Remembering why the backstop is needed
January 16, 2019 9:15 PM   Subscribe

These pictures show what life looked like during the troubles. The future of the Irish border is one of the key issues of the Brexit negotiations. Because of its sensitive history, there are fears over what might happen if a hard border and checkpoints returned.
posted by Long Way To Go (35 comments total) 44 users marked this as a favorite
 
Amazing photos. I know a couple of guys that grew up there. It sounds intense. One guy is from a Protestant family - he called it Londonderry, Ulster, and he said when they did the Lord’s Prayer in church on Sunday, just before they all said “Amen” everyone would yell out “NO SURRENDER”. Crazy shit.
posted by awfurby at 10:36 PM on January 16, 2019


1969: A British armoured car moves through Strabane, County Tyrone.

The thing in the picture that this caption is referring to looks more like a tank than an “armoires car”.
posted by gucci mane at 10:41 PM on January 16, 2019


I have really unfond memories of having to stand outside my aunt’s house while the British army went through the house on one visit to my dad’s relatives. And pretty grim ones of Derry which seemed like a total hellhole especially where you waited for the bus back to the Republic.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 10:50 PM on January 16, 2019 [8 favorites]


The Green Flag by Robert Kee is comprehensive through 1973.
posted by Special Agent Dale Cooper at 11:11 PM on January 16, 2019 [1 favorite]


1969: A British armoured car moves through Strabane, County Tyrone.
The thing in the picture that this caption is referring to looks more like a tank than an “armoires car”.


Pretty sure that's a Saladin. Much smaller and lighter than a tank, and wheeled rather than tracked.
A depressing early example of the militarisation of the conflict though, which looked and acted as an army of occupation. It lead to checkpoints, curfews, searches and internment (imprisonment without trial), and all the very visible and intrusive military infrastructure, armed patrols etc that escalated the conflict substantially in the 70's.

It's just so depressing that the tories seem so willing to risk throwing away the hard-earned peace, but I guess that's just another ongoing example of how badly the British have treated the Irish.
posted by Absolutely No You-Know-What at 11:35 PM on January 16, 2019 [13 favorites]


On the subject of the murals, I went on your of a bunch of the remaining ones while in Belfast last March. While I do have to admit to having certain sympathies for the Catholics over the Protestants, I don't think that was the cause of one finding the unionist murals so much creepier and distressing than the republican ones.

Our guide was a cab driver who'd lived through the Troubles. He's a Catholic who had nothing good to say about the IRA and even less positive remarks about the UDA. I really hope for both the world as a whole and for him and his family, that the current UK government doesn't manage to fuck things up badly enough that he has new militant murals to show tourists. (Also, if you get to go to Belfast before the UK tries to imitate The Road Warrior, do one of those tours. They're fantastic and with the time and money.)
posted by Hactar at 12:36 AM on January 17, 2019 [5 favorites]


Astonishing really that there was a de facto civil war played out on the streets of a major developed Western country well within living memory.
posted by el_presidente at 12:39 AM on January 17, 2019 [15 favorites]


Thanks for the book selections! What are some good documentaries? People online were recommending a three parter by Peter Taylor, Voices from the Grave, and The Life After.
posted by gucci mane at 1:03 AM on January 17, 2019


Growing up on the south coast of Ireland during the 80's and 90's my personal experience of the border was non-existent, but you'd hear various stories by word of mouth - my dad's friend who was interrogated for 5 hours, the schools football team who were strip searched by the side of the road, the woman who had her clothes dumped on the road while soldiers waved her underwear around.

Our seaside resort also had a noticeable uptick in visitors from the North every year for the week of the Twelfth i.e. fleeing possible violence arising from Protestant organisations marching through Catholic areas to commemorate that big battle three hundred years ago when Catholics were finally put in their place. Quite a few of them ended up staying, for example Liam Neeson's family (Catholics from a heavily Protestant town) used to come down in the 60's and 70's and his cousin still lives here today.
posted by kersplunk at 1:09 AM on January 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


A new interactive map by The Irish Times shows the details of every one of the 208 crossing points on the border.

A tweet from yesterday in response to Arlene Foster's latest comments: This was my reality growing up. If this isn’t a hard border I don’t know what is!
posted by rory at 2:18 AM on January 17, 2019 [9 favorites]


Not a documentary, but Alan Clarke's Elephant gets right to the point, and then mercilessly bashes you in the face repeatedly with it - luckily it's just a film. (Trigger warning, nsfw, etc.)

Also, Hunger, by Steve McQueen, though not a documentary is worth watching.
posted by nikoniko at 2:54 AM on January 17, 2019


The transition to the final picture is pretty stunning. I wish that the history of England's actions in Ireland* was properly taught in British schools - growing up in the 90s, as far as I was knew, the UK had always "owned" Northern Ireland (not that I was taught this, I just wasn't told otherwise). It was only as an adult reading Wikipedia (after watching films & TV documentaries on the subject) that I learned Ireland only gained independence in the early twentieth century. Maybe that stuff features in British schools now but when I was a kid we just learned about kings & queens and WW2.

