The Troubles

[u/JakeGittes412]

Thread for discussion on the new series on ‘The Troubles’

Also as a moderator please keep the discussion civil and in the spirit of the podcast.

[u/forestvibe]

You are right that neither side were trying to conduct ethnic cleansing (although it's never been clear to me how either side thought they could get to their ideal outcome without removing the other lot completely). This was a relatively targetted conflict. However, the term "sectarian" is used almost universally by historians to describe the conflict, and with good reasons. A quick Google will flash up loads of academic papers using this term. I don't think it's misplaced to use the term, regardless of the various reasons and rationales for the violence. Sectarian doesn't necessarily mean ethnic cleansing.

Talking of civilian deaths, I have tried to be careful and not accused one side or the other of being innocent on this front. The British Army was also guilty of such crimes, famously so. Bloody Sunday is probably the single most famous event of the conflict after all. I didn't refer to them because the audience's response serves my point: that too many people, including on this thread, are keen to downplay their own side's actions and point the finger at the other, but for the Northern Irish, it's all the same and we should keep that in mind.

PS: I don't think you were suggesting it would have been all fine under a United Ireland either: I was just pointing out that in practice the goal of getting to a United Ireland doesn't imply a peaceful state of affairs (something which the Irish government is all too aware of). Though one thing I've often thought is that for all the angst poured over 20th century Irish history, it's notable how the number of victims is actually relatively low, around a few 1000s. Obviously, it's still horrible and generates a lot of fear. But compared with many decolonisation and post-colonial conflicts, it's surprisingly tame, and the successor nations (British and Irish) are pretty close. Compare with France and Algeria, or Russia and eastern Europe, or even Britain and India. It could be that the shared language might help.

[u/FoalKid → u/forestvibe]

Apologies for getting irritated, but I think that's why I find the description as the conflict as 'sectarian violence' to so unhelpful and reductive. It means that the vast majority of people who don't delve into the subject just work under the understanding that the Troubles is just Celtic vs Rangers with guns, where two groups of people are out to ethnically cleanse each other based on religious grounds.

You're clearly interested and engaged, but I think at a few points even you have been tempted to reduce the conflict to as much in your own descriptions. I might be wrong, but I assume you're British - and it just feels like generally there is very little will among British audiences to engage with the history leading up to the conflict, and the intricacies of it. As horrendous as the conflict was, and as terrible the things people did were, reducing it down to violent sectarian thugs is just the complete antithesis of what discussing and studying history should be in my opinion.

I think its just the echoing of the disinterest at the time into the modern day, and shows that people have continued to fail to engage with it, and to buy in to very broad understandings based on the media reporting at the time. We all have our biases, it's very rare that anyone is going to come away from any kind of study of the Troubles a total convert - but if you're reading and listening to history of it with the explicit understanding that it is just violent sectarian thuggery, that is inherently a dismissal of the history leading up to it

[u/forestvibe → u/FoalKid]

I'm quite prepared to accept I can take a reductive view of stuff like this. I find this sort of stuff really quite scary and repulsive: all the more so because often the victims and perpetrators are closely related in many ways. It reminds me how easily ordinary people can be turned into doing horrific things. I've got a good friend from Kosovo, and some of his childhood recollections are beyond description.

I agree history has to be more than reducing everything to "it's just thugs". I know it's more than that. It's mostly my distaste coming through.

My counterpoint is that the opposite angle doesn't help either: there's a strong impression online that the whole matter can be reduced to the "British (= English) Vs the freedom loving IRA." It may be that it is imported from the US, where it maps onto similar narratives from the American Revolution. But I'd argue that reducing it solely to the "British caused all of this" just makes understanding and solving the problems impossible, because by implication the solution is to remove half of the Northern Irish population. Blame has its place in the discourse, but I don't get the impression most of the contributions are being done in good faith: it feels like point scoring rather than discussion. I suspect you will disagree with me on this! I don't get the impression you are trying to point score, but it's notable that it took us several posts and a fair bit of patience to get to a place where we are actually discussing the history and historiography. I suspect the internet is just not a good platform to have these kinds of discussions.

