Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland

[shoulditbethishard1]

Thought provoking, upsetting and realised that there’s still so much more I don’t know about the troubles

Did anyone else watch it?

A Catholic unionist ? Yeah pull the other one ?😂 Yer as rare as hen's teeth.
If you believe that folks , you will believe anything. The Catholics did not have equal representation. They did not have equal housing , equal quality of job prospects , health , education prospects . Whoever this Catholic Unionist is on here , is rarer than a hen's teeth.
And why would the Northern Ireland Catholic vote for a party who stood in a parliament away in a country away from their own country ? Their native language( Gaelic ) was surprised for hundreds of years. They could not own property for years and were not allowed to join trade unions .So were called scabs. This person is not telling the truth.

I was just going to say I've never met a catholic unionist in real life!

@DownNative you failed to mention the atrocities on the loyalist sides to and British side as well. I think mumsnet people would be shocked of they read a bit more about how much the the British state inflicted the Ira and carried out alot of their activities. There is proof of this. Much has yet to come out ! Dublin and Monaghan bombings , The Miami Showband murders for example have significant evidence of British state involvement in loyalist bombing. Also Birmingham bombing also has IRA /British infitration. You don't mention this Catholic unionist person strangely. But I will leave it there. Almost like you have an agenda.

@curtainsfringe thinks we are daft 😂

Thank you!

For me, I find what strikes me the most is how it is too often the voices of Northern Ireland's extremes you're hearing in these kinds of programmes. The moderate is squeezed right out of the story, unfortunately.

Consider who's better known Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness are easily better known than John Hume, Seamus Mallon and David Trimble.

And two of the moderates jointly won the Nobel Peace Prize!

The other thing that strikes me is it makes it look like ALL of Northern Ireland was being blown up. And like the majority of the people are taking part in terrorism. Nothing could be further from the truth as most of the trouble was in Londonderry and Belfast. I lived in a mixed town where that kind of thing wasn't a daily occurrence. Not only were most people not involved in terrorism, but most people were able to live fairly peaceful lives. You just went about your business and if you were unlucky, you were unlucky.

Some places were more dangerous than others. The Ardoyne, for example, is an interface area so was prone to quite a lot of different incidents. But Bangor wasn't like that. That's not to say terrorism never destroyed families in places like Bangor.

So the thing I don't want people to think is the whole place was full of people trying to kill each other and every town was blown up. Places like Portrush, Bangor and the Causeway Coastal towns like Ballycastle were very much places of escape from all that. There were still good times amidst it all.

you failed to mention the atrocities on the loyalist sides to and British side as well

This always gets left out. The narrative is very much the IRA committed all the atrocities...

The other thing that strikes me is it makes it look like ALL of Northern Ireland was being blown up.

That is true, it was very much concentrated.

@DownNative a Catholic saying Londonderry yeah pull the other one . Dishonest person.
Can't abide .

@shoulditbethishard1 I'd imagine the army letting it be known that they would be protecting the Protestant/unionist community and terrorising the Catholic/nationalist community, including murdering civilians in the streets would have soured relations pretty swiftly.

I've also never met a Catholic unionist or even heard of one until this thread. People seem to be assuming that @DownNative is an authority on these matters - they are offering a unionist perspective, which is fine, but that does not make what they are saying true. I am from a nationalist background and would disagree with much of their analysis, particularly the revisionism around the lack of civil rights for Catholics in the 60s.

What we had was a terrorist campaign of unjustified murder with an alternative that was democracy.

I'm glad for programmes like Once Upon a Time in NI. They show what happened and explain how it happened. They correct subjective, simplistic views like this.^^

It is an oral history. Enjoys a horrid word but it’s the voices and the complexity behind each of them. Northern Ireland is a complex and grey situation.

And yes you could say that in a somewhat large way it involved working class areas. Again complex reasons for this. Resettlement with social housing but even more middle class people would hardly be having loads of mixed religious belief parties.

Not a bit of it.

My family would have been targets for the likes of the UVF and UDA as well as the Provisionals. Our view has always been that the Republican and Loyalist terrorists were completely unjustified and had no right to destroy the country.

It's not a choice between supporting PIRA or the UVF. Most reasonable people can easily condemn both. The two groups barely ever touched each other and seemed to prefer it that way, so it's not like we have to choose between one or the other.

And that is the reality.

I do not and have never struggled to condemn the Loyalist terrorist groups just as I don't with the Republican groups. Between them, they are responsible for a whopping 90% of all deaths.

That's without mentioning their so-called punishment beatings, kangaroo courts and even exiling people.

I'll end there with Hume's words:

"There is not a single injustice in Northern Ireland today that justifies the taking of a single human life.

What is more, the vast majority of the major injustices suffered not only by the Nationalist community but by the whole community are direct consequences of the IRA campaign.

If I were to lead a civil rights campaign in Northern Ireland today, the main target would be the IRA.

It is they who carry out the greatest infringements of human and civil rights, with their murders and bombings, their executions without trial, their kneecappings and punishment shootings.

The most fundamental human right is the right to life. Who in Northern Ireland takes the most human lives?"

