The Troubles

The Troubles (Irish: Na Trioblóidí) was a violent conflict from the 1960s to 1998 over the status of Northern Ireland and its divided people. It’s reckoned that over 3,500 were killed, half of them civilians, and another 48,000 injured.

The same term was used for the conflict of 1870 to the 1920s that led to the independence of the Republic of Ireland, and partition from Northern Ireland, which remained part of Britain. The 20th-century Troubles had their roots in those and in earlier grievances.

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 largely ended the 20th-century conflict and has stood the test of time. But sources of tension still simmer, and occasional outbreaks of civil disorder are watched with alarm in case a new phase of Troubles is coming.

The tricolour of Ireland gives equal prominence to the orange and the green – and also to the white, for those of no religious affiliation. Such was the vision of its creators, the United Irishmen of 1798, fired by the revolutionary ideals of the United States and France. But that vision died with the encircled rebels on Vinegar Hill in Wexford and at Ballinamuck in Mayo, bayonetted where they stood. The next 200 years of Irish history were to be divided on sectarian lines.

This is the five-minute version, so it doesn’t explain how the troubles all got started 25,000 years ago as glaciers moulded Ireland’s future landscape and pattern of land ownership; nor the Roman real-estate project of 35 BC that made orange the emblem of an Ulster where oranges do not grow; nor the 12th century Anglo-Norman land-grab and establishment of parish and county boundaries that became the convoluted and dangerous frontier between Ireland north and south.

That land-grab stalled but was resumed under the Tudors from the 16th century, this time with a religious difference, between the Catholic Irish and the Protestant incomers. Even greater was an economic difference, as England underwent an agricultural and industrial revolution, drawing people off the land into towns. In Ireland, they vanquished the traditional Gaelic kingdoms and feudal ways of life, except for two stubborn stand-outs in Tyrone and Donegal. A war of 1593–1603 finally broke those two, but there was a further uprising and the town of Derry was burned. The response was the “Plantations” – organised large-scale immigration of Protestant loyalists from Great Britain, especially into Ulster, changing the population balance.

Repression increased after the 1798 rebellion, and 19th-century Ireland nursed a sackful of grievances: "penal laws" against the Catholic religion, privileged landlords versus poverty for the majority, even before the famine years, distant London government, and suppression of Irish language and culture. Many emigrated to England or America. It was only from the 1870s that the root cause was seen as British rule, and the solution as Irish independence.

The next 50 years saw arson attacks, reprisals and other violence dubbed "The Troubles". In 1912 the British government granted Ireland a measure of autonomy ("home rule"), but there was a furious reaction in Ulster, and both factions took up arms. The compromise was to partition Ireland into the north and the south. Then the First World War broke out, home rule was frozen, and thousands of Irishmen departed in British uniforms to fight and die in Belgium and France. Others saw a chance to rebel, launching the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916. It had little support and was crushed within a week, but British executions and reprisals in the aftermath only strengthened Irish feeling. As soon as its men came home from the war, Ireland proclaimed its independence, and The Troubles escalated. The Anglo-Irish peace treaty of 1921 confirmed partition, along a nonsensical border gerrymandered to maximise the area staying under British rule. An anti-treaty faction rejected partition and fought a civil war (especially in County Cork) against the new Irish government. They were defeated, but their aspirations to re-unite Ireland were undimmed.

Then came relative quiet for 50 years, and the Republic – the south – stayed neutral during the Second World War. Belfast and the north were busy with industry, but Catholics there faced blatant discrimination, virtually apartheid, in education, employment and housing. From the 1960s, Ulster’s smokestack industry collapsed under foreign competition, and republicans began speaking the language of civil rights. Both sides organised into paramilitary terrorist groups, with multiple splinters and factions-within-factions. The police were unashamedly pro-unionist, so they were attacked. In 1969 the British army was deployed, ostensibly to "keep the two sides apart", but was quickly seen as pro-unionist and became targets in turn. Their worst act was "Bloody Sunday" in 1972 in Derry, when they shot dead 14 unarmed protesters.

The republican or Irish nationalist faction was led by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), with their main belligerent the Provisional IRA or "Provos". The main unionist or loyalist factions were the Ulster Defence Association (UDA) and Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF). And the other major player was the British government, which did its best to undermine the legitimacy of its own rule. A prime example was the 1971–1975 policy of detention without trial of suspected terrorists: 1874 nationalists and 107 loyalists were held, and the disparity in numbers was stark. Oddly enough, this did not quell unrest, which peaked in 1981 with hunger strikes by detainees (to death by Bobby Sands and nine others) and riots in the streets.

