in the Brighton hotel bombing, the assassination of Airey Neave and the attempted assassination of John David Taylor, the Enniskillen and Omagh bombings, the hunger strikers in the Maze prison, the creation of the Peace People organisation (which won the Nobel Peace Prize), the splits in the IRA and ultimately the Belfast Agreement.