The Troubles refers to roughly 30 years of sectarian violence in Northern Ireland in which more than 3,500 people were killed. The Good Friday Agreement ended the conflict, but the legacy of the violence festers in Northern Ireland and beyond.
In the 1976 Kingsmill massacre, the IRA slaughtered ten young Protestant civilians. In 1977 Robert Nairac, a Grenadier Guardsman attached to Britain's special forces, was abducted, tortured and murdered by the IRA. His body was "disappeared" to instil fear and has never been recovered; the bones of most other disappeared victims have been returned.
On Bloody Sunday in 1972, British soldiers killed 13 civilians at a civil-rights march in Londonderry. A £200m ($267m) public inquiry led the then prime minister, David Cameron, to apologise for "unjustified and unjustifiable" killings. The sole paratrooper tried, known as "Soldier F", was ultimately cleared of murder, though the judge said the soldiers "did not act in lawful self-defence" and had "sullied" the name of the regiment by shooting unarmed civilians fleeing from them.
In 1998, 70% of Catholics and 74% of Protestants said they not only did not support the violence but had no sympathy for the reasons behind it. In 2022, however, Michelle O'Neill, a Sinn Féin politician who became the first minister of Northern Ireland, said there had been "no alternative" to "violent resistance to British rule" during the Troubles. A poll found that 69% of Northern Irish nationalists agreed.
One of the perverse fruits of peace has been the glamourisation of killers. Irish history is replete with cycles of violence in which those who launch attacks have no popular mandate but later come to be venerated, perpetuating the hope for others that, though shunned today, they will be lauded tomorrow.
Keir Starmer's government is pursuing a policy, agreed with the Irish government, under which commissions would reinvestigate Troubles deaths and then draw a line. Labour's Northern Ireland Troubles Bill retains the possibility of prosecutions, but any convicts would serve only two years, thanks to a provision in the Good Friday Agreement. The focus is on "information recovery": telling families, and the public, what happened. The previous Conservative government had legislated for a de facto amnesty—in effect trading justice for information.
Sectarian murals are a long-standing feature of Northern Ireland, with paramilitary groups using gable-end paintings to mark territory and commemorate killers. Research found that in the quarter-century since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement three-quarters of the most intimidatory murals in the loyalist Shankill area have gone. The Loyalist Communities Council—legal, but made up of banned paramilitary groups—broadly supports removing militaristic murals; newer paintings in loyalist areas commemorate Queen Elizabeth II and King Charles III. Tourists still flock to surviving Troubles wall art, including iconography of IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands and the Ulster Defence Association's "Freedom Corner". A growing non-sectarian street-art scene has produced apolitical floral and figurative pieces, including a tribute to Lyra McKee, a journalist murdered by dissident republicans in 2019. Political disagreement has so far prevented the creation of a museum of the Troubles in Northern Ireland.
That must be wonderful: I don't understand it at all.