Help me out with my essay!!?

Question

What are the causes of sectarianism in Ireland???

Answer 1

clogged toilets

Answer 2

Wow. Okay. As an Irish person I feel the need to answer this, if only because the category is called 'Homework Help'...

It depends on who you ask. In this case, you're asking me. This is my version.

In the first place, sectarianism mostly goes on, or went on, in Northern Ireland, less so in the Republic, but that's another topic.

When the border between Northern Ireland and the rest of the country (then known as the Irish Free State) was established in 1921 (by the Anglo-Irish Treaty), it effectively divided the island into a nation and a bit. The Northern bit was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and the majority of its population were Protestants. In the southern bit, the Irish Free State, the vast majority of the population were Catholics. However, there was also a sizable Catholic population in Northern Ireland.

From then on until the late 1960s, the Protestant majority in the North had, for the most part, economic and political superiority over the Catholic minority. On the whole, the Protestants tended to be loyal to the British crown (hence the term 'Loyalists') or to the United Kingdom (hence the term 'Unionists') and to look down on the Catholic minority as being, well, Catholics. I don't think that most sensible people would disagree that the Catholics in Northern Ireland were pretty systematically discriminated against, by the largely Protestant ruling class, from the 20s until the 60s at least. Catholics found it hard to get good jobs, to be elected to public office, to get decent houses, and so on.

It's complicated, but in the 60s, with the general global rise in resistance and liberation movements, the Northern Catholics began to feel that enough was enough and that something had to be done about this. A civil rights movement began to protest publicly about the plight of the Catholics. At around the same time the IRA, which had existed since the 1920s but which had been pretty useless as an underground organisation, began to arm itself and take the whole liberation thing a lot more seriously.

A series of events in the late 60s and early 70s led to the British Army entering Northern Ireland, initially to protect the Catholics from the Protestants (!) but subsequently to act as a kind of heavily armed police. This backfired at times, most spectacularly at the notorious Bloody Sunday incident, when British soldiers fired live ammunition at an unarmed civil rights demonstration, killing at least thirteen people.

After this, the IRA (and splinter groups such as the INLA) began a systematic campaign of terrorist violence designed to harry the British government into withdrawing its forces from Northern Ireland. In retaliation, Protestant paramilitaries formed terrorist groups such as the UDA and UVF, which targeted Catholics in order to intimidate the Catholic community into shutting up, pretty much.

In other words, it started out because the Anglo-Irish Treaty enabled Protestants to throw their weight around too much; it got worse at least partly because of a series of spectacular blunders by various British and Northern Irish administrations; and it got awful because both sides started tit-for-tat killing and the UK and Irish governments suffered from a serious lack of imagination as to what, if anything, they ought to do about it.

This is a very crude and simplified explanation (you should, by now, be able to see how hard it is to be even-handed about it, without the whole topic becoming very confusing) and I seriously advise you to look up some reputable sources.

Answer 3

go type irish sectarianism in wikipedia. its a long story and you wont get it all here.

Answer 4

Stop being lazy-you'll never learn to learn if you ask others to do your work for you. Homework is meant to be just that-WORK at home!

Answer 5

You should do it yourself garl!!!! you must have the brains if you are doing essays

Answer 6

there are loads of reason do a search on it, as it depends on your view and point etc....

Answer 7

something TO DO WITH THE leprechaun?

Answer 8

No.Do it yourself.