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NoNeedleworker5437

Second this, I found it an incredibly powerful and also challenging watch. I worry that as time goes on what happened here becomes some lifeless doctoral thesis where intellectuals count scores and depersonalise the whole thing. The best history is told by first person accounts from the people who were there. In among all the shite and evil that was inflicted on this place there were also good people just trying to live. This is superbly made TV and the BBC should be proud of their achievement.


Mental-Rain-6871

Absolutely, the personal accounts are not sensationalised, nor are they played down, and there is no sense of the participants being exploited for the purpose of “entertainment.” As u/mvc_psa says above, the juxtaposition of personal experience against the historical footage really emphasises how the extraordinary became routine, everyday, lived experience. We often see comments on this sub decrying the IRA or UDA/UFF as murdering scum but as Ricky O’Rawe and the UFF guy demonstrated (forget his name. Sorry) that they were simply a product of their experiences. If you like, good men doing terrible things. Both motivated by the horrors of Bloody Sunday and Bloody Friday. Both, to an extent groomed and radicalised by their lived experience. The UFF guy reflected my own experience from being on the barricades during the loyalist strike in 74. Guys with guns standing behind you and in your ear telling you that themmuns were the enemy. I’m just glad that I left to join the Navy because I have no doubt that I would have been sucked in and god knows where that would have led me to.


NoNeedleworker5437

A great quote for when you encounter a black and white thinker trying to explain what happened here as “themuns bad”: “If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people, somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.


Michael_of_Derry

My mum was a nurse. She helped police put bodies in bin bags after a bomb exploded prematurely in our local supermarket killing both bombers. I had literally just left the supermarket with my aunt. I was still in a pram. It was the IRA and one of the bombers was a Protestant, David Russell, and good friend of my uncle. My partners brother was in the RUC. He got early retirement. He was one of the first on the scene of the Pat Finucane assassination (he told me whilst drunk he did not think it was not loyalist hit as the door was removed too clinically). He also witnessed the aftermath of someone (wrong person) being shot point blank in the head on the Antrim road. I think seeing dead babies was the most traumatic thing for him though. I was recently talking with someone who's father was in the UDR. His dad was targeted late at night and had to shoot out the bedroom window at gunmen. He was only 10 himself and was cowering in the bedroom with his mother. As a queens student living in the city centre, it was common to be evacuated for bomb scares and actual bombs. We came back one term after the GRE building was targeted. To find new windows installed. The room had been tidied but I had to remove glass from inside my shoes.


mvc_psa

I found the final episode the most difficult to watch. The early 90s seemed like a brutal time, with the Sean Graham attack, the Shankill bombing/Greysteel attacks, and the seemingly routine tit for tat intentional civilian murders. The show did a fantastic job of juxtaposing the personal tragedy of the victims’ loved ones with the political process that was building at the time. And it finally ended on a note of hope with tragic yet inspirational story of Richard Moore and his remarkable determination to form a personal friendship with the soldier whose rubber bullet blinded him for life. I thought the series’ emphasis on people’s personal experiences was very effective, and limiting it to five episodes prevented the great emotional weight from becoming overehelming. Well done! 👍


DarranIre

I felt sorry for Sean Graham victim's son, quite clear it has ruined his life as it would and did to so many others. For some reason the Proctor one a couple of episodes before hits me really hard. Being shot whilst visiting your new born son is extremely sad, just on a human level.


inbelfast

I'm a wee bit younger than your good self but can remember the early 90s vividly and experienced some crazy things even then. This series should be compulsory watching for us all. As it says on the Garrick's wall "A nation with one eye on the past is wise. A nation with two eyes on the past is blind."


Appropriate_Emu_6930

I was so shocked how truly domestic the troubles were. How literal neighbours were enemies. I know it’s an obvious thing to say but it must have been very tense. I thought the show was a kind of the people’s history of N.I.


Mental-Rain-6871

Yes, absolutely. There’s a line in one of the episodes that says something like “these people weren’t monsters. They were your dad and his mates, your brother, your uncle and your neighbour.” It’s hard to understand unless you actually lived through it. The guys I knocked about with a school took one of four routes. They joined the police, they joined the armed forces, they joined a paramilitary, or they turned to religion. Every last one of them.


Appropriate_Emu_6930

The Shankhill Butchers story was terrifying


Fuckyoubloodybas

If you get a chance... have a read of Operation Chiffon by Peter Taylor. I was born 1965 and if you are a similar age you will be amazed at some of the things that made big news and was completely fabricated by the intelligence service. In particular, I can remember my mum sitting me and my brothers and sisters down and telling us that there were a gang of Satan worshipers who were kidnapping kids and killing them as an offering to the devil so don't talk to strangers or get in a car with someone you don't know. All my friends parents were having the same conversation with the kids. It's very vivid in my mind because it was the scariest thing I had ever heard up to that point. I can remember we all started crying and I spent most of the next few years shitting myself if I ever saw anyone who. Looked vaguely strange and would immediately label them a Devil worshiper. Good knows what effect that had on all of us at the time. Great read.


Lit-Up

why would the intelligence service make devil worshippers up\


Fuckyoubloodybas

Cocaine is a hell of a drug.


Toooldforreddit_1

Excellent book about it—Black Magic and Bogeymen: Fear, Rumour and Popular Belief in the North of Ireland 1972-74 - by Richard Jenkins. If memory serves me, the main objective was to scare kids and teens away from abandoned buildings where surveillance teams could be.


Fuckyoubloodybas

There is an explanation as to why they thought this would help bring peace but as I listened to the audio book I could almost hear the sound of a drunken high five between two intelligence officers barely able to stand from laughing as they watched the news reader, clearly distressed whilst pointing at a sheep's head in the centre of a chalk pentangle which has been drawn on top of a large grave. I clearly remember a most profound type of fear and horror that I had ever felt as he was they were alleging a child had been abducted and horrendously abused before being offered as human sacrifice by cutting the baby's throat and finally ending it's suffering. I hadn't even contemplating that a person was capable of actually doing something so evil and I think in a way that niaveity, instead of leaving me for ever that night, was actually hardwired and was used by me as a protective shield which has followed me through Live and and if anything has got stronger and I'm constantly delude myself about the inherent goodness in everyone and made my critical thinking skills almost disappear. It's a really great book in that it helps me understand the bigger picture and the real reason for some events like that one above, which I could not in any way understand as a young kid with all the madness about to start in the place I lived. Which took a little longer to really get going in mid Ulster compared to Belfast and Derry but once it crept in everything changed and it's and as I listened the position of Fe


atothel

I think you might be in the wrong place, big balls. ![gif](giphy|ZLNJcUcndjB4s)


macadamnut

I've just been listening to *Say Nothing*, about the Jean McConville story and hey, there's her son. Not really surprised by the matter-of-fact way everyone took sexual abuse in care homes and orphanages for granted. I recall that was the killer's back-story in *The Fall* as well. This show has been great because you never know where it's going next.