#and it escalates into a skirmish or a riot or fuck even a battle and he's just like 'whoops;

[leorugiet]

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[bondsmagii]

If it's not too personal, could you talk a bit about your experiences growing up in Northern Ireland with the civil war and the cultural differences between the north and the republic etc? I have Irish ancestry but none of the Irish part of my family is alive and I'm trying really hard to reconnect with that part of my blood and pay homage to it, so hearing about the experiences of someone who's lived it would mean so, so much to me.

I can try but I can’t promise it’ll make any sense; it’s a highly nuanced situation and I experienced it as one person living in one time period and the whole thing is just a huge mess but! I’ll try and keep it as succinct as possible lmao (good luck to me).

basically the most simplified version of the issue is thus:

Britain, being Britain, takes over Ireland, because of course they do

nasty bastards about it

Irish people are understandably pissed and there’s about 800 years of conflict

Britain keeps sending British people over there to settle (mostly from Scotland originally) to up British numbers and get those bastard Irish Catholics out of the idea they can like, live in their own country

things escalate

rebellions happen

Big Rebellion happens (the 1916 Easter Rising)

the Irish War of Independence happens and Britain is finally like OK we’ll chat (centuries later)

My Man Michael Collins goes over the London and negotiates a treaty 

Ireland is given independence but not the six north-eastern-most counties; these countries are the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland respectively

(you’ll sometimes see Protestants calling Northern Ireland “Ulster” but they’re wrong because Ulster is a province and has nine counties not six)

(Catholics tend to avoid using “Northern Ireland” and will call it “the North of Ireland”, “the Six Counties”, or if they’re really political “the Occupied Six Counties”)

some other stuff happened that I won’t get into here because I’ll just bitch about Eamon de Valera for eight hours (if you want to see me bitching I did so here)

the North of Ireland was partitioned as such because of its huge number of British-identifying Protestants descending from the people who had moved over; they wished to remain British and so the North is still a part of the UK today

Irish-identifying Catholics in the North were understandably pissed about this because they wanted their whole country back but were now stuck across a land border with neighbours who didn’t particularly like them and whom they did not particularly like

this escalated into a civil war known as The Troubles (because we’re really great at understating things) where thousands of people died in a bloody conflict mostly contained in the North

(aside from occasional skirmishes and people using the border as a way to escape conviction, the Republic didn’t really have much to do with this war)

it was Bad Times and the North was eventually occupied by British soldiers who set up bases and patrolled the streets and backed up the police for several decades, which only further escalated things 

many years of shootings and bombings and beatings and terror ensued

this is about the point where I come in and start trying to grow up there, fun times 

I’ll put the rest under a cut because wow this is already very long and I haven’t even touched on what it was like to grow up there lmao

detailed accounts of living in a literal warzone under the cut, so beware.

Civil War Funtimes

growing up in a warzone like the one I grew up in was wack as hell because it’s not… acknowledged as a civil war at all. like the rest of the UK kind of just forget it ever happened or they don’t know about it at all, and like as much as I don’t like to admit it the North is UK soil and the idea that thousands of people could be killing one another in the fucking UK is just phenomenal to me. when I talk about my experiences growing up and don’t specify the country, people hear what I went through and assume I grew up in Bosnia or Chechnya or something. it was that bad.

the strange thing is, as unpleasant as it was, while I was growing up there it was totally normal. it was scary sometimes, when coming into direct contact with things, but a lot of the time it was just inconvenient. I remember being stuck in traffic on the motorway going into Belfast and it was hot and we had no water and we were there for hours and we were moaning and complaining and finally when we were allowed to move again it turned out there was a bomb up ahead and the Army had been called in to diffuse it, but at the time it wasn’t about The Bomb but more about I’m Hot and Thirsty and Several Hours Are Gone From The Time I Had To Run Errands In Belfast. it was only when I moved away from the North and lived a more normal life that I looked back and began processing fully how fucked up it was to live there.