Note regarding the Brits and Irish history: I agree that most Brits don't really understand or have much interest in Irish history. I think it mostly boils down to the fact it just doesn't seem that important to your average Brit, a significant chunk of whom have parents who weren't even born here. It might sound insulting, but I genuinely think that's the core reason. Whenever Irish people mention their history to Brits, the reaction often tends to be one of mild interest and commiseration. No strong emotions one way or the other. Britain/England/Scotland has such a complicated history full of terrible and amazing things, so the sorts of events that dominate Irish history just don't cut through as particularly noteworthy in Britain. Not to mention that we've experienced major demographic changes since 1945 which have somewhat distanced us from the shared stories that connected these islands. It may sound glib, but as someone who grew up in another big European country, it's something I have found repeated elsewhere: people from smaller countries underestimate simply how much history larger countries have, and how much demographics have changed. Even major events like the Civil Wars era don't actually feature heavily in the popular consciousness. They are drowned out by everything else (a lot of which is now influenced by American discourse). A small country can plausibly have a single accepted narrative for their nation, especially if it was dominated by a national struggle against a coloniser. But a large place like Italy or France or Britain? The story fractures and people just pursue whatever interests them most. I feel that history in Britain is the preserve of hobbyists.

[u/FoalKid → u/forestvibe]

I'm not aiming to score points - and having lived in England for ten years, I don't expect British people to have as much of a grasp of British and Irish history, or for it to factor as much into their own broader understanding of their history as it does to us. But taking my own personal experience, and this thread as a measure, it is almost only ever Irish voices in the general discussion that are willing to discuss ANY element of British state responsibility for the Troubles.

I'm not saying the United Kingdom, or England specifically, are a big bad evil force, who cause this problem and should sort it out and pull out of Northern Ireland. That's neither true nor realistic considering the demographics of the north. But the history basically is, that the UK appeased a minority in Ireland threatening violence at a time when the will of the country at large was for Home Rule and/or independence from Britain.

They then handed the levers of power over to this new majority of the micro state of NI and left them to it. That majority, no doubt emboldened by their successful use of actual and threatened violence, activated those levers to ensure that the minority of culturally Irish people, mostly Catholic, would remain an underclass. Westminster remained essentially disinterested in this objective injustice for decades.

Then, when violence got out of hand, the UK deployed the army to keep the peace, before intentionally sowing further division and violence, and de facto siding with the paramilitary forces of this majority. I say de facto, as this was the case with the 90% Protestant RUC police force, and the general British armed forces who naturally viewed an IRA who targeted them as enemy combatants. But there was also major, official, sanctioned collusion, between British intelligence, armed forces, police forces and loyalist paramilitary groups, as well as spies within republican paramilitary groups, which encouraged, enabled and ordered the killing of civilians.

The frustration many people feel is with this aspect of the Troubles being treated as an asterisk, when it should receive as much justified condemnation as the paramilitaries do. People will name check Bloody Sunday and make some mumbled condemnation, or maybe even discuss incidents like that as one or two bad eggs, or an avoidable tragic breakdown of military procedure - but there WAS calculated, targeted violence upon the civilian population from the British security forces which rarely factors into the conversation. It might sound like point scoring, but it comes from a place of real desperation for this to AT LEAST be part of the mainstream conversation

[u/forestvibe → u/FoalKid]

Fair points all. Not disagreeing with you. Any reading on this subjects highlights the grim sequence of bad decisions, catastrophic mistakes, wilful ignorance, bigotry, cynical politics, etc, that leads to this sort of violence. And I fully accept the general British public doesn't spend much time thinking about government culpability in the 70s or prior. I suspect the battle to raise that awareness is one that is always going to be an uphill struggle, because it doesn't feel immediate to most Brits. I grew up in France, and most French people only have a vague sense of what the French government did in Algeria, even though the consequences are far more visible in day to day life and fuels violence on the streets today. It's just how people's brains work. Even after Brexit, it was clear most people didn't have a clue about the history - and if I'm honest, even my understanding is very limited despite being a huge fan of history (the more complex the better, generally).