IRA VE İRLANDA 2

 Far from acting as a microcosm of the broader Irish War of Independence, Belfast’s Bloody Sunday instead offers an example of how differently the conflict unfolded in Ireland’s north and south. Belfast was, in many ways, unlike the rest of the Ireland: “industrialized, prosperous, a city with a Protestant and unionist majority population and very close geographical connections with Britain,” per Jones. Though unionists lived across the island, they were a “largely dispersed population, … too weak to fight [Irish independence] politically or militarily” outside of the six northern counties.

In the south, most of the deceased were IRA or British forces. In the north, the majority of victims were civilians, including women and children caught in the crosshairs of random gunfire. As violence faltered in the south in the summer of 1921, unrest skyrocketed in the north; a year later, this trend reversed once again as civil war engulfed the southern-centric nationalist faction.

Today, says Jones, Ireland is a far more secular place than it was 100 years ago. “[T]here is a greater awareness of everything the different peoples of the island have in common than in the past and greater respect for difference,” she says. Still, with the specter of Brexit threatening to spark violence in Northern Ireland once again, echoes of the region’s not-so-distant bloody past continue to resonate.

“There are certain lessons to be learned [from] what happened 100 years ago, not only on Bloody Sunday but in other cases of senseless, tit-for-tat, sectarian killings in what I have called an ‘unholy’ war,” Parkinson concludes. “Uncertainty over the region's political future—as illustrated by the recent furor over Brexit and criticism of a ‘border’ in the Irish Sea—have been exploited by the unscrupulous, as they were in the past, and cast shadows over Northern Ireland’s political future.”