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I was born in Berkshire and grew up in Hampshire so 'the Troubles', as the conflict between republicans and loyalists in Northern Ireland became rather strangely known, didn't personally affect me. Sure, IRA bombs were on the news a lot when I was a kid and when I got older and started going to gigs and record shops in London I was heading to a city that was being, fairly regularly, bombed by the IRA.
A sign outside of a British Army vehicle check point in Newry, County Down.
None of that particularly affected me on a personal basis. I remember being in Woolwich, in February 1996 - the month I moved to London, when news came through of a bus being blown up outside the Wellington pub. We thought, briefly, that it was pub of that name in Woolwich but it turned out to be The Wellington on The Strand/Aldwych junction.
A pub I now know pretty well. Eight people were injured and one person (the perpetrator - Edward O'Brien, an IRA volunteer) died. The whole thing was quite confusing. Why did Britain own, and govern, a corner of the island of Ireland? Surely it would make more sense to, as Paul McCartney and Wings had said in 1972 in response to the Bloody Sunday massacre, 'Give Ireland Back to the Irish'?
On the other hand I didn't want to be blown up and killed by an IRA bomb and I didn't want that happening to my friends or family either. Because it was such a local war, and because it's always been such a political hot potato, it's been hard to have an impartial debate about the subject - even now, twenty six years after the Good Friday Agreement.
Last year the BBC aired a five part series, Once Upon A Time In Northern Ireland, which took a very thorough look at events that many of us have lived through and, in conjunction with that, London's Imperial War Museum are hosting an exhibition called Northern Ireland:Living With The Troubles. Mo and I went on Sunday.
The Ballymacarrett district of East Belfast, with St Matthews church in the background, 20 March 1975
It's a fairly small, and free, exhibition so, of course, there's no chance that they can tell the entire story. You get a feel for what it what was like to live through those times but you can't even begin to gauge the scale or enormity of the situation, just how long it lasted, and certainly not how it became normalised to those that lived through it, those that lived in it. An everyday part of life that really never should have been an everyday part of life.
One overwhelming thing you take away from the show is that though things are better now than they were in the nineties, eighties, and seventies (by far the bloodiest and deadliest decade of the Troubles) thanks to the Good Friday Agreement, things still aren't completely normal. Whatever normal is.
The peace is fragile, it has been endangered by a reckless Brexit, and many aspects of the conflict remain unresolved. People now live peacefully side by side (for the most part) but it wouldn't take much, one ill-judged comment from a high ranking politician, one bullet from a zealot's gun, for things to go back to how they were. Thankfully, there is an entire generation who have grown up since the Good Friday Agreement was signed and they're united with the vast majority of the elders in working to make sure this does not happen.
Exhibitions like this, however, don't look at the future. They look at the past and the curators at the IWM have had quite a job making sure everybody's views is represented (including lead curator Craig Murray who offers his thoughts at the start, explaining he has left the bulk of the storytelling to those that experienced events first hand) while, at the same time, trying not to cause offence with opposing views. As we read, "there is no single story that everyone involved can agree on". We may all share this history but we all see it from different angles.
Though there's a broader history of the conflict going back about a century, the exhibition, if not the Troubles themselves, really begins on the night of the 27th June 1970. With violence erupting near St Matthews church at the junction between the loyalist Newtownwards Road and the republican Short Strand.
Loyalists say the Provisional IRA fired into a crowd during a riot that had began after attacks on a flute band returning from an Orange Order parade. Republicans say that loyalists attacked the church to invade Short Strand and that the PIRA simply defended their community with the few guns they had. One thing all can agree on was that this event accelerated the violence rapidly.
Orange marks an over 80% Protestant area, green marks an over 80% Catholic area (as of 1970)
A republican, Jim Gibney - sixteen years old at the time, recalls events:- "I think maybe about nine o'clock, or half nine, a gun battle started and it was a pretty shocking experience". He describes "a constant exchange of fire" and how "the local IRA and the local defence forces had combined together to protect the district from attack" because the community had been left on its own to defend itself.
