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The gravest immediate test came in Northern Ireland. The power-sharing institutions established under the 1998 Agreement had taken office only in December 1999. David Trimble of the Ulster Unionist Party served as First Minister and the SDLP’s Seamus Mallon as Deputy First Minister, but unionist confidence in the institutions depended heavily on progress towards paramilitary disarmament. The Agreement had envisaged the decommissioning of paramilitary weapons by May 2000, yet the Independent International Commission on Decommissioning reported that it had received no information from the Provisional IRA about when decommissioning would begin.
In 1689 Ireland became the principal battlefield in the struggle unleashed by the overthrow of James II in England. The conflict was not simply an Irish religious war, although religious allegiance mattered profoundly. It joined disputes over monarchy, land, law, local security and the international contest between William of Orange and Louis XIV. In Ireland, James still possessed a substantial base of support, particularly among Catholics who had gained influence under his lord deputy, Richard Talbot, earl of Tyrconnell, and who expected a more durable redress of the land settlement imposed after the Cromwellian conquest.
Ormond’s government faced problems that had accumulated since the Restoration of Charles II in 1660: disputed land titles, the cost and organisation of the army, the Crown’s Irish revenue, and the relationship between the Protestant establishment and the Catholic majority. Ireland had not had a parliament since 1666. Ormond believed that a new one could help settle titles and support military and fiscal measures, but the proposal was contentious. Land settlement remained raw because the confiscations and rearrangements of the 1640s and 1650s had transformed ownership on a vast scale.
