Meeting "Clear and Present Dangers"? British Legal Responses to Violent Irish Nationalism

BRIAN J. DORRIAN

ABSTRACT

In August 1969, the British army was deployed in Northern Ireland in support of the "civil power." This action was taken in response to the sectarian violence which swept Ulster in the wake of civil rights demonstrations against many years of anti-Catholic discrimination, and in response to the inability of the civil authorities to impartially counter the violence. Building on extant emergency provisions in Northern Ireland, the British government in the years that followed enacted powerful new legislation, including the Prevention of Terrorism Act, which sought to curb the threat and the reality of terrorism. It attempted to do so, for example, by giving extensive powers of arrest and detention to the police, by permitting a government minister to exclude suspected terrorists from certain parts of the U.K., and by extending the authorities' search and seizure powers. The legislation represents a profound intrusion on civil and political liberty, both in Northern Ireland and on the British mainland. The extent of this intrusion has been assessed by a number of internal and external bodies, all of which have recommended, with varying degrees of extensiveness, the alteration of the emergency legislation. Successive British governments, however, have remained convinced that the problems of the province are really about law and order, not about the state's illegitimacy in the eyes of a significant proportion of Northern Ireland's people. Until the government considers this aspect of the violence in Northern Ireland, it is argued, and until the full panoply of civil rights is restored, there can be no lasting peace in the troubled province.

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Citation: (1992) 50(2) U.T. Fac. L. Rev. 161.
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