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What violence accompanied the early years of Northern Ireland between 1920 and 1922?
Between the summer of 1920 and the summer of 1922, intense street fighting between the IRA and security forces — especially in Belfast — left more than 500 people dead, the vast majority of them Catholic civilians. Beyond the killing, 10,000 Catholics were driven out of their jobs and 25,000 were forced from their homes by violence and arson.
Belfast as a battlefield: the IRA, the RUC, and two years of open warfare
Northern Ireland was born into conflict, not stability. The new state, governed from Stormont under Sir James Craig, faced an immediate and brutal challenge: the IRA refused to recognise partition and waged an armed campaign against both the new government and its security forces, primarily the Royal Ulster Constabulary.
Belfast bore the brunt. The city's geography — Catholic enclaves like the Falls Road pressed against Protestant strongholds like the Shankill Road — turned residential streets into front lines. The fighting was not abstract: it was arson, ambushes, and reprisals carried out block by block, as Tom Holland details in The Rest Is History.
The human cost was staggering even by the grim standards of Irish political violence. More than 500 deaths in just two years placed this opening chapter among the most lethal phases of the entire conflict — a fact that tends to be overshadowed by the later Troubles of the 1970s.
Expulsion on a mass scale: 10,000 jobs lost, 25,000 homes destroyed
The violence was not limited to armed confrontations. A systematic campaign of intimidation uprooted the Catholic community at scale. Ten thousand Catholics were expelled from their workplaces — shipyards, factories, construction sites — in what amounted to an organised economic purge.
Twenty-five thousand more were driven from their homes by violence and arson. Entire streets were cleared. This was displacement on a scale that rivals some of the most documented episodes of twentieth-century ethnic persecution in Europe, a point examined with forensic clarity in this episode of The Rest Is History.
The episode "697. The Troubles: Murder in Belfast (Part 1)" situates this founding violence as the original wound of Northern Ireland — the context without which nothing that followed, including the Troubles of the 1970s, can be properly understood. That longer arc is traced across The Rest Is History podcast in full.
"At the peak of the violence in the early 1970s, almost 500 people were being killed every year and a bomb was going off in Belfast every single day."
From The Rest Is History, episode 697 — cited to contextualise how the founding violence of 1920–22 prefigured the scale of the later Troubles. The numbers at the peak of the 1970s eerily echo those of the state's birth.
The parallel is striking: the 500 deaths recorded across two founding years (1920–1922) match almost exactly the annual death toll at the worst point of the 1970s. Violence was not an aberration in Northern Ireland's early life — it was its foundation, as explored throughout The Rest Is History.
See also
What was the demographic makeup of Northern Ireland at its creation?
Northern Ireland was established with a two-thirds Protestant majority and one-third Catholic minority, meaning approximately half a million Catholics lived within its borders from the very beginning — a built-in tension that shaped every political and sectarian conflict that followed.
What were the origins of the partition of Ireland and when did it happen?
In 1912, almost half a million unionists led by Sir Edward Carson signed a covenant pledging to use all means necessary to fight against home rule from Westminster — a declaration that set the course toward partition and the creation of a separate Northern Ireland.
Who was Ian Paisley and what role did he play in Northern Ireland's history?
Ian Paisley was the voice of hardline Protestant Ulster fundamentalism and the sworn foe of the Church of Rome, serving as the defining champion of the Ulster loyalist cause and one of the most polarising figures across the entire span of the Troubles.
Key takeaways
- More than 500 people — mostly Catholic civilians — were killed in just two years of street fighting in Belfast between 1920 and 1922.
- The violence was not only lethal: 10,000 Catholics lost their jobs and 25,000 were expelled from their homes through arson and intimidation.
- The founding death toll of 1920–22 almost exactly mirrors the annual peak of killings during the 1970s Troubles, underlining how deep-rooted the conflict was from the outset.
- This opening wave of violence established a pattern of sectarian displacement — economic, residential, and physical — that would define Northern Ireland's social fractures for decades.
This answer comes directly from The Rest Is History, episode 697 — "The Troubles: Murder in Belfast (Part 1)."
Listen to the episode on Listenly