The Battle of Drumcree

In 1995, the Orange Order entered an increasingly turbulent phase of its existence, fraught with danger for the organization. On the face of it, this is a puzzling development. Republican guns had largely fallen silent with the IRA ceasefire negotiated through back-channel diplomacy between Dublin, London, the SDLP, and Sinn Fein. This process may have alienated Unionists from the British, but it should not have threatened the Order. The problem was that the decline of IRA and Protestant paramilitary violence was accompanied by new ‘proxy wars ‘ based on local-level conflict. This built upon the familiar Troubles story of ‘ethnic cleansing ‘ in urban residential areas or rural tracts, involving Republican or Loyalist intimidation of the local minority, beginning with threats or abuse and escalating through beatings and firebombing of homes to plain murder.

Ancient history · Battle · Criminology · Diplomacy · Intimidation · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Irish and British Studies · Law