In a world where people have become almost blasé over the scale of the communal violence in Yugoslavia, the United Kingdom's internal war in Northern Ireland may at times appear trivial. At plenty of other times, however, it can appear that factional hatreds have locked the Province into a cycle of violence equal in ferocity to anything experienced in Sarajevo. Over the past two decades terrorists have murdered more than three thousand citizens and have provided the British democratic system with one of its most serious challenges. And yet, for all the media coverage they have received, these atrocities have never mobilised the national conscience; nor has the Ulster situation been an issue in any general election since the Seventies.

LRB 8 October 1992 | PDF Download