Irish nationalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Irish nationalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: "In Northern Ireland itself, the Catholic or nationalist community was a minority in Protestant and Unionist state. However, most northern nationalists did not support militant republicanism before The Troubles of the 1970s. In 1918, they had largely voted for the moderate Nationalist Party rather than Sinn Féin and continued to vote for moderate or constitutional nationalist party (which was, however, very different from the 'Home Rule' Nationalist Party that existed until 1918) until the political turmoil of the late 1960s. The Nationalist Party began to be seen as an irrelevance after the launching of a Civil Rights campaign to end discrimination against Catholics in the late 1960s (see Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association). However, the Civil Rights agitation ran into Unionist and Ulster Volunteer Force resistance as some Unionists claimed NICRA was merely another face of the IRA and violence broke out, leading to a thirty year conflict known as the Troubles.

The IRA, which had become increasingly reformist and Marxist oriented in the late 1960s, split into the Official IRA and Provisional IRA. The 'Officials' ceased armed activity in 1972. The Provisionals or 'Provos' launched a guerrilla or terrorist campaign against the state of Northern Ireland, with the aim of creating a new Irish Republic that would include all 32 counties of Ireland. Their a"