The “Troubles” it was called, the thirty-year siege of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland seared into the collective Irish memory, now receding.
Dating from 1966 to 1998, the Troubles were the tip of the long tail of eight centuries of British colonial domination of Ireland. In the shootings, bombings, and other mayhem, as many as 3,720 died, and estimates of the injured and wounded are as high as 47,000.
A visit to Northern Ireland for about ten days in September with a tour group was a reminder of the death, destruction, and social turmoil of the Troubles, but also a lesson in how the tide has turned toward a peaceful and prosperous future for the North.
On one side of Troubles divide were unionists, usually Catholics, who were inspired by the tactics of street demonstrations and civil disobedience of the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. The unionists wanted an end to discrimination in employment. Another unionist cause was the gerrymandering that left them barely represented in government. Perhaps the sorest of sore points was the practice of internment, by which suspected combatants and collaborators in the unionist cause were imprisoned indefinitely without the preferring of charges, without bail, without counsel, and without resort to the American legal rule of habeas corpus. On the other side were loyalists, usually Protestant, who wanted to stay in the United Kingdom.
Much of the Troubles violence happened in close quarters in the principal cities of the North, Belfast and Derry. The loyalists were fortified by the local police, special auxiliaries, the British Army, and other armed authority. Without the support of a government and badly outnumbered, the unionists waged an irregular campaign of street demonstrations, assassinations, and strategic bombings of occupied buildings in the North, and occasionally in England itself. The six counties of Northern Ireland are, along with England, Scotland, and Wales, a constituent country of the United Kingdom and many households in the North fly the Union Jack and prize their status as British subjects.
The Troubles officially ended in 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement by the British and Irish national governments, loyalist authority in the North, and the leaders of Sinn Fein, the political arm of the modern Irish Republican Army.
The agreement is also known as the Belfast Agreement. The two names for the symbolize a persistent duality between the factions. Another is the official name of the second city in the North, Derry/Londonderry – the first the more Irish-sounding, the latter more English. The conflict lives on even in the naming of things.
The 1998 Agreement meant an end to overt hostilities and an effort by many on both sides to move toward reconciliation.
Resistance to the decolonization of Ireland from British rule has always been strongest in the North. The North was set up as a British entity, separate from the rest of Ireland, by a declaration called Partition at the end of the Irish revolution around 1920. More than 100 years later, with the rest of Ireland now an independent republic, Northern Ireland might be seen as the last crown jewel of an exhausted empire.
The sites, symbols, and icons of the Troubles are set in the way of the contemporary tourist.
In east Belfast there persists a 45-foot wall that still divides a Catholic enclave from a Protestant one. Along Falls Road in the Catholic quarter is a streetside memorial to murdered children, a mural in the image of Bobby Sands, the poet, revolutionary, and member of the British House of Commons who died in 1981 at age 27 after a 66-day hunger strike. On the other side of the wall in the loyalist enclave along Shankill Road the loyalists have their own dead-children’s memorial, a profusion of Union Jacks, and murals in homage to Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles.
Near Belfast in County Down are the remnants of a British prison called Long Kesh, where internees were lodged indefinitely and without due process. Long Kesh, partially destroyed during the Troubles when inmates set it on fire, is being remade as a site of remembrance and reconciliation.
In Derry, the tourist is led through a Catholic enclave called the Bogside. It was in the Bogside where 13 Catholics, most of them young men, were shot to death by British paratroopers on January 30, 1972. The victims were participants in a street demonstration for political, economic, and social reform. The mass killing became known as “Bloody Sunday” and is recalled as a landmark in Troubles savagery.
In the green of the main traffic roundabout in the small city of Lorne on the Antrim coast is a site-specific metal sculpture in the shape of a crown – there can be no mistaking where native sympathies reside. The tour’s droll guide observed that in Lorne there aren’t enough Catholics for the Protestants to fuss with, so the Protestants harry each other.
The signage in the roads, streets, and lanes of the South are almost uniformly bilingual, English and Irish, known to all but the Irish as Gaelic, as part of an effort to reclaim Irish cultural heritage. Being fluent in the Irish tongue is a mark of national pride. In the North, the signs are in English only, and the English spoken there is in a brogue different from the one in the Republic.
The Gardai (police) barracks in the North are fortified with high walls, barriers against belligerents with malicious intent, a Troubles vestige.
In Carrickfergus, about 12 miles from Belfast, there are symbols of royal medieval origins, including Carrickfergus Castle (1177). Along the promenade of Belfast Lough is a metal sculpture in the image of William of Orange (1650-1702), who ruled England, Scotland, and Ireland from 1689 to 1702.
But up and down the island, North and South, it is as if the gentle nature of Irish interpersonal relations has been adopted in public affairs. The toxic rhetoric of American politics is unknown in modern Ireland. The Republic moves toward deeper social and economic ties with the North. It is as if the bulk of the Irish are intent on making nice rather than teasing out differences.
The barrier in east Belfast is now called the Peace Wall, and there are gates through it open during daylight hours. Tourists are invited to uncap their Sharpies™ and affirm the peace proposition.
In Derry, a sleek new self-anchored suspension pedestrian-and-cycle bridge spans the sparkling River Foyle. The Peace Bridge closes the distance between loyalist and unionist enclaves. There is a structural irregularity, a hook, in the center of the bridge intended to symbolize a handshake. A Derry tour guide recalled when the common kitchen toaster was a mark of the divide. If it was kept out on a countertop, the household was Catholic and unionist; loyalists kept their toasters in a cupboard.
