There have been a lot of articles in the press this week about the British Army presence finally being retired from Northern Ireland (NI) after 38 years. Readers of the blog will know that I now live near Dublin, in the Republic of Ireland, but I was born in and grew up in NI until the age of 18. I’m now 29, so if you do the calculations, you can see that the Army was present for all of the years I spent living there.
Over the years (and especially in the 1980’s) when we talked to family and friends that lived abroad, they often asked ‘how can you live there in the middle of a war-zone?’ They were used to only seeing the press coverage of attacks and negative news of the conflict that was euphemistically called ‘the troubles’. Even people living in the Republic of Ireland, a mere 100 miles or so from this ‘war-zone’ held the same opinions. Each time a bomb went off in Belfast (15 miles from where we lived) we were guaranteed to receive a phonecall from a relation in Dublin to just check ‘if we were OK?’.
Most people know that the island of Ireland has been divided into two countries since 1921. Heading back in time, Ireland was forcibly occupied by the British under King Henry II starting in 1171. For a brief history lesson on more recent times, let’s turn to Wikipedia:
An armed rebellion took place with the Easter Rising of 1916, and the subsequent Irish War of Independence. In 1921, a treaty was concluded between the British Government and the leaders of the Irish Republic. The Treaty recognised the two-state solution created in the Government of Ireland Act 1920. Northern Ireland was presumed to form a home rule state within the new Irish Free State unless it opted out. Northern Ireland had a majority Protestant population and opted out as expected, its in-built majority choosing to remain part of the United Kingdom, incorporating within its border a significant Catholic/Nationalist minority. Disagreements over some provisions of the treaty led to a split in the Nationalist movement and subsequently to the Civil War. The civil war ended in 1923 with the defeat of the Anti-treaty forces.
Following this, the ‘troubles’ really started in the 1960’s with large civil rights protests, that eventually led to the creation of paramilitary groups such as the Provisional IRA who were protesting ‘the British occupation of the six counties’ (being the territory termed Northern Ireland). Over 3000 people died as a result of the conflict over the next 30 years.
Reading the last two paragraphs you might see why people developed negative opinions and believed that we were in the middle of a full-on civil war, scared to leave the house. The real story is that the majority of the conflict was confined to certain areas or certain times of the year (parade season for example). Things were certainly different living in NI compared to living elsewhere, you did have to have a healthy sense of self-awareness and be determined to not put yourself in trouble.
As a teenager, we were rarely allowed to go into Belfast without adult supervision, as incendiary devices were still common in large shops. Walking into a shopping mall, your handbag or purse would be searched (usually half-heartedly) and walking down the street the young soldiers would train the sights of their guns on the bottoms of cute girls and follow them as they walked. There were no rubbish bins/trash cans on the street in Belfast for years, as they could be used to plant bombs. We were encouraged to simply drop our trash on the street and it would be cleaned up later – and it’s a habit that’s proved hard to break for a lot of locals.
When I traveled to Israel earlier this year, I was reminded of all these themes when I saw Israeli soldiers at every bus stop, along with large concrete bollards to prevent the bus queues from being rammed. Civilians carried guns (this was the most worrying to me), but only if they had been licensed and passed an annual test. My bag was searched on entry to every shop and to enter the hotel I had to show my room key. None of this shocked me in any way, I treat it the same as the security queues at airports, there for my benefit. And I was careful not to walk anywhere by myself, and was mainly accompanied by locals.
It’s strange however, that something that seems almost normal and familiar to one person can shock another – plenty of people have informed me since that they would not travel to Israel because of these daily activities, they were too scared.
Back to NI – the shame about all this is that some people are still scared to travel there, even though the troubles have ended – but just look at what they are missing:
Why did you remind me…. I fancy a trip to the Diamond, Ballycastle. A meal at the Cellar would go down well right now.
Posted on August 1, 2007 at 12:42 pm.