Why weren't The Troubles in Northern Ireland considered a war?

by lostglastonbury

I just finished reading "Bandit Country: The IRA and South Armagh" by Toby Harnden and don't understand why The Troubles aren't considered a war. At least in South Armagh, the IRA held control of the ground and the British forces would only travel in and out of its bases by helicopter. The IRA would plan, organize and execute guerilla attacks on British forces with bombs and sniper attacks. However, this is obviously not representative of the entire conflict.

However, there are similarities to the Irish War of Independence or the Anglo-Irish War. The IRA didn't engage in conventional battles but instead used Flying Columns for hit-and-run attacks on the British forces before melting back into the surrounding community, similarly to how the South Armagh Brigade did.

Neither The Troubles nor the Irish War of Independence were fought by conventional means. Instead, both used guerilla tactics. However, only one is considered a war.

I've seen this answer on r/AskHistorians but I've read the answer numerous times and it still fails to make much sense or give a strong answer.

With Reference to “Bandit Country” you have sort of answered your own question from the Republican point of view. South Armagh was a unique Brigade in a unique area, who were the only Provisional IRA Brigade able to meet and defeat the British Army in the field more than once. Given you have read the book already I do not need to go into detail of how they operated or the operations they pulled off. Even other success stories in other brigades territories such as the Derryard Checkpoint ambush (Moloney, Ed (2003). A secret story of the IRA) had South Armagh fingerprints all over it. East Tyrone had tried to emulate their rival brigade but due to British counter intelligence and naïve recruits they were ambushed many times and lost a comparatively large number of volunteers.(Urban, Mark (1992). Big Boys' Rules.)

If you imagine the Republican conflict into maybe 3 sectors were ASUs operated completely differently, using similar tactics and weapons. The three sectors would be Belfast City, Derry City and the Country Brigades. Hardly any operated in a similar fashion to South Armagh who are the only brigade you could consider as being in a real guerrilla war, although the would be considered a Country Brigade. According to https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/sutton/ SA brigade killed 228 British security forces nearly a quarter of all the British forces who died in the Troubles died in Armagh, predominately the south. To get near those number you would have to count the whole of Belfast City which had three IRA battalions and would have massively outnumbered South Armagh ASUs. In Derry, my own city for example although smaller that Belfast there were many willing ASU’s in a nationalist dominated city. Even without any real loyalist threat to deal with the Derry Brigade only killed 101 British forces.

https://cain.ulster.ac.uk/victims/gis/googlemaps/victims.html

If used and working correctly the above tool is a great way to visualise the conflict and how people died, you will see for example to low number of sectarian killings in Derry and the atrociously high amount in Belfast particularly the north of the city. It was indicates how much of the country was relatively untouched by the conflict and how certain IRA brigades operated. West Tyrone for example, using roadside bombs a lot more effectively than their East Tyrone counterparts who loved a good shout out.

All the reasons above I believe are purely from a Republican operational point of view, many republicans would still regard it as a war no matter how ineffective some of their units were. From a British perspective they only sort of regarded it as war in the early years, early 70s. Prisoners at this time had special category status within prisons and known republicans were being interned without trials .

However i don't believe they ever officially called it a war. During Britains policy of ulsterisation, which you may have seen in “Bandit country”. The brits refused to regard it as a war and flooded and professionalised the Ranks of the RUC and the UDR and done away with things such as special category status for terrorist prisoners. This was due to the preserved belief that the death of an RUC/UDR member would have less effect on public opinion on the British mainland than that of an English/Scottish soldier (Neumann, Peter R. "The myth of Ulsterization in British security policy in Northern Ireland."). However I do believe this was made hard as the UDR could not operate in certain areas successfully, particularly in the depths of the cities.