It was an ethnic rather than a religious conflict, and Protestant and Catholic churches both wrung their hands ineffectually against the violence - but your religion instantly defined you, and Ian Paisley's "Free Presbyterian Church" preached bilious hatred of Catholicism. The nonsensical shape of the border was not an issue, but rather its legitimacy. A series of Anglo-Irish peace initiatives came and went, but from the 1990s several favourable factors combined. All sides were war-weary and saw no military victory. Britain and Ireland were both members of the European Union, which sought open borders for people and trade, civil rights, and stamping out of corruption. Political leaders (including US President Bill Clinton) sensed a historic opportunity. The 1998 Good Friday Agreement established a peace process, with disarmament of paramilitaries, a Northern Ireland Assembly with devolved government and sharing of senior positions, and recognition by the Republic that Northern Ireland was part of the United Kingdom.

Four months after the agreement, when John Hume and David Trimble had yet to collect their Nobel Peace Prize for their part in it, The Real IRA splinter group set off a car bomb in Omagh that killed 29 people and injured over 200. But the shocked reaction showed that the tide had really turned.

For each destination, see the city page for locations, opening hours and similar detail. The point is that many sights that you might not associate with the Troubles are bound up in that story.

54.6-5.931 Belfast is at the heart of Northern Ireland, and was the focus of the late 20th century Troubles. It's now a lively safe city, a good all-round destination with lots to do and see.

• City Hall is the grand baroque building on Donegall Square. Built in 1906, it proclaimed Belfast's status as a leading city not only of Britain, but of the Empire. The guided tour is excellent.
• Orange Order Parades are held across Northern Ireland in summer, but especially in Belfast on 12 July. (When the 12th falls on Sunday, the parades are on Mon 13 - that next occurs in 2037.) They commemorate the 1690 Battle of the Boyne near Drogheda, when the Protestant King William vanquished the deposed Catholic King James. Feeder parades converge on Donegall Square then the combined parade heads south, to the shrill of fife and boom of Lambeg drum. In 2026 12 July is a Sunday so parades are on Monday 13th.
• Titanic was long a source of embarrassment to the city but is nowadays its pride. East Belfast was the ship-building quarter and staunchly Protestant: Catholics were unlikely to find jobs or housing. The "unsinkable" RMS Titanic was launched here in 1911 and made its maiden voyage from Southampton in April 2012, crossing the Channel to Cherbourg then to Cobh, the port for Cork, where it picked up Irish emigrants. It then sailed out into the Atlantic, struck an iceberg off Newfoundland and sank with great loss of life. The ship-building industry collapsed in the late 20th century, feeding The Troubles, and this area became run-down. It was revitalised from 2012 by the opening of Titanic Belfast museum.
• Ulster Museum is within the Botanic Gardens, in the southside university quarter. Its wide-ranging displays cover the Irish conflicts.
• West Belfast bore the brunt of The Troubles, as it's an "interface area". Protestants lived and still live in the blocks around Shankhill Road and Crumlin Road, and Catholics a little way south in the blocks around Falls Road. The area is safe to visit by day but can be rough at night.

• Peace Wall along Cupar Way (midway between Shankhill Rd and Falls Rd) is the best example of the great metal barriers erected to separate hostile communities. No museum exhibit this: by day you can freely pass through its gates but they're closed at night, and there's sad acceptance that these walls will have to remain awhile. They're different from the "Ring of Steel", the security cordon around central Belfast, which has been dismantled.
• Political murals adorn building gable ends especially in the interface areas. They come and go with events, check locally which are especially worth seeking out.
• Black taxis were the dolmuş or marshrutka of the troubled city. Republicans targeted the transport system and its workers, the bus fleet was torched, and routes were blocked by barricades. Community leaders imported traditional London taxis for shared rides that became the mainstay of local transport. They were uneconomic once peace returned and bus services resumed, but are still used for city tours. They're a good way to see outlying parts that you might hesitate to visit solo.
• Crumlin Road Gaol is the grim Victorian prison in use to 1996, now a museum.
• Irish Republican History Museum is mostly around the collections of Eileen Hickey, an imprisoned Provisional IRA organiser.
• Museum of Orange Heritage is the other side of the story, from 1688 when William Prince of Orange ousted the Catholic King James and began Protestant rule.
• Divis Tower was the "Upstairs-Downstairs" of west Belfast. Divis Rd leads into Falls Rd, and this high-rise housing block was a vantage point for republican snipers. When the army returned fire, the people they hit weren't necessarily the snipers. The two top floors were converted into an army observation post, with sentries helicoptered in and out to avoid ambush in the stairwell.
• Pubs reflect the tribal divide of their neighbourhoods. Some standouts include -
  • Crown Bar, a gorgeous Victorian pub now owned by National Trust. It was regularly rocked by explosions from the bus and railway stations across the road.
  • Northern Whig takes its name from the seditious newspaper of the United Irishmen of 1798.
  • The Harp, nowadays a stylish place, takes its name from the punk rock club here in the 1980s that brought together all sides. Punks were united in their detestation of both Protestant British and Catholic Irish authority, and those authorities were united in detesting the punks.

