From Wikipedia

The Troubles

Episode Six

The violence continued through the rest of the 1970s. The Provisional IRA declared a ceasefire in 1975 but returned to violence in 1976. By this time it had lost the hope that it had felt in the early 1970s that it could force a rapid British withdrawal from Northern Ireland, and instead developed a strategy known as the "Long War", which involved a less intense but more sustained campaign of violence that could continue indefinitely. The Official IRA ceasefire of 1972, however, became permanent, and the "Official" movement eventually evolved into the Workers' Party, which rejected violence completely. A splinter from the "Officials", however, in 1974 —the Irish National Liberation Army—continued with a campaign of violence.

By the late 1970s, war weariness was visible in both communities. One manifestation of this was the formation of group known as "Peace People", which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1976. The Peace People organised large demonstrations calling for an end to paramilitary violence. Their campaign lost momentum, however, after they appealed to the nationalist community to provide information on the IRA to security forces, the Peace People being perceived as being more critical of paramilitaries than the security forces. The decade ended with a double attack by the IRA against the British. On 27 August 1979, Lord Mountbatten of Burma, while on holiday in Mullaghmore, Co. Sligo, was blown up by a bomb planted on board his boat. Three other people were also killed, including a local teenage boatman. That same afternoon, eighteen soldiers, mostly members of the Parachute Regiment, were killed by two remote-controlled bombs at Warrenpoint, County Down.