I’m Catholic, so right off the bat I kind of got the shitty end of the stick. both sides were bad, don’t get me wrong, but Protestants had the backing of the police and the British Army and it’s been confirmed that both organisations backed Protestant paramilitary death squads; i.e., helped gangs of Protestant terrorists murder Catholics and get away with it. they also committed a lot more atrocities of their own, including opening fire on unarmed civilians, so it’s kind of a shitty deal when the two organisations sent in to protect everyone align with one side of the civil war and don’t give a shit if you’re getting beaten to death in front of them or something. I remember one time my friends and I were chased by a gang of people who found out we were Catholic somehow, and they were throwing lit fireworks at us in full view of the police, who did nothing. we were 15. 

how did they know we were Catholic? there’s a million ways to tell. growing up there sort of required knowing what I call the sectarian geography of the country. certain places were Catholic, and certain places were Protestant. saying you were from a certain town or village could confirm your religion to a potential enemy. in large cities, especially Belfast, saying the street you were from could out you. I had to be careful what side of the road I walked on, and there were streets I couldn’t exit from if I was going into the city centre for fear that someone would see and wait for me. likewise, names could be used to identify you. my friends and I had several different names we’d give depending on what area we were in or the name or accent of the person talking to us. it’s subtle things, too – I mean obviously you’re Catholic if your name is Seamus or Sean or Eamon and obviously you’re Protestant if you’re called William or Billy but it wasn’t always as obvious as that. it was safer to be subtle. if I’m in a Catholic area and want to use a fake name for whatever reason, I’m Joseph McCarthy. if I cross the street to a Protestant area, I’d be better off as James McAllister. all of us learned this growing up, and there were so many nuances I can’t even remember a lot of them now. I know should I ever visit Belfast again it’ll all come back, and so will the subtle shifts in my accent depending on where I am. but to think I knew all this at 12, 13, 14 years old? and it was the difference between life and death, quite literally? I have no idea how I dealt with the stress.

making it into the city was only half of the battle, anyway. violence could erupt at any moment, and bomb scares were known to happen. I’ve been in a number of riots which almost always escalated from a peaceful protest, because of Army and police presence being unwelcome or unfairly biased. during such riots people could and did die: the police and Army used rubber bullets because they’re apparently “less deadly”, but many people, including small children caught in the crossfire, were killed by them. often there was added danger from the IRA (Irish Republican Army; the main Catholic paramilitary force) who would show up to take shots at the police and soldiers, meaning that civilians were very often caught in the no-man’s land between offensive and defensive fire. this was not occasional pistol fire, either: both sides were armed with semi- or fully-automatic weapons. again, this is on streets legally in the UK. 

bombs were also a threat, though most of the time they were just threats to create panic and disruption. however, it was occasionally real: I once found a bomb myself, in a newly opened supermarket that was packed during its first week. it was hidden on the shelving and around its outside, nails and ball bearings had been taped to use as shrapnel. I remember going quickly to tell the store manager and him pulling the fire alarm so people didn’t panic too much. everyone went out into the car park and it was only when the bomb squad arrived that people realised. a humorous note to this story is that my parents lost me in the chaos, and found me talking animatedly to several police officers and a member of the bomb squad, in his full protective gear. I was 13, and I’m sure they were wondering just what kind of trouble I’d got myself into in the 20 minutes I’d been out of their sight.

