Ulsterisation

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

Ulsterisation refers to one part – "primacy of the police"

British government during the conflict known as the Troubles.[2] The strategy was to disengage the non-Ulster regiments of the British Army as much as possible from duties in Northern Ireland and replace them with members of the locally recruited Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) and Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). The objective of this policy was to confine the effects of the conflict to Northern Ireland.[2][3][4][5]

Name and origin

The name of the policy comes from a similar US strategy towards the end of the

Vietnam Syndrome of American public opinion turning against American military involvement in Vietnam. By analogy, British policymakers perceived the death of soldiers from Great Britain (i.e. England, Scotland, and Wales) during The Troubles to be far more consequential in terms of British public opinion than what could be portrayed as "Irish people killing and policing Irish people".[7]

The move to locally based policing followed the

Lord Carrington also warned that British Army expenditures in Northern Ireland were unacceptably high; throughout the 1970s, military leadership stressed the need to focus on confronting the Red Army on the North German Plain, rather than on fighting in Northern Ireland.[7] The Ulsterisation plan was outlined in an unpublished 1975 British strategy paper titled The Way Ahead produced by a committee of senior British Army, RUC and MI5 officers, chaired by John Bourn, a Northern Ireland Office civil servant.[8]

Implementation

Ulsterisation included various attempts to reform views of the RUC, whose reputation had suffered from its involvement in the

Irish border.[10]

Result

Ulsterisation brought about striking changes in the casualty patterns, with military/police casualties from Northern Ireland exceeding those from Britain for the rest of the conflict, reversing the previous pattern. A related strategy, 'Criminalisation', was meant to alter perceptions of the conflict from a colonial war to that of a campaign against criminal gangs.[5][6][11] It was judged that the political impact in Britain of killings of British soldiers by the Provisional Irish Republican Army was greater than the deaths of local security forces members. The drop in the number of non-UDR British Army casualties by 1976 helped prevent any build-up of sentiment in Britain for a withdrawal from Northern Ireland.[6]

References

  1. ISBN 0-7453-0415-X
    , pg.192
  2. ^
    ISBN 0-86322-016-9
    (Pbk), pg.258-9
  3. ISBN 0-14-100305-7
    , pg.123 / 171
  4. ISBN 0-86104-757-5
    , pg.68–69
  5. ^
    ISBN 1-84413-316-8
    , pg.164
  6. ^
    ISBN 0-14-100305-7
    , pg.123
  7. ^ a b c Neumann, Peter R. "The myth of Ulsterization in British security policy in Northern Ireland." Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 26.5 (2003): 365–377.
  8. ISBN 0-571-16809-4
    , pg.17
  9. Palestine Police
    , and would be given the job of implementing Police Primacy in 1976, Mark Urban, pg.18
  10. ISBN 1-85182-392-1
    , pg.47
  11. ISBN 0-86104-757-5
    , pg.51

External links
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