This is sort of IMHO but because it is about a political issue I posted it here. Mods can move it if they see fit. I’d like to hear peoples’ opinions on the Troubles, i.e. the bloody period from about 1968 to 1998 when there were widespread civil disturbances, terrorist acts, military engagements, and too many killings in Northern Ireland (and also rest of UK, Republic of Ireland and partly elsewhere).
Specifically although not exclusively, I’d like to hear what people not from the countries involved heard about and thought about these events. News media colour one’s perceptions of foreign lands. I have had discussions with Americans, Germans, and people of other nationalities about the Troubles and realise some people harbour strangely distorted perceptions of the events.
A tragedy three-five hundred years in the making. Aided and abetted by American citizens who thought they were doing good.
My family came here because of the English. Same reasons, more or less, too. They kinda… ducked aboard a ship before someone caught 'em.
But, as far as the Troubles… Fed by American money and political support, a futile fight over nothing but pride, religion, and whose granduncle did what to whose great-uncle… and what one of 'em did to someone else’s great-aunt. Pointless. Bloody. The worst kind of thing. I didn’t think it would ever end.
I have a somewhat slanted view on things since I was born in Scotland, and actually spent 3 years in Londonderry as a 3, 4 , 5 year old. This was 1966, 67, 68’ish.
What I remember is HATING the Catholic kids. Why? Because they lived in different neighbourhoods, went to different schools, and all the other Protestant kids hated them too. I have vague memories of lurking in bushes and throwing stones at the Fenian bastards as they got on the school bus. This is what we were “trained” to do.
I’m fairly confident that if I stayed I would have come to my senses eventually, but it just goes to show you how entrenched the hatred was back then. Could the Palestine/Jewish situation be any different? Not bloody likely.
Anyway, after moving to Canada and reading more about the Troubles, I actually started to side with the Catholics. I was embarrassed that the Orangemen would routinely march through Catholic neighbourhoods and rub their faces in something that was centuries old. I understand that’s not happening any more: correct?
So, now I’m married to a Catholic. My kids are attending Catholic school. I’ve become a dyed-in-the-wool atheist and couldn’t be happier that my kids are at least learning “A” religion in school. Can’t hurt 'em any.
Anyway, it’s nice to see a compromise and I’m glad newer generations don’t hold the same prejudices from when I lived there.
I always thought the IRA had the right of it to the limited extent that it would probably be better for all Irish if the island were politically unified, but otherwise, it was all so much tragic dumbassery on both sides.
My mother, BTW, once toured the Republic and got the very distinct impression most people there don’t much care whether they ever get the North united with the Republic or not.
I don’t know all of the details, but in general I believe in self-determination of peoples. Northern Ireland’s status should be decided on the basis of what the people of Northern Ireland want, not on the basis of making the island whole. Too many people place historical claims or territorial continuity above the desires of the people. the people of the present are what matter, not history and geography.
Perhaps a trite way of looking at it given the devastation but there are many worldwide conflicts that follow the same pattern. Over here is a bunch of people that are (or see themselves as) picked on. Over there are a bunch of sympathetic people with money. Let’s give them money to buy guns and see what happens!
Oh, no, that’s not our battle to fight - let them get bloody and we’ll sing songs about them. MUCH more important to invest in RPGs than touchy-feely things like economic infrastructure.
I wasn’t out of high school yet when the bombings stopped, and I wasn’t mature enough to look for information beyond the casual news coverage we got.
I thought the IRA were the badguys, on the rare occasion when I thought about it at all. There wasn’t even a question of the degree of blame, I just thought the terrorists ought to have knocked it off and stopped killing people.
Let’s not forget the Provisional IRA and the armed struggle grew from the denial of the legitimate demands for the end of all the Protestant persecutions, gerry-mandering etc etc made by the Civil Rights movement.