This was the reality of the Troubles and it is not an "agenda" to highlight this. It's a matter of historical record.

Are you suggesting there was no alternative to murder?

The leader of the biggest Nationalist Party throughout the Troubles John Hume emphasised that very point over the years.

Hume was right. The Republican and Loyalist terrorist groups were wrong.

Then your getting into a whole area of cycles of destruction. I can quote at a police officer that black male teenagers are 390 percent more likely to be stopped and searched on the street. They would reply they are the ones more likely to commit crimes. I would say they are prejudice. They would respond with…

whatever way you look at it most deaths in the troubles were as a result of the IRA.

Northern Ireland is a complex issue. When you think you have got to the beginning there is just more and more.

Nobody calls it The Ardoyne.🤣🤣🤣

What revisionism?

It is true Catholics could vote in the Westminster and Stormont Elections. Local council elections was the problem due to the requirement of being a property owner which was less likely for Catholics.

But this didn't mean all Catholics couldn't vote.

What I actually do is use the words of Nationalists like John Hume and, where relevant, those who were part of the Provisional Movement. Hume especially destroyed the Provo propaganda over the years to the point where they thought about murdering him too.

Personally, I have a huge amount of respect for Hume. He's actually an influence for me on this.

I've never read that quote from JH before, that was really interesting.

@DownNative you're minimising the extent of the oppression endured by Catholics living under the Orange state. It wasn't just voting, it was a denial of education, housing and employment rights. It was an apartheid state. And even having the vote as a Catholic wasn't much good to you when the constituencies were gerrymandered to ensure no nationalist representation.

Also, this isn't just history. Soldiers who murdered civilians have never been held accountable and never will be. There's legislation in train to ensure that. Their victims have been denied justice for decades and will never get justice it seems. It's very sad. One way the British government could atone for what happened would be to face up to the atrocities carried out by their soldiers. They won't though.

The troubles is all about oppression. The whole of a Ireland is. People were also oppressed by the various ‘groups’ in their area, or estate. They lived under multiple layers of oppressive, coercive control.

Yes, whether you believe it or not I am a Catholic Unionist.

That's reminded me that the bit in the episode 1 about the Londonderry v Derry name could have been touched on more. Historians can find no record of the name being contentious before the Troubles.

In fact, Republicans were known to sometimes use Londonderry as they did on a commemoration for Robert Emmet with a words "A Present From Londonderry" on it. And Loyalists also aren't averse to calling it Derry either - see Apprentice Boys Of Derry and Relief of Derry, for example.

This is talked about on the CAIN website in a piece written by Brian Lacey. Here's the excerpts:

"I am not sure at what point the use of the alternate names Derry or Londonderry became a badge of political identity. Clearly, things have always been a bit more fluid than all sides give credit for. For instance, in the Tower Museum (actually in glass cases opposite each other) there are two objects which, as it were, give the lie to the 'official' versions.

In one case there is a rule book of the loyalist Apprentice Boys of Derry. It uses the name Derry throughout, and the name Londonderry never appears at all. In the other case, there is a small souvenir teapot, dated 1898, commemorative of the 1798 Rebellion and of the nationalist hero Robert Emmet. On the reverse of this clearly republican artifact is the inscription "a present from Londonderry"."

cain.ulster.ac.uk/issues/segregat/temple/discus1.htm

Personally, it doesn't bother me what people call it. Derry, Londonderry, Maiden City, Legenderry....sometimes I call call it Stroke City due to the "Derry/Londonderry" thing.

But this kind of thing isn't necessarily a marker of someone's politics. And it's unnecessarily divisive to make it so too.

For those who are unsure of what CAIN is, from their website:

CAIN - Conflict and Politics in Northern Ireland.

The CAIN Archive is a collection of information and source material on 'the Troubles' and politics in Northern Ireland from 1968 to the present. There is also some material on society in the region. CAIN is located in Ulster University Opens a new browser window. and is part of ARK.

The Irish Government also helps fund CAIN.

Violence on both "sides" was horrific . But for peace to continue we need to continue to examine the truth. Me ? I think Britain needs to look at its colonial past and be more accountable for it. We stole countries and land. We murdered people and divided people. We caused Northern Ireland. And maybe not me , a poor working class mum from Glasgow living in the South of England but Britain used our colonies. The Scots made up the Black n Tans

@curtainsfringe what's the chances of having three Catholic Unionists on this thread and Sinn Fein winning yesterday? Who knew there was so many untapped Catholic Unionists? 😂 Clearly they aren't voting over there ?😂

And now with this thread being absolutely crackers. ( You can see the a kind of gerry mandering in action here ), I bide everyone a good night and peace and love for all of the UK and Ireland.

I was born at the start of the "Troubles". I saw violence, pretty much every day. The threat was there on the days the actual violence wasn't.

Glad it wasn't so bad for you in the 80s and 90s in Bangor @DownNative.

@Cheekymaw, I'm a Catholic Unionist because having grown up in NI, lived in England and in Ireland, I've learned my lesson: Trust none of the cunts!

I appreciate the safety of dual nationality and an international land border.