![]() ![]() ![]() The Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Catholic paramilitary/guerrilla group organizing to resist Protestant and UK-loyalist domination, was stamped a terrorist organization, and terror was certainly among their weapons. ![]() They were truly existential, civil rights struggles. Compared to a term like “civil war,” “troubles” sounds like what a prudish aunt might call your period, or how Victorians would refer to mental illness.īut as Keefe’s book details, starting with the riots in Belfast in 1969, the divisions between the outnumbered Catholics and the “unionist” Protestants had rankled for centuries. With Patrick Radden Keefe’s sweeping bestseller, Say Nothing, published this past year, along with the TV favorite Derry Girls, it seems that The Troubles, that unofficial civil war, are making a comeback in popular culture. I picture indignant, proud people spitting at one another, hateful, their differences too chasmic to ever bridge.Īnd then there’s the euphemism used to describe the sectarian violence that plagued Northern Ireland from the late sixties until the late nineties: The Troubles. ![]() I picture men lining up on either side of a line and shooting at one another. A phrase like “sectarian violence” or even “civil war” is expansive - hard to envision in the mind’s eye, hard to really feel. ![]()
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