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January 6 - February 20, 2025
Special Powers Act, which dated to the era of partition, had created what amounted to a permanent state of emergency: the government could ban meetings and certain types of speech, and could search and arrest people without warrants and imprison them indefinitely without trial.
she locked eyes with one attacker, a man with a club, and for the rest of her life she would return to that moment, the way his eyes were glazed with hate. She looked into those eyes and saw nothing.
the riot spread like an airborne virus.
Everywhere there was rubble and broken glass, what one poet would memorably describe as ‘Belfast confetti’.
Catholics moved into homes that had been abandoned by Protestants, and Protestants moved into homes vacated by Catholics.
But sometimes it’s the myths that we believe most fervently of all.
when Eamonn McCann and a huge mass of peaceful protesters assembled in Derry one chilly Sunday afternoon in January 1972, British paratroopers opened fire on the crowd, killing thirteen men and wounding fifteen others. The soldiers subsequently claimed that they had come under fire and that they only shot protesters who were carrying weapons. Neither of these assertions turned out to be true. Bloody Sunday, as it would forever be known, was a galvanising event for Irish republicanism.
the Great Famine of the nineteenth century, in which a million people in Ireland were allowed to die of disease and starvation, and another million or more were forced to migrate. Even as the Irish starved during the famine, ships laden with food were leaving Irish harbours – for export to the English. Many in Ireland and elsewhere had taken the view that the British bore a responsibility for the famine, one that exceeded callous neglect and began to look more like deliberate murder.
Father Alec Reid administering the last rites to Corporal David Howes
The IRA issued a statement, eloquently capturing the strategic advantage of terrorism: ‘Today we were unlucky, but remember, we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always.’
Seamus Heaney wrote in a poem about the Troubles called ‘Whatever You Say, Say Nothing’.
There will be those who will say that the end justified the means, that the achievement of peace was a pearl whose price was worth paying.’ To O’Rawe it seemed that anyone capable of playing such a long and calculating game and dispatching six men to an unnecessary death must be a genius of political strategy – but also a sociopath.
the doctor’s kindness had meant a lot to Hughes. Later, he learned that after watching all ten men die in the hunger strike, Dr Ross had taken his own life, with a shotgun, in 1986.
Price felt a sharp sense of moral injury: she believed that she had been robbed of any ethical justification for her own conduct.
This was a cruel twist: some of the children could no longer remember what their mother had looked like, apart from the one surviving photo of her, but they still recognised the faces of the people who took her away.
People had risked their lives to entrust their stories to the Belfast Project; the least Boston College could do was engage in a little civil disobedience to protect them.
‘Sometimes,’ McCann said, ‘we are imprisoned within ideals.’
I saw an opportunity to tell a story about how people become radicalised in their uncompromising devotion to a cause, and about how individuals – and a whole society – make sense of political violence once they have passed through the crucible and finally have time to reflect.
On race days, Michael released his birds, and they would disappear over the horizon. Then, eventually, they would come home. He always loved that about pigeons. They wander. But their natural instinct is to fly back to the place where they were born.