54.516667-6.0333332 Lisburn illustrates the best and worst of Ulster. When 17th-century France persecuted Protestants ("Huguenots") they fled to Britain and Ireland, bringing weaving skills with them. Lisburn thereby grew into a major centre for the Irish linen industry. From the 19th century, the linen looms were programmable, using punch cards to specify patterns: the system interested Charles Babbage and George Boole, and underpins modern computers.

• Irish Linen Centre is a museum of that era, in the 17th-century market hall where linen was traded.
• Long Kesh 3 miles west of Lisburn was an RAF base and aircraft assembly plant. This and other bases in Ulster enabled the RAF to protect Allied convoys and attack U-boats out in the Atlantic beyond the range of planes from Great Britain. There's an aviation museum here.
• Maze Prison or "H-Blocks" was built on part of the Long Kesh site. It began in 1971 as a detention centre: the British arrested 342 suspected paramilitary terrorists, and held them without trial in Nissen huts on the disused airfield. The arrests were solely of supposed IRA members, with no action against loyalists; detainees were systematically abused, indeed tortured. To official surprise, this didn't end terrorism in Ulster but sparked an escalation of violence. Internment without trial ended in 1975 and a permanent prison HMP Maze was built, known as H-blocks for the plan of its cells. Those held claimed that they were political prisoners, not criminals, and refused prison discipline. Protests included "the blanket" (refusing to wear prison garb), smearing the cells with excrement, and hunger strikes, with Bobby Sands and nine others starving themselves to death. From the late 1980s there was less paramilitary violence, and The Maze closed in 2000; it's now a derelict brownfield site.
• Hillsborough Castle 4 miles southwest of Lisburn is a Georgian mansion, the ceremonial base of British power in Ulster. Talks leading to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 were held here.

54.991667-7.3416673 Derry – or is it Londonderry? Even the name indicates its sectarian divide, and the term you use is your badge of identity.

• City walls were built 1613–1618 to defend settlers from Irish attack, in an era when most cities were tearing theirs down, so they're one of the finest examples in Europe. The town within is a citadel on a crag. The walkway has great views and multiple access points.
• Tower Museum at the foot of the walls gives a good overview of the city's tumultuous history.
• Apprentice Boys Memorial Hall especially documents the siege of 1689. The boys famously slammed the gates shut against an approaching army.
• Bogside is the valley immediately west of the heights of the walled city, then the ground rises again onto the Creggan estate. "Free Derry Corner" is the focus of this nationalist district, and building gable-ends have murals of political art.
• Museum of Free Derry exhibits the conflict, especially "Bloody Sunday" in Derry and its long aftermath.

54.6-7.34 Omagh is the market town in County Tyrone that saw the last and worst act of The Troubles. After the Good Friday Agreement of April 1998 there was cautious optimism in Northern Ireland. But in August an IRA splinter group planted a car bomb near Omagh Courthouse: their warning messages led police to evacuate people away from the courthouse towards the bomb, and 27 were killed when it exploded.

• Memorials: A glass obelisk indicates the site of the blast on Market Street. The main Memorial Garden of Light is a short way north across the river, a set of mirrors each bearing the name of a victim.
• Ulster American Folk Park loops back to where this story began. It depicts 18th / 19th century town and country life, conditions at the docks and aboard the emigrant ships, then settlement in the New World pushing ever west to the Frontier. It's five miles north of town.

• The border: now you see it, now you don't. It's deliberate policy to make this no more significant than a county boundary, so all you may see (for instance on the Belfast-Dublin motorway) is a sign that distances and speed limits are now in km. The border is not patrolled, it's your responsibility to check that your documents (such as car insurance) are valid. The potential problem is that this is also the border of the European Union (though not the Schengen Area, which neither Britain nor Ireland joined.) The EU mandates free movement of goods and people within its nations. The Good Friday Agreement mandates free movement of goods and people between Northern Ireland and the Republic. The United Kingdom mandates free movement of goods and people between its home nations of England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. But the whole point of Brexit was to stop free movement of goods and people between the EU and UK. Duuuh …

• Dublin is a great city, within range of a day trip from Belfast but deserving much longer.
  • Connelly Station is where the Belfast train arrives. Many Irish mainline stations are named for those executed for their part in the Easter Rising, and the British were most obliging in ensuring enough names to go round.
  • The Post Office was almost the only building seized during the Rising, with the rebels besieged. The GPO Museum describes those events.
  • Kilmainham Gaol is where the rebels faced the firing squad. But the fate of many of its denizens was to be transported as convict labour to Australia and elsewhere.
  • EPIC Museum describes the Irish emigrant experience, with a replica ship.
  • Glasnevin Cemetery holds an illustrious roll-call of big names in 19th-/ 20th-century Irish history.
• Cork and its surrounds were the powerbase of the anti-treaty faction in the Irish Civil War of 1922/23.
  • The Public Museum has a good exhibition on that war.
  • Cobh is the port for Cork, and depicts the emigrant experience and visit of Titanic.