January 21, 2026
Remembering the end of the Troubles in Northern Ireland
We are victims of our own history, our own beliefs, our own government. There are no winners.
— from an interview with Mina Wardle, Belfast resident, 1995
When I was in college, I had a $2,000 award to fund the project of my choosing between my Junior and Senior years of school, the summer of 1995. I spent the money on a three week trip to Belfast, Northern Ireland. I had been to the Republic of Ireland twice as a child — 1984 and 1986, if I remember right. Those years, I was in a marching band called The Mount Vernon Guard. The commandant, Jack Harris, regularly took the band to perform in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade in Dublin. Because of this childhood connection, Ireland always tugged at my heartstrings. We never went to Northern Ireland in the 1980s, of course, because of the Troubles. Hearing the news of a ceasefire in Northern Ireland in 1994 is what gave me the idea to go to Belfast for my 1995 project. My plan was to find ordinary people living in Belfast and interview them about what life was like after the cease-fire.
I realize that many Americans today are too young to remember “the Troubles” and have no idea what I’m talking about. (“What cease-fire?” you may be asking yourselves.) If you want a compelling piece of narrative nonfiction that explains this period of history, I highly recommend Patrick Radden Keefe’s book Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland. If you’re not going to pause and go read a book in the middle of this essay, here are the basics you need to know: “The Troubles” is a euphemism for a campaign of domestic terrorism waged from 1969 until the 1998 with a goal of unifying Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland. 3,720 people died and over 47,000 were wounded during this period. It had a tinge of “religious war:” Catholics in Northern Ireland, who had faced significant discrimination at the start of the Troubles, tended to favor unifying with the Republic of Ireland. Protestants tended to favor continued membership in the United Kingdom. The Troubles ended with the Good Friday Agreement of 1998, and the cease-fire of 1994 was an important milestone toward the eventual lasting peace. This is the world I walked in to in 1995.
A bulletin board inside the Royal Ulster Constabulary that tracked the deaths since the start of the Troubles. The photo is from 1995.
In the journal I kept at the time, I wrote how much I was reminded of America on the drive into Belfast from the airport. The rolling green hills surrounding the city made me think of San Francisco. When I got to the city proper, the giant industrial shipyards (the same shipyards that built the Titanic) made me think of Baltimore. However, I soon also saw sights that shocked me as an American who had grown up in an era of political stability. In the hopeful but early days of the cease-fire, the Royal Ulster Constabulary still used armored personnel carriers to patrol the city, and the British Army still maintained an observation post on the top two floors of the Divis Tower apartments that let them watch over the Catholic neighborhood below.
An RUC armored personnel carrier in 1995. I heard that it was illegal to take photos of security forces back then, so I was quick and felt guilty taking this.
Divis Tower, 1995. The top two floors of this building were a British Army surveillance post with a commanding view of the surrounding Catholic neighborhood.
As I explored Belfast, it was easy to tell if when I was in a Catholic or Protestant neighborhood: The curbsides in the Catholic neighborhoods were painted the green, white, and orange of the Irish tricolor, and the curbsides in the Protestant neighborhoods were painted the blue, white, and red of the Union Jack. Once I became well-versed in the area’s iconography, the frequent building murals also let me know the political leanings of the neighborhood I was in. For instance, a mural depicting King William III — William of Orange, the namesake of the Orange Order and of my alma mater The College of William & Mary, the Protestant king who deposed the Catholic James II in the Glorious Revolution over 300 years before I set foot in Belfast — that mural loudly proclaimed I had found my way into a Protestant neighborhood. A mural of Bobby Sands proclaimed my entry into a Catholic neighborhood. In 1995, I do not know how much of the city was simply “Belfast.” Instead, there was Catholic Belfast and Protestant Belfast.
One of the many murals in the neighborhoods of Belfast, 1995.
Armed with a pen and a cheap steno book, I roamed the city looking for anybody willing to talk to me. I talked to the media officers of Sinn Féin and the Royal Ulster Constabulary, to a paramilitary in the Ulster Volunteer Force, to shop owners and mental health workers, to kids who curiously came up to me as I photographed murals. Everybody was friendly, slightly amused to meet a baby-faced 21-year-old American, and willing to talk — in particular the Unionists, who felt their perspective was underrepresented and misunderstood by Americans. Most of the stories I heard were tales of regret that violence had been allowed to consume an entire generation. For example, I heard of a 16-year-old kid arrested for paramilitary activities. He had been taken away in his school blazer; he died of leukemia at age 31 after spending almost half of his life in one institute or another, including 12 years in prison.
I also learned of some of the unexpected difficulties of forging a peace after so long. The mental health worker I interviewed, Mina Wardle, told me this:
Consider what happens when a father gets released from prison. While he was in prison, the wife had to educate and provide for the kids and bore the entire burden of running the household. Then, suddenly, her husband’s back in the house. And the children all think that daddy’s great because daddy never smacked them — that was always mommy. And daddy has a degree because he was able to study in prison. And now when she goes out with him, everybody wants to talk to him and hear his latest theories, and she simply gets introduced to people as his wife if she gets introduced at all. She has lost her role, and none of the work she had done for years keeping things together gets recognized. She’s left in a state of total frustration.
I also learned how violence perpetuates itself in both subtle and obvious ways. People explained to me how an unstable land leads to a poor economy and to unemployed young men on street corners, and that unemployed young men milling about on street corners lead to more violence and instability. And then those curious kids who came up to me when I was photographing murals? They hadn’t developed the filter that adults instinctively have when talking about sensitive topics. One told me, “When you see a Catholic, you explode. You just want to fight.” They assured me me they could tell who was Catholic just by looking: “They’re squinty. You can tell them by their eyebrows and by the way they walk.”
Three weeks in Belfast in 1995 do not make me an expert on the 26-year history of the Troubles. In fact, until recently, I couldn’t have answered one of the most important and basic questions: What brought the shooting and bombings to an end? I got a bit of an idea of the answer to that question when I read Say Nothing, the book by Patrick Radden Keefe that I recommended above. Keefe gives a simple, hopeful answer when he talks about Stephen Rea, star of the movie The Crying Game and husband of Provisional IRA volunteer Dolours Price:
There were ordinary, decent people who became involved in the republican movement only to see the conflict spiral into something they could no longer control. For some of these people, Rea pointed out, a moment arrived when they found themselves saying, “I’ve had enough.”
I think it really can be as basic as that. A movement can start with the best intentions, but idealism tips to fanaticism, fanaticism justifies violence, violence self-perpetuates… and you lose control of events. Breaking the cycle requires enough of the people involved in the violence, and enough of the people supposedly helped by the violence, to both look around at what’s going on and declare, “We’ve had enough.”
This is not Northern Ireland. Photo by Octavio JONES, AFP.