Robert Niblock, from the loyalist point of view, remembers things differently. He recalls a local band, Gertrude Star, coming back from a parade and being attacked on Newtownards Road before the IRA began firing on the Protestant crowd. Protestants that, according to Niblock, had no guns. He claims two Protestant dead (and twenty-seven injured) and that the one republican who died had been short, accidentally presumably, by an IRA gunman. Niblock was fifteen at the time.
Joe McCann, commander of the 3rd Battalion, Official IRS in the Markets area of Belfast during the siege of the Inglis Bakery in Eliza Street, 11 August 1971
Bloody Friday poster
A year and a half later, thirteen unarmed protestors were shot dead by the Army in an event that is now widely known as Bloody Sunday. Another six months after that tragedy, the PIRA planted twenty-two bombs around Belfast city centre and another nine people were killed (and one hundred and thirty were injured). The PIRA claimed they gave warnings but these were deemed inadequate to prevent loss of life.
The deployment of British troops in Derry/Londonderry's Bogside area in 1969 had preceded, and likely caused - or partially caused, this rapid descent into violence and murder. It was this era that defined the conflict in the media and, therefore, in the minds of the wider UK public. But also helped cement ideas in the minds of republicans and loyalists, Protestants and Catholics, about each other. The more people that died, the more people there were seeking revenge, the more death there was. Many of those who died, an estimated 50% of all casualties, were civilians.
The PIRA began to use car bombs. The numberplate below was removed by Private Steve Kirvan, a member of an Army explosive ordnance disposal team, after defusing a bomb attached to a car in Portadown in 1972. Car bombs were seen by the PIRA as highly effective, and devastating, weapons. They required few volunteers in their placing and they could, and would, be driven to sensitive sites thus ensuring massive damage and often death.
Vehicle number plate
Rubber bullets
The British Army became famous for their use of rubber bullets. Usually, "usually!", non-lethal, 56,000 rubber bullets were fired up to 1976. Seventeen people, eight of them children, were killed by rubber bullets that proved to be anything but non-lethal. All but one of those killed by rubber bullets were Catholic leading to those in the Catholic community, not unreasonably, to believe that they were being disproportionately targeted.
Some, in the Catholic/republican community, took to wearing PIRA badges. Some, in the Protestant/loyalist community, started to support the Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR). The UDR, formed in 1970, was the largest regiment in the British Army and served only in Northern Ireland. Many of the soldiers who fought for the UDR would lose their lives. Republicans saw the UDR as a tool of British state oppression and a sectarian military force. They believed the UDR was colluding with loyalist paramilitaries in killing Catholics.
Provisional IRA (PIRA) badges
The flag of the 3rd battalion Ulster Defence Regiment (UDR)
Improvised mortars developed by the Provisional IRA, abandoned after a unsuccessful attack on an Army base.
The war, sorry - the Troubles, as we know, could not be contained solely in Northern Ireland and PIRA attacks continued to take place on the mainland. Improvised mortars, similar to those above, were used to attack Downing Street in 1991.
Many members of both the PIRA and the loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) were imprisoned. A 'Special Category Status' was introduced by the British government in 1972 which gave paramilitaries recognition as prisoners of war rather than criminals. When the government ended that policy in 1976 it caused an emotional debate over prisoner status. Were these people criminals or soldiers? Were they terrorists or freedom fighters?
Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) handkerchief
Jake Jackson, a former PIRA member, talks about how "to be able to engage in armed actions against human beings you have to depersonalise them" and how he came to view the RUC and the British Army as "nothing more than targets". Going on to add "anyone can shoot a target but it's much more difficult to shoot 'Brian' who has three children, likes golf, and does a bit of charity work".
The stories that RUC members and UVF fighters tell is, predictably, similar. It's a story that has been, and will be, told during conflicts at all times and in all parts of the world and it's a story that we seem unable, as human beings, to change the narrative on.
Devastation caused by a car bomb in Omagh on 15 August 1998
Some people will always find a reason for violence and some will justify their violence no matter how much damage, destruction, and death it causes. After the PIRA agreed to the ceasefire under the Good Friday Agreement, a splinter group - the Real IRA - emerged and in August 1998 they were responsible for a car bomb in Omagh that killed twenty-nine people. The deadliest single incident in the entire history of the Troubles - and one that took place after the Troubles had, officially, ended.
