Reconsidering Jan. 6 in the long shadow of Northern Ireland’s Troubles

The Rubicon crossed on Jan. 6., 2021, is behind us. It remains unclear how another year gone by has changed opinions of that day, if at all. It seems that American perceptions of Jan. 6 are entrenched along partisan lines.  

But there’s some good news: The U.S. is not on a path of civil war or dramatically heightened domestic political violence. Still, the salutary lesson of that day should be an inviolable red line that seditiously conspiring to upend the peaceful transition of power between U.S. administrations — and any political violence — is intolerable.   

Importantly, for Americans to have meaningful discourse, getting the right historical analogy for Jan. 6 is important to fully process what played out at the U.S. Capitol on that day.

In the context of the Jan. 6 breach of the Capitol, it’s important to recall that even during the early years of the Trump administration, U.S. counterterrorism policymakers did set the terms for framing a greater focus on far-right extremism. The inclusion of domestic terrorism in policy debates was notable because it was the first time that the U.S. government had included domestic extremism and white supremacy in a U.S. national counterterrorism strategy as a priority. Specifically, the 2018 National Strategy for Counterterrorism addressed all forms of terrorism, including domestic terrorism threats. Building on that, the Biden administration prioritized domestic terrorism and published a National Strategy for Countering Domestic Terrorism, which by many measures, has made good progress. 

Counterterrorism practitioners certainly did not anticipate that a contested 2020 election, fueled by a dizzying array of conspiracy theories, would be an accelerant for violence on the scale of what happened on Jan. 6. However, it’s not a stretch to understand that when barricades were overrun and police were savagely attacked that day, some who lived through Northern Ireland’s Troubles can draw parallels to Belfast’s political violence. 

Not surprisingly, in a hyper-tribalized America, some number of violent extremists on the fringes of society will gather to hatch homegrown terror plots because of a fictive kinship dynamic. After all, these far-right extremists perceive their world as under siege. Still, feverish language on civil war is not helpful, and may very well be dangerously self-fulfilling.   

While I was putting together class notes to lecture on terrorism at Georgetown University, Belfast’s Troubles and its legacy were coincidentally conjured up in several thought-provoking opinion pieces comparing Washington’s Jan. 6 violence to Northern Ireland. In his acclaimed film “Belfast,” British filmmaker Kenneth Branagh explores the slippery slopes of tribalization in Northern Ireland during The Troubles through the lens of his childhood memories of barricades, bombings and political violence. Branagh lucidly described why Jan. 6 was a cautionary tale, which reminded him of his native Belfast.  

Those conjured ghosts of Northern Ireland’s troubled past encouraged me to travel to Dublin and then to Belfast to consider those very questions. Are there relevant lessons from Dublin and Belfast that can be helpful in understanding the potential for future political violence in the United States? In a word, yes. 

Polarizing conditions for a civil war were present in the cauldron that was Northern Irish society in the 1970s, and ripples were felt from Belfast to Dublin, between one “tribe” that felt it was victimized and the other one frightened that their political legitimacy would be broken and replaced by historical enemies. Yet, there was no civil war, instead, the contours of sectarian political violence played out for over three decades, mostly in Northern Ireland, until conciliation was reached with the Good Friday peace agreement.

In America, there is no sectarian divide as there was in Northern Ireland, but there are dangerous undercurrents with conspiracies and a racist replacement theory that centers on the belief that nonwhite, non-Christian people are replacing the white Christian majority population in order to push a radical socio-cultural agenda. Traces of this far-right thinking have moved from the fringes to going mainstream in American political discourse. 

At its core, getting the correct analogy for Jan. 6 rests not in Belfast but perhaps in Dublin’s steadfastness — at least that’s what I have concluded after my brief sojourn to Ireland. Reflecting on lessons from the Republic of Ireland, there’s room to be cautiously optimistic about the question of future political violence in the United States. 

This year marks 100 years of Irish Independence. In 1922, after more than 700 years of British authority over Ireland, the Irish Free State was established. And for the ensuing 100 years to the present day, Ireland had to disrupt the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and its terrorism campaign, albeit rarely equal to the violence across the border in Northern Ireland (loyalist paramilitaries prosecuted its own terror campaign there). Ireland’s Garda Síochána (the national police service of Ireland) faced their share of IRA bombings, police killings, weapons caches and bank robberies. Despite Ireland’s conflicted attitudes toward the IRA, it is fair to say that most southerners support Irish reunification someday. But for the purposes of thinking about Jan. 6, during The Troubles, the Republic of Ireland’s red line was never accepting that the IRA’s political ends justifies its violent means. 

All told, it is important to note that the United States is a vast nation with law enforcement resources spread across the federal government and in states, local governments, tribal governments and territories. Contrastingly, Ireland is an island with one nationwide police and security service, which was scaled to capably address domestic terrorism threats throughout The Troubles. 

And so, during the upcoming second anniversary of Jan. 6, I am going to reflect less on the violence that I witnessed that day, and more on the Dublin I just visited where its security services weathered troubles and turbulence, but after 100 years, its republic stands strong — just like ours. 

Christopher P. Costa is the executive director of the International Spy Museum and an adjunct associate professor with Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, Walsh School of Foreign Service. He is a former career intelligence officer and was special assistant to the president and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council from 2017 to 2018.