An Irishman's perspective on his personal experience of the Troubles in Northern Ireland

Hinzugefügt: 2026-06-03

[00:00:00]Hello all and uh nice if cloudy day here in Dublin. So thought I'd do another video and this time covering the uh the troubles period of um in Northern Ireland. Um so this is a conflict that took place in Northern Ireland. what's known as a sectarian conflict between um two main groups uh the IRA or Irish Republican army who were claimed to be fighting for a united Ireland against um the UVF or also volunteer force who were wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK.

[00:00:43]And there were other groups involved such as the Irish National Liberation Army or the INLA or the ULA Defense Force, the UDA as long uh as well as sorry um British security forces and occasionally um input from Angardesia, the Irish police force as well and the Irish military too um but very very occasionally and only at the request of the United Kingdom.

[00:01:13]Um the conflict mainly took place in in Northern Ireland uh particularly the cities of uh Belfast and Derry and um didn't really involve the rest of Ireland except for uh occasional bombing campaigns or threats of bombs uh here in in Dublin and in other places as well as bombing campaigns very famously in uh in Britain as well. Um, so you can see many videos online about the history of this conflict, but what I want to talk about today is uh my personal experience growing up in the latter half of this conflict um throughout the 1980s and 1990s.

[00:02:04]Um the this will hopefully give you some indication as to why most Irish people my age and older would uh consider Northern Ireland to be of predominant importance for um for any relations between ourselves and the British and why we take it so seriously to to maintain the peace there. um this people who are younger than me as the generations go by it becomes less and less of an issue but still uh memories are long in Ireland. So uh we do teach our children and grandchildren about this conflict and what happened and they um generally would share the same outlook as most of older people.

[00:02:51]So, um, when I was growing up in the 1980s, uh, my childhood was mostly in the 1980s. Um, the conflict wasn't really, uh, too heavy here in the Republic. Um, there the era of the violent bombing campaigns both in, um, the Republic of Ireland and in the UK had largely come to an end.

[00:03:14]that there were some incidents that did to take place but most of the conflict was taking place within uh within Olster itself within um Northern Ireland itself. Sorry. Um just to clarify on terms, right? When I say Northern Ireland, I mean Northern Ireland, the the region of Ireland that is part of the UK. When I say Olter, I mean that plus the three the three counties of Ireland that are um that are under uh Irish uh jurisdiction from um from Dublin. That would be Monahan Caven and Dunigal.

[00:03:54]Um, it's called Northern Ireland, not North Ireland because of the fact that Dunnal is the most northern county in Ireland or region in Ireland. And it is part of the Republic of Ireland. So, it's um Northern Ireland means that it's it's in the north area rather than it being the full north. Anyway, with that said, um during the 1980s, the conflict had become kind of regionalized and contained to that area. And while there were um attacks going on, especially for um Irish Republican Army or IRA attacks in the UK, these had basically dwindled um since the bombing campaigns that did take place there in the 1970s.

[00:04:42]Um like I remember clearly some of my first memories of watching the news with my parents would be um attacks on one side or the other um taking place in places like Del Belfast and Derry. And um these attacks known as tit fortat attack attacks would be one side basically um attacking uh sometimes to maim sometimes to kill people on the other side which would result in that side then launching revenge attacks back. Um this was like a daily occurrence. Uh it will it happened over and over again and I do remember my parents commenting about the fact that it will always be like that in the north and they would never come to an end. Um it was also the period of the disappearances where people would vanish um and basically from their homes or vanish from their communities um with no idea where they had disappeared to.

[00:05:47]Later, most of these people would be their bodies would be recovered as they had been basically murdered and their bodies disposed of by one side or the other. Um the the some of these bodies still haven't been recovered today. Um which causes a lot of anguish to the families involved.

[00:06:10]But the um but the vast majority of these people had been were um were found again. So again this was something that entered our consciousness quite strongly here in Dublin. Um the fact that because some of these people actually disappeared from Dublin itself. Um why did they disappear? mainly because they were working against uh either the IRA, UVF or some other group um with the security forces and um were considered traitors to one side or the other. Um that that was mostly the case but to this day we don't know exactly why some of these people were were taken. Um then as you went into the '9s and as I started entering my teenage years um travel into into Dublin be Dublin city center became more kind of um forefront of my mind. However um we were discouraged from doing so by uh my parents. Now, just to give you a bit of sense of geography, I'm from a suburb of Dublin in the north Dublin area. Um, to get to the city center, uh, involves a bus journey of about, uh, 30 to 40 minutes. And, um, it was the same back then. Um the my parents did not really like or enjoy me or my siblings going into the city center because as they would say they would be afraid of uh a bombs going off in the center of Dublin.

