The "Troubles" is a term for the conflict that began in 1916, ended with an ambiguous armistice in 1998 and rumbles on to this day

Cartoon of David Trimble and Gerry Adams by Steve Bell

[UPDATE - "Unfortunately, the "terrible beauty" they [Pearse and Connolly] spawned is even now to be seen in action in the blazing streets of Belfast" wrote John Banville]

Philip Bobbitt said that "Long War" is a term for the conflict that began in 1914 and concluded in 1990. Christopher Hitchens said the identical, that the global conflict that began in August 1914 did not conclusively end until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union.

My argument is that the Troubles should be a term for the conflict that began in 1916 and quasi-concluded in 1998 with an ambiguous armistice, embedded a little further in 2005 but continues to this day with an uneasy truce.

He's a quick overview of history.

An Anti-Treaty IRA irregular said in the immediate years after 1923 that "Our instructions were that we were to create war in the North with the result that the rest of the country would become involved and therefore do away with the Treaty". These instructions delivered by Collins were the workings of the IRA and the provisional IRA.

Attempted incursions across the border were carried out in 1922. People forget things like the fact that there was an IRA bomb incident in or around a major British city almost every other day in the first nine months of 1939. There was a propaganda campaign in the late 1940s. An IRA killing campaigns in the 1950s. From 1969 to 1998 there was a sustained and ruthless campaign of bombing and killing.

Christopher Hitchens wrote:

"The global conflict that began in August 1914 did not conclusively end, despite a series of “fragile truces,” until the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union."

Philip Bobbitt said the "Long War" is a term for the conflict that began in 1914 and concluded in 1990. He said in an interview:

"The "Long War" is a term for the conflict that began in 1914 with the First World War and concluded in 1990 with the end of the Cold War. The Long War embraces the First World War, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the Korean War, the War in Vietnam and the Cold War. The Long War can be understood as a single conflict fought over the constitutional issue of what form of the nation-state — fascist, communist or parliamentary — would succeed the imperial states of the 19th century."

Likewise:

"Attempts to coerce Northern Ireland into a United Ireland, whether by the attempted incursions across the border in 1922, by the propaganda campaign in the late 1940s, or by IRA killing campaigns in the 1950’s and from 1969 to 1998, have all failed miserably, because they were based on a faulty analysis of reality."

Where do we end? Dissident republicans protested at glasnevin cemetery for the erection of a cross to mark the death of those who died in World War One and two. Ireland was the only which county absent a cross until recently.

Christopher Hitchens said the Napoleonic conflict would deserve to be called the First World War. He wrote in the New York Review of
 Books:

"The Napoleonic conflict would deserve to be called the First World War. Never before had two great powers and their volatile allies mobilized their societies so extensively to contend for mastery over so immense a reach of the earth’s surface. Great engagements were fought at the gates of Moscow, in the Baltic, at the mouth of the Nile, in Italy, Turkey, and Spain, but the reverberations extended, by way of proxy fighting, to China, Australia, and other barely charted latitudes. Both North and South America, and the intervening Caribbean basin, were drawn in, and found their internal politics conditioned by French and English rivalries and allegiances. Hitherto obscure archipelagoes and islands such as the Falklands and Mauritius became decisive. Local nationalisms were inflamed and manipulated from Chile to Ireland."

He continued:

"The long struggle between imperial and Georgian Britain and Jacobin and Bonapartist France. Conflicts to which tradition has awarded other customary names—the Peninsular War, the War of 1812—were in actuality subplots of this great contest. Stendhal, Tolstoy, Wordsworth, Beethoven, and Goya all spent themselves trying to set down some of it."