Blokeuptheroad
And a few more….
So what was your nickname ?. Seems army, and police officers too do this nickname thing, but are usually an unimaginative lot. What was yours ?
I see in one of the pics your hair looks reddish(maybe light/pic) wouldn't be 'Ginger' then would it ?
Does the war of the three kingdoms count as civil war in ireland as it just seems to be war against british invaders? (Is it thus an english affectation calling it a civil war for ireland)
Thats part of why war of the three kingdoms is slowly replacing it but its still uncommon. After all it started in Scotland with the Bishops war.
At this point the English parliament declined to pay for the war against the Scots at which point Charles went to the Irish nobility and tried to raise an army there by offering various things including increased religious freedom.
This started to be assembled which then worried both the Scots and the English parliaments which led to some proposing to attack Ireland first.
In turn this worried the Irish nobility who had been assembling that army and they launched the rebellion of 1641 and ended up with four main factions fighting each other.
Its not as simple as "invaders" since a lot of that Irish nobility were "Old English" who had adapted a lot of Irish customs (think the Normans who slowly became English as an equivalent) and were catholic and were strongly opposed to the newer plantations and the protestants being brought in.
wouldn’t be ‘Ginger’ then would it ?
Strawberry blonde if you don't mind. More cue ball these days though. No nickname, just a slight tweak of my surname.
Very interesting to read about you being embedded in the popuation, that sounds properly crackers. I presumed everyone was in the big bases behind the big walls
We mostly were on bases and on other tours I was. But Lisburn was such a big Garrison there wasn't room for all the families on camp, so there were married quarters on and off camp. Those off camp were well known by the locals and the paramilitaries as army family accommodation. There was no protection at all, other than more frequent patrolling by army and police armoured land rovers.
Not that being on camp was much safer. Camps were routinely mortared. One of my pics above show the launch tube from a PIRA Mk15 'barrack buster' mortar. That particular one was fired at Downpatrick police station. In 1996 Lisburn garrison (Army HQ in NI) was car bombed on the inside. PIRA got two car bombs through all the main gate security. The first exploded and the second a few minutes later, deliberately parked outside the camp medical centre to target the injured from the first bomb and those treating them. We weren't there at the time, but playgroups, shops, libraries and the med centre used by my wife and kids on earlier and later tours were all nearby.
When were first moved to our married quarter off camp, relatively newly married with a toddler in tow, my wife looked around our new home. She asked me why there was so much broken glass in our small back garden. I had to tell her that it was as a result of a car bomb targeting the married quarters a few weeks before we arrived that had flattened a couple of neighbouring houses. That was a difficult conversation.
I do feel a lot of residual guilt about taking my young family there with me and exposing them to those risks. They however mostly have fond memories of their time there, we were all young and daft and just accepted it as a weird sort of normal.
As an Irish notional catholic growing up I always felt GB to be anti-Irish and anti-Catholic . Not at the level other minorities experience but always there. That may be changing now or maybe Ive changed.
Some parts of it were. When I met Mrs Sandwich and proposed marrying her my dad's father told him to forbid it at the table one evening. (Some context. The grandfather left after the war to administer the Austrian partition and stayed. His attitudes were frozen in time as he had no contact with my dad until the mid-60's, due to a problem with his then mother-in-law).
There was a middle class sector (possibly with 40's military connections) that were extremely racist towards the Irish of either side of the 6 counties border.
Holy cow! Contact is available free and online! It's a slow, observational art film, not a movie. But I really was struck by it when I saw it about 20 years ago in a cinema.
http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/439385/index.html
https://archive.org/details/contact-1985
Not seen that, will take a look. A film that really struck home with me because it captures the bleak banality of tit for tat sectarian violence was 'Elephant' by Danny Boyle. Not to be confused with a later US film of the same name. It's a short film with very little dialogue which is authentic and disturbing and really captures some of the mood of Northern Ireland in the 1980s.
Funnily enough, I saw Contact and Elephant back to back, maybe at the Prince Charles Cinema. Elephant was quite striking - although I think one third thought it was genius, one third thought it was triggering, and one third thought it was total pish.
Robert Carlyle is in Elephant. Or is it Gary Oldman?
The thing that amazed me about the troubles was that each side sat down and negotiated a peace deal. I remember bomb threats as a child at school and then in my twenties on an army base thought that 'bonnet and boot'searches, checking under your car each day and the QRF (Quick Reaction Force) responding to every little incident would be the status quo for years. I really do admire the folk who brought about the peace, gives me some hope for the middle east.................
The thing that amazed me about the troubles was that each side sat down and negotiated a peace deal.
That Thatcher restarted the talks despite the brighton bombing and other attacks and then Major kept it going despite the mortar attack both deserve praise on their part which is often overlooked (admittedly because it is only coming out in recent years).
Apologies for the silence. I've just caught up, there's a lot to take in here. I've read everything posted but haven't followed up any links yet (it's 2:20am).
Thank you, thank you to everyone who has replied. There are some astonishing posts here.
Came across this, thought I'd add it here as it's quite a candid and compelling documentary from the early 1970's
There is a lot more history to Ireland than just the ‘troubles,. <br />I was just at my first cremation in Cork and the crematorium is like something out a WW2 movie. It’s located on its own small Island accessed via a bridge. You then walk through a tunnel carved in the rock into an old brick building. It is rather spectacular. Over the water in one direction is Cobh (with its Titanic connections), in another direction is Spike Island (Corks own ‘Alcatraz’). The crematorium site itself was previously used by the British navy for decades as a gunpowder/ammo store and was apparently the second biggest harbour in the world at one point (according to the chap I was talking too, so might need fact checking).
https://www.islandcrematorium.ie/history/