I gre up in the UK with the Troubles as a background and remember the troops going in initially to protect Catholic communities. I blame the Protestants for their stupid vicious bigotry. It was not 6 of one and half a dozen of the other initially. Deny the legitimate grievances of a minority with a mailed fist and they will fight back.
It was tragic, it was stupid and the IRA terrorism was evil and viciously counter-productive but if the Catholic minority had not been made permanent second class citizens, if scum like Paisley and Protestant terrorists like the UVF not been operating decades of violence and thousands of deaths could be avoided.
As ever the lesson we always fail to learn is that meeting legitimate grievances with force inevitably leads to lose-lose in the end. Relevant Wiki article
I used to be rabidly anti IRA and the Catholics but then when the hunger strikes began I started to read more about the history and the social side of what was going on. I soon discovered that my perceptions were terribly flawed. Several things that I read, I particularly remember Ten Men Dead about the hunger strikes and a book called Living in a War Zone by an American who went to Belfast and lived with a Catholic family although he was a protestant, made obvious the level of social disadvantage the Catholics suffered.
Trouble is, the self–determination principle is tangled up with both history and geography, as the partition was specifically designed to take in parts of Ulster that would ensure a Unionist majority. (This is why the northernmost point of the island, Malin Head, isn’t in Northern Ireland!)
I never made a point of learning much about it, but from my perspective it seemed like a lot of violence over trifling nonsense. It also seemed like the IRA, in addition to being terrorists, was involved with drugs and crime. These perceptions may well be totally ignorant, I’ll admit, but as an uninterested US citizen, that’s what I took away from it.
That’s how I thought of it, and I once got in a nasty argument with an alcoholic privileged friend of mine with a name like Eilis over it: she insisted that the IRA was nothing whatsoever like the PLO. I disagreed strongly.
The Hollywood portrayal of the IRA was generally romantic, as I remember: they were good people who sometimes went overboard in their actions.
While the IRA often seemed morally ambiguous to me (I liked their cause, thought their way of working toward it was awful), the Orange folks (can’t remember the exact name) always seemed like colonialist schmucks.
If I thought more carefully about it now, I expect my view of it would be a lot more harsh of both groups.
That was part of the problem though. The US was a major source of funding for the IRA and successive governments did nothing to stop it. The Protestants had their own terrorists and the Ulster security agencies, police and later the British Army and security services all too often functioned as the armed thugs of Protestantism. And then there was Bloody Sunday.
My step brother was in the British Army over there on several tours and he and his mates took great delight in generally fucking with the catholics - smashing houses up on vague pretexts etc. It was standard opersating procedure once the Catholic side became The Enemy.
When all the organs of the State are against you then naturally you turn to your own community for protection and justice but that just leads to a dreadful slippery slope.
What you say about drugs and crime applied and still applies equally to the Protestant side.
I’ve no doubt you’re absolutely right. It just seems like we heard about the IRA being involved in all of this bad staff and very little about the Protestant side also having their hands dirty.
The sectarian hatreds seemed to me to be neighborhood related. Foe example, i knew a guy (catholic) who grew un in Belfast. Protestants lived on one side of the road, Catholics on the other. neither group had anything to do with eachother.
Another chap grew up in a town outside belfast: his recollections were that both groups socialized, went to echother’s weddings and wakes, and drank together.
Another thing: Belfast was relatively quiet in the 1950-1960’s period-because (I think) the N. Ireland economy was doing very well-shipbuilding and textiles were booming, and eveybody had a job. When the koreans took the shipbuilding away, and the textile mills closed down, people were thrown out of work-that’s when things got ugly!
Though I am much too young to remember even the end of the conflict, I remember vaguely having the impression that both sides were killing each other over Protestantism vs. Catholicism (I was young and didn’t grow up in a religious household, so I didn’t really know the difference between the two). Later than changed to British army = good (they were part of the government) and IRA = bad (weren’t they terrorists?).
I admittedly still don't know very much about the Troubles, but am constantly shocked that the death toll was so high on both sides.