[00:07:44]Now there hadn't been a bomb going off in Dublin for god about 10 15 years at this point but um there was always threats of bombs. Almost every weekend there was a a bomb threat was made um in the city center um where whole regions of of Dublin city center had to be uh closed off. Um, this resulted in a sense of very understandable paranoia amongst Irish people and caused huge amounts of economic damage to uh to Dublin and other cities and uh may gave us a sense of the fact that we um we were kind of a bit under siege and at the uh at the behest of the paramilitaries.

[00:08:31]Um the the Irish police did do their very best and um the onardia corner becames one of the most um proficient groups in the world at bomb disposal.

[00:08:44]But nevertheless um that that feeling was always there. Um even going to to a McDonald's because there was none basically in my area. The nearest one was in the city center became a huge event in my childhood ma because of uh the fact that my parents really did not want us anywhere near the city center by ourselves and they were quite reticent of going in themselves. Um I went to university then later in the 1990s to um Trinity College and uh I remember several times uh just for those who don't know Trinity College is the main is a large university in the center of um of of Dublin City. Um it's one of the three big universities that uh that service the the people of Ireland um that is in the capital with lots of other minor ones, smaller ones as well. But anyway, um so I I did uh a degree there um that lasted from 1996 all the way up to 2000. So I was there in the the early times of the um of the peace process and for the priest process itself and even I I distinctly remember even in the early days like in 1996 97 that there were several times where parts of Dublin near to the university and the university itself had to be closed down due to bomb threats.

[00:10:20]So it was still going on even all the way up to the time where we uh regained the peace in 1998.

[00:10:30]Um even after that because it took uh a good few years for both sides to wind down its um its their military aspect of their campaigns and agree to um demilitarization.

[00:10:48]people were very unsure that this was going to actually last there like there had been a a ceasefire declared um in the mid '90s and that ceasefire came to an end with the bombing of Canary Warf and um the also the bombing of the Alma bombing which I is one of my uh most distinct memories because we did feel that that ceasefire would actually last. But the uh the MA bombing in particular, which killed uh many people um in the streets of a town called Ma in Northern Ireland, um was a shock to everybody as we had hoped that that ceasefire would last.

[00:11:34]Now, thankfully, it didn't derail the talks. It didn't derail the peace and the peace continued on as everybody in Ireland and abroad turned really and rightly so against the IRA and the UVF.

[00:11:48]Um so all of this um took place in the 1980s 1990s. Now contrast that to what happened then in the early 2000s where um huge amounts of investment poured into Ireland to both north and south. But because Northern Ireland didn't have the infrastructure of due to lack of investment over 30 years due to a war going on there um the the Republic of Ireland um and due to a lot of very astute u management by various Irish governments at the time um entered a period known as the Celtic tiger um our first major economic boom.

[00:12:31]Now that came to an end with the um with the financial crisis in 2008 but it was a period where there was money flowing across the country. Um it was so good that uh the Irish government used to give um free money to people who open savings accounts would you believe? Um so you have to see this from an average Irish person's perspective. The 1970s, 80s, and 90s were dark periods in our history. We had gone through recessions.

[00:13:06]We had the war going on in Northern Ireland. We were having diplomatic issues with our nearest neighbors, and we had a succession of um not so great governments, particularly the government of Charles J. Hahi, which I've done a video about before. And then once the peace did settle in in the early 2000s, we entered a period of great affluence and great um prosperity for basically everybody in Ireland. Well, the vast majority of people in Ireland anyway, um, which has except for the massive hiccup in due to the financial crisis in uh, 2008, 2010 and the COVID crisis uh, there a few years back has basically been ongoing.

[00:13:55]Um, so we are very nervous about it going back to the bad old days. Um, we want the prosperity that we have to spread to our neighbors in the north. Whether they are pro- British, pro-Irish, we don't really care. Uh, the days where we feared uh, unionists and unionism are long since gone. The religious aspect has basically disappeared as well because uh, Ireland is much more secular than it used to be.

[00:14:28]And but most particular of all and most important of all, we don't want bombs going off in our streets. We don't want people murdered in a nearby city just over silly pol well not silly from our perspective uh political uh disagreements. and we don't want um the threat of this spiraling out of control to becoming an all an all Ireland um conflict with uh the prospect of unification coming up um within the next we'll say decade. This is something that we are behind the scenes already working on with how to manage this without it spiraling into um violence once again.

[00:15:09]But from our point of view uh that's our highest priority. um when it when coming to dealings with with the UK, when coming to dealings with international affairs, uh we don't want to go back to that stage. So, um I hope that this plus a little bit of my biography uh would be interesting video for those who are interested. um is my second or sorry third video uh on this topic of Northern Ireland and it's all building up to the fact that I want to discuss Brexit and um our situation with regards to Brexit in the next couple of weeks uh in various videos coming up as uh the tide seems to be shifting in Britain regards to this. Anyway, have a very nice day and take care wherever you are.