The most successful of these вЂњplantationsвЂќ began taking hold in the early 17th century in Ulster, the northernmost of IrelandвЂ™s four traditional provinces, previously a centre of rebellion, where the planters included English and Scottish tenants as well as British landlords. Colonizing British landlords widely displaced Irish landholders. The story of the Troubles is inextricably entwined with the history of Ireland as whole and, as such, can be seen as stemming from the first British incursion on the island, the Anglo-Norman invasion of the late 12th century, which left a wave of settlers whose descendants became known as the вЂњOld English.вЂќ Thereafter, for nearly eight centuries, England and then Great Britain as a whole would dominate affairs in Ireland. Marked by street fighting, sensational bombings, sniper attacks, roadblocks, and internment without trial, the confrontation had the characteristics of a civil war, notwithstanding its textbook categorization as a вЂњ low-intensity conflict.вЂќ Some 3,600 people were killed and more than 30,000 more were wounded before a peaceful solution, which involved the governments of both the United Kingdom and Ireland, was effectively reached in 1998, leading to a power-sharing arrangement in the Northern Ireland Assembly at Stormont. The other major players in the conflict were the British army, Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC), and Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR from 1992 called the Royal Irish Regiment), and their avowed purpose was to play a peacekeeping role, most prominently between the nationalist Irish Republican Army (IRA), which viewed the conflict as a guerrilla war for national independence, and the unionist paramilitary forces, which characterized the IRAвЂ™s aggression as terrorism. The Troubles, also called Northern Ireland conflict, violent sectarian conflict from about 1968 to 1998 in Northern Ireland between the overwhelmingly Protestant unionists (loyalists), who desired the province to remain part of the United Kingdom, and the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nationalists (republicans), who wanted Northern Ireland to become part of the republic of Ireland.

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