On April 10, eight unionist and nationalist parties successfully concluded 22 months of negotiations on the future of Northern Ireland with a power-sharing agreement that devolves executive power from London to Belfast. Continuing efforts by splinter paramilitary groups on both sides to disrupt the peace effort grew intensely violent at times, but only exacerbated popular weariness of the conflict. Indeed, public opinion, along with the personal involvement of British and Irish Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Bertie Ahern, helped promote cooperation among longstanding opponents. Northern Ireland comprises six of the nine counties of the Irish province of Ulster. At the insistence of the locally dominant Protestants, these counties remained part of the United Kingdom after the other 26 predominantly Catholic Irish counties gained independence in 1921.
Catholics now constitute a majority in four of the six counties.
The demographic trends have aroused anxiety within the Protestant population, which is largely descended from seventeenth-century Scottish and English settlers. Britain s 1920 Government of Ireland Act set up the Northern Irish parliament, which functioned until the British imposed direct rule in 1972. Disorder resulting from a nonviolent Catholic civil rights movement in the 1960s prompted the deployment of British troops that have occupied Northern Ireland ever since. Amid sectarian violence beginning in the 1970s, division grew within both the primarily Protestant unionist and Catholic nationalist communities. British general elections in May 1997 brought significant gains for republicans and a new Labour government with a mandate to bolster the peace process.