finally, a lot of people died. I mean, a lot. thousands, in a country with a population of only one eighth the size of London alone. every single person in that country knew someone who had died or been injured during the fighting. it’s a very close-knit country; both sides of the conflict have a strong community spirit and towns and districts are often very close, with many people knowing everyone if not by name then by sight. when you take several thousand people and have them killed violently, their death will be felt through fifty to one hundred of their friends, families, neighbours, colleagues, etc. in a country so small, that reverberates and quickly takes in everyone. many people knew several of the dead; older people might know dozens. many more would have witnessed something. my friend group were no different. it’s been over a decade and I still can’t talk about it in any detail, but all I’ll say is that I lost a friend of mine when I was 15, and it was a very violent, drawn-out death at the hands of a mob of adults. he was my age. the reason for it was because he was Catholic. being the same age as him made it a very strange experience. even now, on my birthday, I think about the fact that he would be my age if he had lived. he’s frozen in time, and the rest of us have grown up and moved on, and it’s so unfair it makes me feel sick.

as for the culture,

(forgive the abrupt ending, but to be honest that part of things always exhausts my emotions when talking about what it was like to live like that.)

I’m sorry that this is a wholly depressing account, but it was a warzone; I get the feeling that’s to be expected. what I can say is that despite everything, I miss living there dearly. despite how horrible it could be, the country is beautiful and a vast majority of the people I met and grew up with were wonderful. I miss it a lot. I miss the landscapes, I miss all the places I used to go to lose myself. I miss the forests and the waterfalls, I miss the Causeway Coast, I miss turning the bend on the motorway and seeing Belfast nestled in its valley with the sea on one side and Cave Hill on the other. I miss the little villages, I miss getting lost in the fields and the trees and the trails, I miss the tiny little pubs and the small harbours and drinking by the lough with my friends. I miss the food, and I miss all the little quirks in the way we talked, and I miss walking down the street or going into a shop and having my friends’ parents recognise me and act like they’re all my mothers (“ach, how’ve you been? lookit you! I can’t believe it. you used to be so wee!” – no matter if they’d seen me a week ago, I was always wee then and taller now).

I was lucky enough that my friends and I were much more open-minded; members of the new generation who were getting sick to death of all the fighting. there were both Catholics and Protestants in our friend group, and sometimes the only thing that got us through was making dark jokes and poking fun at one another. I miss that, too – living away from the country and knowing no other people from there makes reconciling what happened very difficult. even now I have an innate connection with people when we hear one another’s accents. we’ll start chatting like old friends, and it’s wonderful, because religion doesn’t come up at all. we’ll ask where each other is from, and usually we’ll have heard of it, and then we’ll probably start bitching about the weather or the roadworks that are still there eight years later or something. sometimes we’ll even start making a few dark jokes of our own, and it’s always a relief to laugh. it loosens something in the chest. I don’t think there’s a group of people more resilient than those from the North. we’ve seen some shit, and we still manage to live through it and laugh about it. I remember one time in school, when we were about 16, me and my fellow Catholics were going to skip school for St Patrick’s Day (we never got given the day off, honestly) and our Protestant friends were jealous, and we invited them along and they were jokingly saying that nah, they couldn’t, it’s a Catholic celebration, it wouldn’t be right, etc, and finally one of them was like “we’ll come to St Paddy’s Day if you skip school and come with us on St Proddy’s Day” and we were like “what the fuck is St Proddy’s Day” and he was like “idk it’s like St Paddy’s Day but for Protestants” and I was like “alright when is it” and everyone decided it was the day after St Patrick’s Day so our entire group skipped school for a two-day drinking fest. to be honest it’s stuff like that I remember more than the fighting. 

I didn’t get to go to the Republic as much as I wanted to, but despite the border I find the culture is just as warm, just as welcoming, and the sense of humour is brilliant across the board. Irish/Northern Irish culture, no matter what you want to call it, is just very familial. it’s warm. everyone is genuinely interested in everyone, everyone is genuinely there for a laugh (craic, as we’d say – pronounced “crack”. common greeting is “what’s the craic?”). it’s a nice place to be. you come from a culture known across the world for its friendliness and its love of fun, but as depressing as some of this information is, I hope you realise that you also come from a very resilient people. despite everything I love the place and I hope to go back one day, when I’m ready to do so. and the best part is that despite everything, I know I’ll be welcome.