Ulsterisation

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This article does not cite any references or sources. (October 2006) Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unverifiable material may be challenged and removed.

Ulsterisation refers to a supposed British Government strategy on the 1970s to pacify Northern Ireland during the conflict known as The Troubles. The strategy was to disengage the non-Ulster regiments of the British Army as much as possible from security duties in Northern Ireland and replace them with members of the locally recruited Royal Ulster Constabulary and Ulster Defence Regiment. The objective of this policy was to confine the conflict to Northern Ireland.

This strategy was outlined in an unpublished 1975 British strategy paper titled "The Way Ahead" and Labour’s first Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Merlyn Rees, and came to be the dominant theme in the conflict as it raged into the 1980s.

It was judged that the political impact of killings of British soldiers by the Provisional Irish Republican Army was greater than the deaths of local security forces members^{[citation needed]}.

The move to locally based policing followed the Scarman Report, published on 3 October 1969. This recommended a complete reorganisation of the RUC, with the aim of both modernising the force and bringing it into line with the other police forces in the UK.

The name of the policy comes from a similar American strategy towards the end of the Vietnam War called "Vietnamisation".