*and elsewhere in the world
posted by EndsOfInvention at 3:03 AM on January 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


There are reportedly over 34 kilometers (about twenty miles) of "peace walls" separating communities in Northern Ireland today. That really amazes me: people speaking the same language, citizens of the same country, who go off to work/school/whatever each day and then come home and plot how to get rid of their neighbours.
posted by Joe in Australia at 3:24 AM on January 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


On a slightly more lighthearted note, if you haven't seen Derry Girls yet, it's quite good!
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 4:47 AM on January 17, 2019 [11 favorites]


RE: books, I quite liked Colm Tóibín's Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border (a BBC link), the novelist's account of doing just that. He gets into the history, talks to the people who live on and around the border. Not a history book but he's a good writer with a solid grasp on the subject.

Similarly, I'd recommend this episode of RTE's History Show podcast. Even growing up in the republic, I had the idea that the border had consisted of serious military checkpoints non-stop since 1922 but this features interviews with folks who lived around it. What they convey is a border that was a lot more porous that it became in the late 1960's, a border people might cross because TVs were cheaper half an hour's drive away. Kind of closer to how it is now, with people from the republic nipping north to buy fireworks and the like.
posted by ocular shenanigans at 4:50 AM on January 17, 2019 [4 favorites]


If you want to see a play that summarizes the madness of the"The Troubles"* in the 21st century, watch Cyprus Road with the amazing Stephen Rea if it every comes around. Warning: play has serious depictions of racism and violence, but is bleakly, blackly comic beyond belief.


* I always hated that term. Such understatement for what was a low grade civil war.
posted by lalochezia at 5:01 AM on January 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


This has been an inadvertently Troubles-heavy season, so to piggyback on other recommendations, I really loved Anna Burns’ Milkman, set in unnamed-but-obviously -Belfast in the late 70s. It is weird and disturbing and as close as you can get to real-life dystopian fiction.

I also had a chance to see “The Ferryman,” which explicitly deals with the way The Troubles destroyed families, during its Broadway run. I also thought was very good if you have a chance to see it.
posted by thivaia at 5:21 AM on January 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


Growing up on the south coast of Ireland during the 80's and 90's my personal experience of the border was non-existent...

Pretty much the same for me in north Co. Dublin at the same time - but in some ways that also says a lot. The border was less than 60 miles from where I grew up, but I was well into my teens, before I went to the North, and that was only after one of the IRA ceasefires. Even then, though tensions had eased a bit, you were still met by an army checkpoint at the border.

It's very different now, when it's fairly normal to hop over to Newry or Belfast to take advantage of sterling fluctuations, or just general lower prices. But there still are tensions - my sister went to a dress shop in a smaller town in the North to look for her wedding dress a couple of years ago. When she came out there was a note on her car (with Irish licence plates) telling her to get out as they didn't want "her type" there.
posted by scorbet at 5:21 AM on January 17, 2019 [7 favorites]


* I always hated that term. Such understatement for what was a low grade civil war.

I've been thinking of a dystopian story set in post-Brexit Britain, and one of the ideas is a civil war against Scottish separatists, which is referred to as “the Unpleasantness”.

“The Troubles” is a classic British understatement, dripping with imperial hauteur; a bit like referring to recalcitrant, soon-to-be-eradicated natives as “fuzzy-wuzzies”.
posted by acb at 5:53 AM on January 17, 2019 [5 favorites]


The death toll for The Troubles is over 3,500 (9/11 was about 3,000).
posted by carter at 5:58 AM on January 17, 2019 [5 favorites]


I remember going to northern Ireland on vacation (ostensibly for genealogical research) with my parents at about 12 years of age. Kids my age were digging up the street to build a barricade or something. The feeling of fear was palpable. It really put my cozy life back in Canada into perspective.
posted by klanawa at 6:20 AM on January 17, 2019


“The Troubles” is a classic British understatement
I'm fairly sure the term arose within Ireland, though in which community I'm not sure - I think it's the Republican community, but couldn't say for certain.
posted by Grangousier at 6:44 AM on January 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


(Yes, Wikipedia reminds me - it's a direct translation of the Irish name for the situation "Na Trioblóidí")
posted by Grangousier at 7:52 AM on January 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


Just a couple years ago, my partner and I vacationed through NI, taking walking tours all through Derry and up the Falls Road in Belfast. My Aunt had warned us about the border crossing but it was a literal non-event. I only twigged to it when the style of the road signs changed.

The Belfast tour guide talked at length about how much the EU was underwriting the peace process. I left with a newfound appreciation for the miracle of the Good Friday Agreement and an awareness of its fragility. So when the stupidity of Brexit got underway soon after that, I despaired.

And yet, I'm nurturing some slivers of optimism. Perhaps it's possible that NI has developed enough of its own identity, perhaps being able to hold two passports has taken deep enough root, perhaps the Tories have demonstrated convincingly enough that they do not care about NI, that even if we don't see A Nation Once Again in my lifetime, maybe just maybe everyone on the island can live in peace with each other.
posted by whuppy at 8:26 AM on January 17, 2019


What's missing from the gallery is the extent of the militarization in Northern Ireland. For me, that would always be RUC stations, such as Crossmaglen RUC Station. That this brutal monstrosity could be in a rural village is unthinkable now.

