{"id":1536,"date":"2009-08-24T08:29:11","date_gmt":"2009-08-24T07:29:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/wordpress\/?p=1536"},"modified":"2009-08-24T08:29:11","modified_gmt":"2009-08-24T07:29:11","slug":"northern-ireland-40-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/?p=1536","title":{"rendered":"Northern Ireland 40 years ago"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Forty years ago, I set off to visit Northern Ireland for the first time. A week before, sectarian rioting had broken out in Belfast and Londonderry and troops moved into the cities. Like most people in the remainder of the UK, I was shocked by the events and could not understand how this could be happening in my country.<br \/>\nI was starting a year as sabbatical president of the students&#8217; union at my university at the time, so I took a week off and went over to see for myself what was happening. In both cities,  I walked all the streets and districts where there had been violence, talked to lots of people on both sides of the sectarian divide, and took 60 black and white photographs.<br \/>\nI kept a detailed diary and concluded my visit with these words:<br \/>\n&#8220;Two weeks after the troops went in, it is impossible to say where Northern Ireland goes from here. The Callaghan [then Home Secretary] package appears to offer genuine hope if all sides are prepared to work for peace. However, one Catholic on the barricades told me; &#8216;It&#8217;s the lull before the storm&#8217;.<br \/>\nYet renewed conflict need not be violent as the DCDA [Derry Citizens&#8217; Defence Association] are certainly considering a rate and rent strike. Unrest in some form, therefore, is likely to continue, as the bitterness of decades if not centuries cannot be wiped out in weeks or even months.&#8221;<br \/>\nI seriously underestimated the scale and longevity of <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/The_Troubles\">&#8220;the Troubles&#8221;<\/a> which did not come to an end until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 after the passage of three decades and <a href=\"http:\/\/cain.ulst.ac.uk\/sutton\/tables\/Year.html\">the death of some 3,500<\/a> civilians and soldiers. At the time of my visit, I did not know that, three years later, Jim Callaghan would interview me and employ me in the House of Commons and, five years later, I would be a Special Adviser in the Northern Ireland Office working for a Labour Government.<br \/>\nIncidentally, media coverage of this 40th anniversary is almost non-existent. What does this tell us?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Forty years ago, I set off to visit Northern Ireland for the first time. A week before, sectarian rioting had broken out in Belfast and Londonderry and troops moved into the cities. Like most people in the remainder of the UK, I was shocked by the events and could not understand how this could be [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1536","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1536","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1536"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1536\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1536"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1536"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.rogerdarlington.me.uk\/nighthawk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1536"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}