The estimated death toll of the Troubles, in total, is around three and a half thousand (with injuries not far short of fifty thousand) and it seemed, at one point, like there was no end in sight, that the death toll would continue to rise and rise. An ex-UVF member (unnamed) takes up the story:- "at some point someone said 'right, we've had enough'" and talks about how they would go out with the full intent of executing their enemies.
IRA members were equally merciless and I remember there being very little sympathy for the IRA, or the republican cause, in England during the 1980s. Following the government's ending of the Special Category System and Margaret Thatcher's enforcement of that decision, ten IRA hunger strikers starved themselves to death. I remember, as a teenager, returning from roller skating on the bus on Sunday nights where a lot of lads my age, who would have been described at the time as 'casuals', would sing songs about one of those hunger strikers, Bobby Sands, and how he "did it for the bastards in the IRA".
Residents and visitors walking past a wire security cage surrounding shops and businesses in the centre of Belfast in 1972.
Hunger strike poster
A soldier looks down the sights of his rifle in a pedestrianised part of Newry town centre, County Down
Murals
Murals
A soldier on patrol watches a woman walking down the street in a republican area of Strabane in the late 1970s
That's how nuanced the debate about the troubles had become on much of the mainland. I expect those kids, those casuals, had parents who watched the news and imparted the information to them that the IRA, and Bobby Sands, were 'bastards'. It seems like any attempt to understand why parts of Northern Ireland were burning had long been abandoned.
But, as this exhibition is at lengths to point out, the towns and cities of Northern Ireland were no different to those in the rest of the UK. They had the same shops, the same road signs, and the same people going about the same everyday business. Except, of course there's an exception, that everyday business could be disrupted in a moment. By a shooting, by a bombing.
It was normal to see soldiers in your garden on your way to work in the morning, it was normal to have to pass through British Army checkpoints, and it was normal to have to pass through paramilitary checkpoints. Belfast shoppers entered the city centre through turnstiles and, once there, were surrounded by security fences. Even Tufty, the road safety squirrel, had to take on a darker role than he was accustomed to.
Public information poster
Jim Gibney speaks of the class issues that underpinned the conflict, Liam McAnoy, an ex-IRA member, talks about how women were particularly discriminated against at the time, and Jeff Dudgeon, a gay rights campaigner, talks about how the gay scene was, perhaps surprisingly, a safe space where the Troubles were hardly ever discussed.
The Red Hand Commandos were linked to the UVF and when one member, Beano Niblock, went to prison he observed a commonality between the loyalists and the republicans. They were both working class, they'd grown up in the same city, and they'd both suffered, and, in some cases - including his own, they'd both inflicted violence. He realised he'd been 'tutored' not to see a connection between the two sides.
Eventually 71.1% of the voters of Northern Ireland came to see it was time to put an end to the Troubles (or at least to the vast majority of it). In 1998, Tony Blair (the British PM), Bertie Ahern (the Taoiseach of the Republic of Ireland), Mo Mowlam (the Secretary of State of Northern Ireland), and David Andrews (the ROI's Minister for Foreign Affairs) all signed the Good Friday Agreement and it has, despite great pressure at times, more or less held firm ever since.
Bringing a peace that once looked almost unimaginable. Not everyone was happy. The Real IRA refused to accept the terms of the agreement and some on the loyalist side were unhappy about the freeing of republican prisoners they believed to be terrorists. As well as being even more aggrieved about the rehabilitation of Sinn Fein leaders like Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness.
It was, surely, a price worth paying for peace. For a peace that had already paid too high a price. The final room of the exhibition is given over to one large film. Quite a moving one. One in which those who live in Northern Ireland today speak about their hopes and fears for Northern Ireland's future. They speak about the border concerns Brexit has brought about, they speak about the issues that remain unresolved, and they speak about the possibility of a united Ireland. That's something that still seems a long way off - but it does, right now, feel closer than it ever has done in my lifetime.
Good Friday Agreement booklet
A label sent from Westminster to Sinn Fein's Martin McGuinness
Thanks to Mo for suggesting this, for her company, and for joining me for a quick debrief (soft drinks only) in the over-priced IWM cafe afterwards. I now need to watch the documentary and get a fuller version of a story that happened, and is still happening, in my lifetime.
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