The Troubles: Northern Ireland's Thirty Years of Bombs, Bullets, and Betrayal

The Troubles. Northern Ireland's Thirty Years of Bombs, Bullets, and Betrayal

For nearly thirty years, from 1969 to 1998, a small patch of northwestern Europe — a province of six counties, with a population smaller than Chicago's — was the scene of one of the most sustained urban conflicts in modern Western history. Over 3,500 people were killed: Irish republicans blew up British soldiers and shopping centers; loyalist gunmen drove into Catholic neighborhoods and shot the first person they saw; the British Army shot civilians on a civil rights march and then spent three decades lying about it. The Troubles were not a religious war, though religion marked the tribe. They were a war about sovereignty, identity, and the unfinished business of the British Empire — fought in streets, in pubs, in courts, in prisons, in the corridors of Westminster and the back offices of Downing Street. This book traces the full thirty years of the conflict: the civil rights marches that were beaten off the streets, the birth of the Provisional IRA, Bloody Sunday, the bomb campaigns in Belfast and London and Birmingham, the secret talks, the American mediation, and the extraordinary fragile peace of Good Friday 1998 — a peace still being argued over, still contested, and never quite complete. It is a story about what happens when a state fails a minority of its own citizens — and about the extraordinary difficulty of ending a war that has become a way of life.