AIBU to be shocked that I had never heard about 'Bloody Friday'?

[sashh]

On the thread about public information films WeShouldOpenABar mentioned a film and I went to find it on youtube.

One of the films that popped up in the side bar is about 'Bloody Friday'. This happened when I was a small child, and I know my mum stopped us watching the TV news after my brother was asked what he wanted to be when he grew up and gave the answer, "An IRA sniper".

Anyway I have heard about Bloody Sunday, have a vague recollection of seeing the priest with a white hanky on TV and I am probably aware of it more from the campaign for justice for those shot.

I'm just wondering how much else I missed / am not aware of. I remember some bombings being reported extensively such as the one at Omahg and Enniskillen, I know these were much later so I was older or an adult.

So how many of you dear mumsnetters have heard of this? And if you have are you outside NI?

This is the link about Amnesty

www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/local-national/northern-ireland/amnesty-international-clock-ticking-for-european-court-of-human-rights-to-address-hooded-men-torture-case-30769046.html

Because there is a lot of fondness for Ireland and a large Irish American population, it was quite easy for fundraisers to exploit the fact that the USA can be so inward looking. Some, but obviously not all, of those who were happy to fund raise for the IRA just saw it as this big romantic struggle in 'the old country', where the IRA were fighting a humane and glorious fight against the oppressive British military, and maybe weren't even aware (or turned a blind eye to it) that bombs aimed at 'ordinary' people doing their shopping on a Saturday afternoon featured heavily.

I remember watching a documentary at school, probably 1990s, where the documentary maker was interviewing Irish Americans who were proud to fund raise for the IRA. They were adamant that the IRA only existed because Catholics had never been allowed to vote in N Ireland. They 100% believed that to be true, and refused to believe the interviewer when told that actually they did have a vote, and had done since N Ireland came into existence.

Don't want to monopolise the thread, but the fact that I was able to use the internet to get news at a fingertip just shows how easy it is to access news now. Of course, you need to know the source as this may be unreliable or at worst deliberate misinformation or propaganda.

This was not available in the past.

Ah treacle Soda, there is a lot missing from that statement. The voting rights in NI were not the same as the rest of the UK, even in the 70's. Certain voting rights came with property ownership. Catholics, nationalists were not the main property owners. A person with three properties would get those 3 votes. A person without property, none. Constituencies were gerrymandered so that areas with high Nationalist populations would end up with Unionists being elected. The term Gerrymandering comes from NI practices. A lot of anti-democratic and voting 'engineering' went on in NI. Why do you think people went on those Civil Rights Marches? Housing was Unionist controlled, and not fairly given out. Fermanagh and Tyrone were Nationalist majority counties but ended up being part of the newly created Northern Ireland as the Unionist Majority area was figured to be unviable.

Voting rights were historically carried out in a very dodgy way in NI. Not in the 90's, but not not long beforehand. Certainly up to the 70's.

I remember checking under the car while I was growing up. One year it took three attempts to get the xmas shopping due to bomb scares (uk mainland).

We used to find it great fun watching the bomb squad blow up suspicious vehicles!

I have worked in retail most of my adult life and have had training on how to deal with a warning phone call in all of them.

Pangurban absolutely. When I studied it, the lack of equality between Catholics and Protestants was then deemed to have been a key trigger for the start of the Troubles. Specifically, gerrymandering and also employment and pay bias, even in public sector appointments to protestants.

Wiggle read my post properly, you seem to have missed this bit about the Boston bomb: it was awful and inexcusable and sad. Where did I say, slap it up?

The point is that some people in Boston did not seem to recognise that giving money to terrorists results in . . . death and terror.

Totally agree with the comments that the dreadful treatment of Catholics by the majority Protestants fuelled the unrest that led to the troubles.

The British army were originally sent in to keep the peace but as often happens it all sent pear shaped.

What is most amazing though was the way that people like Martin mcguinnes and Ian Paisley became if not friends then people who were able to do business.

That's extrodinary really.

Wiggle I read Abra's comments as Americans seeing no link between terrorist actions and fundraising for the people who carry them out.

BTW the fact that there are people who have not heard of it all has quite cheered me up. Let's chuck it in the "dustbin of history" where it belongs and move on

Absoloutly not, if you look at early films when the army first went in to NI they were greeted with tea and biscuits. Within 6 months things had changed.

That is something we should have learned and applied when the army have gone in to Afghanistan, Iraq and numerous other places, you may go in to a country for all the right reasons (or all the wrong ones) but what you do on the ground and who to will have consequences, possibly for generations.

Agree about McG and IP. Who ever would have believed it twenty years ago?

I grew up in the London in the 60's & 70's but unlike PP don't remember any great feeling of fear. However, whenever I visited rellies in Donegal and passed through the North I remembered being scared of all the soldiers, checkpoints etc. Especially as some of the soldiers were only a few years older than me and they looked scared as well.

What did amaze me was how lovely and good humoured (if in a slightly fatalistic vein) all the people I met in NI were despite their environment.

Pang I'm aware of all that, but I had already written a very long post and didn't want to make it so long as to put people off reading it.

The civil rights movement was very necessary and the way electoral boundaries were drawn up was wrong, I would never deny that. But to say that being Catholic automatically denied you a vote is simply not true, and certainly by the early 1990s (which is when I'm talking about with regards to the documentary we watched in school, it was up to date at the time) all you had to be was over 18. It's a very different thing to say 'the electoral system is unfair' as to say 'I'm not allowed to vote'.

Well they might have had a vote but the Gerrymandering and the way the constituency lines were drawn they might as well not have had a vote.

I also recall from GCSE history, in the Dungannon area I think, a single child free protestant woman being awarded a council house before a catholic family and their children who had been waiting longer. Things like that reportedly happened a lot.

I tried to google, theres not a lot about it but I came across this link

Some of the most obvious examples of "gerrymandering" was found in Londonderry where in the mid 1960s the shape of the council wards deliberately divided the Catholic population to massively exaggerate the political representation of the Protestant community.

In the late 1960s a group of nationalists began to work for change, focusing initially on housing. In June 1968 the young nationalist politician, Austin Currie, staged the first direct-action protest with a sit-in at a council house that had been unfairly allocated to an unmarried Protestant woman when there were Catholic families who had been waiting longer.