I flew into Belfast Airport quite often just before the peace agreement was signed. Full luggage search for everyone, and none of that cursory TSA nonsense: everything in you luggage and on your person was looked at, every time. Then came the long, slow, single-file drive between the checkpoints: they'd take your details at the first one, but there were two more to get through before you got out. Security theatre, but with guns trained on you the whole time.
posted by scruss at 8:31 AM on January 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


Powerful photoessay; really drives home how fragile and young the peace agreement (like so many others) is. Although I have always lived in the US I remember news reports about Northern Ireland throughout the 1970s and 1980s. This was before the modern 24 hour news cycle so it must have been pretty bad to make headlines over here. The dog marking his territory while Michael Farrell speaks was kind of humorous, though. Also interesting that this photo became the mural on the right in this picture.
posted by TedW at 8:40 AM on January 17, 2019


My parents visited Ireland & Northern Ireland a couple of years ago. They took a bus tour of (I think) Belfast, hosted by a pair of guys -- one Catholic and one Protestant. The guides said that they wanted to tell what happened there not to keep alive a feud, but so people would know the story and not repeat it.

The pictures show a very nice city now, and the murals are still very impressive. It would be so, so stupid for someone to want to discard that peace. :7(
posted by wenestvedt at 8:56 AM on January 17, 2019 [2 favorites]


This documentary about Bobby Sands and the 1981 hunger strike of IRA prisoners is really good. I didn't know very much about The Troubles at the time, just what I was being told by the Irish Catholic sisters at my school.
posted by hollygoheavy at 10:04 AM on January 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


Since someone brought up Derry Girls - I remember liking Good Vibrations, which is about the punk scene in Belfast during the 70s. It's a biopic so of course it's much more realistic, but is still about as feel-good as you could possibly get given the setting, while still giving you a sense of the division, paranoia, and violence that comes from living in a war zone.
posted by en forme de poire at 11:02 AM on January 17, 2019 [3 favorites]


This was my reality growing up. If this isn’t a hard border I don’t know what is!

That's a powerful photo. A border in a tiny village, between two EU members, more militarised than Checkpoint Charlie.
posted by kersplunk at 12:54 PM on January 17, 2019


My parents told me that in Belfast there once were Protestant Taxis and Catholic Taxis. You had to take a Taxi of the appropriate religion, depending on which neighborhood you were going to. A Taxi of the wrong religion in the wrong place would get burned or worse!
posted by monotreme at 2:13 PM on January 17, 2019 [1 favorite]


Do yourself a favor and read Milkman

Among the may things that it is, it's a deep dive into the paranoia of living in that particular occupied state. also it's darkly humorous and an incredible read.
posted by OHenryPacey at 4:54 PM on January 17, 2019


Growing up in northern Ireland in the '60s and '70's crossing the border into the 'South' in my dad's car involved a stop at a checkpoint , a guard chatting about the weather, a cursory chance, at documents and a friendly pat on the roof and we were on our way...

It those days things were much poorer and rougher in the 'South'. The road texture immediately changed, road signs included Gaelic, and it felt like a much poorer country. It was easy to see how the intersection of wealth disparity with religion drove Irish Nationalist resentment and conflict.

If No Deal goes to pass, I can imagine that it'll be the 'North' that becomes the poor side as the British revert to being a nation of shop keepers.
posted by marvin at 7:21 PM on January 17, 2019


My dad is from the North, near Omagh. He and every single one of his brothers have spent time at her Majesty's pleasure. One was tortured (stress positions and that sort of thing). Pretty much whenever I visited someone around had just been either picked up by the RUC, the army, or had a terrifying 'checkpoint' encounter. (One big way to get shot at was to drive away from a checkpoint that was often invisible until your car went by.) We lived in the deep countryside Republic because my dad had been sanctioned from the mainland of the UK (which was thing they could do) and he didn't want to spend the rest of his life being randomly picked up by the security forces in the North for the rest of his life. And that's only one nuclear family and not all of it.

The legacy of wreckage and bitterness that that handed down to the next generation is large. As a child crossing that border was like entering a whole other dystopian world, even though in the 70s the Republic was a lot poorer than the UK, not much of that went to the Nationalist community so everything was not just rundown but half bombed or burned out in parts.

I cannot believe how cavalierly some in the UK and the DUP treat the prospect of going back to those times. And how little anyone thought about restarting The Troubles* with Brexit.

*I was always told that it was called that because at that point no one on either side of the border wanted to say that what was going on was a civil war. And especially not in the Republic where the English army coming in was a source of deep, deep concern. Not actually sure if that is true though.
posted by lesbiassparrow at 7:59 PM on January 17, 2019 [9 favorites]


'The Troubles' (TV Series 1981 Thames Television) was an interesting insight when it was broadcast on TVO.
posted by ovvl at 5:18 PM on January 18, 2019


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