Description: Founded upon the partition of Ireland in 1920, Northern Ireland experienced fifty years of nervous peace under the rule of a devolved government in Belfast. This government was representative only of the majority Protestant unionist community while the Catholic minority sought union with the rest of the island. The Protestant fortress held firm until the late 1960s, following which the province subsided into civil unrest widely known as "the Troubles". Thomas Hennessey's even-handed history attempts to understand the reasons for the long history of communal division, mutual suspicion, Catholic alienation, and Protestant siege mentality. It traces the sequence events, decade by decade, in the history of the troubled province.

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