Derry tourists are led on a stroll atop the City’s border wall, the last intact of its kind in Europe. It’s the same wall on which the stars of the hit TV series “Derry Girls” walk, talk, and shoot funny lines about teen-age life, love, and lust. “Derry Girls” has put an appealing face of the city before the world, of a newer, comic version no longer preoccupied by the Troubles.
The tour group was brought to Guildhall, an 1890 Beaux-Arts statement near the Foyle promenade. Guildhall is Derry’s city hall. It was bombed and rebuilt several times during the Troubles, but repaired each time. Guildhall was the meeting place of Londonderry City Council, renamed to Derry City Council in 1984. The great quantity of artisanal woodwork and stained glass make for an elegant setting for the peoples’ business.
The tour group was granted a reception in the cavernous chamber of Mayor Ruairi (Rory) McHugh. He spoke of the traditions, trappings, and totems of the office, and of the contemporary spirit of cooperation in local government. The council includes a plurality of Sinn Fein, the foremost Unionist party and others tilting left. The crown-loyal Democratic Ulster Party was led through the Troubles by Ian Paisley, a loyalist preacher, who once said inelegantly that Catholics “breed like rabbits.” There was a kernel of truth to the insult. At the dawn of the Troubles Protestants outnumbered Catholics three to one, but the Catholics have since caught up, and with the change Catholic/Unionist sentiment predominates in Derry politics.
The easing of Troubles distemper feels generational. Many younger adults in the North, aren’t preoccupied with the old beefs and grudges and are more like young people elsewhere in the developed world: getting on, meeting up and mating up, on their way to making a buck, supporting a family, making provision for old age.
The Europa, a four-star hotel in the center of Belfast, bombed repeatedly during the Troubles, was rebuilt each time, and thrives today. It was at the Europa where Bill and Hillary Clinton stayed when they came to Belfast in 1998 to sign the Good Friday Agreement.
Near the center of Belfast is the titanic Titanic museum, as large as the ocean-going extravaganza, which was built in a Belfast shipyard. The Titanic was to be everything everybody ever wanted in a tour boat but it sank in its maiden voyage in 1913 following a collision with an iceberg in the north Atlantic, sending more than 1,500 to a watery grave. The tragic story has fascinated the world for more than a century. The museum draws more than 800,000 visitors each year. It is inconceivable that it could have been built in Troubles-ridden Belfast forty years ago. Our trusty wiseguy tour guide observed that the Titanic was built by Irishmen and sunk by an Englishman.
The border between Northern Ireland and the Republic is functionally invisible. The Troubles barricades on the roads from North to the Republic are gone.
The Good Friday Agreement stipulated that reunification of Northern Ireland and the Republic was to turn on whether the issue could command a majority in the North. The agreement requires the taking of a poll, terms and conditions unspecified, before a reunification referendum can be held.
What public-opinion polling is available in the North indicates that a reunification referendum falls, as we hear often in America, within the margin of error.
The ‘ayes’ creep higher every year, the ‘nays’ lower.
Reunification was much on the minds of voters in the 2025 election for President of the Republic. The winner in a landslide was Catherine Connolly, a mature Galway lawyer with a long history in elective office. She ran on strengthening Ireland’s ties with the EU, continuing Ireland’s history of neutrality in big-power geopolitics, expressing solidarity with the Palestinians in Gaza, as a champion of the Irish language and, of course, reunification. It is not a tenable position in the politics of the South to oppose reunification.
The three major factors that led to the partitioning of North from South no longer exist, observes Fintan O’Toole, the brilliant, authoritative columnist of The Irish Times, Ireland’s best paper, who also publishes frequently in high-toned journals on both sides of the Atlantic on matters political, historical, and literary.
The Protestant majority in the North, in contradistinction to the huge Catholic majority in the Republic, is gone. The political link between Ulster unionism and British conservatism is a dying ember. Saddled with the British economic decline attendant to the UK’s decision to exit the European Union, the North is no longer better off than the Republic economically.
As poorly as the Irish have sometimes treated each other as members of a group or faction, they are united in a common culture.
The tour group visited the Seamus Heaney Home Place in Bellaghy, Co Derry, near where the Nobel-prize winning poet was born in 1939. The museum is a multi-media immersion in the work of Heaney, who has been called the greatest Irish poet since William Butler Yeats. Heaney is revered all over Ireland, North and South. There is not a unionist or loyalist slant to his work. Reading Heaney is to learn what unites the island, not what divides it.
Similarly, the Tommy Makem Arts & Community Center in Keady, Co Armagh. The center celebrates the great Irish-American folk musician’s life in both Ireland and the U.S. He and his bandmates the Clancy Brothers brought a full-throated voice of Celtic culture to the world in the 1960s, and of what faith he was or which side he was on in the Troubles is a matter of indifference to his listeners, then and now.
• • • •
There is gathering in Ireland, in the North as well as the South, a sense that the time is nearing for a referendum on the fateful question.
There are a number of potholes in the path to reunification.
What to do with the national government of Northern Ireland?
Would the South be willing to pay in health, educational, and other vital services in the North now paid by the U.K.?
How could police authority be merged?
What to do about the money. The British pound is the basic currency in the North, the Euro in the South.
Contemporary events seem to be influencing Irish thinking. A poll conducted in March by Amarach Research found that more than three-quarters of respondents in both the North and the South favor remaining in the European Union. In a major departure in public opinion in the North, 59 percent there favor a united Ireland within the EU coil.
There is strong support, North and South, for the proposition that the EU should seek greater independence from the United States – 71 percent in the South, 79 percent in the North.
It appears that scratchy relations between component EU countries and the Trump Administration is creating greater EU fealty and united the Irish against what they perceive as a common adversary.
Jim Dady is a journalist, attorney, and gifted storyteller. He lives in Bellevue.