Reflections on the 1981 BBC series, "The Troubles"

When teaching the Troubles as a unit in a one-semester course that focuses on prejudice, conflict, judgment and justice--and that also covers South Africa--details are bound to be left out. No one unit can get into all of the complexities of the situation, and you have to be alright with that as a teacher. One can only try to go as in-depth as possible on the material that one can cover, while frequently checking for student understanding. But one hopes that students become engaged enough and curious enough to look deeper. If they do, the 1981 BBC documentary series "The Troubles," directed by Ian Stuttard and compiled of key first-hand historical footage, is a good place to start.

Northern Irish teacher Peter Rogan brought the series to my attention when he sent me the YouTube link. The original series was presented in six parts, but it's been loaded on to YouTube in eight parts, with each segment running about 27 minutes. Frustratingly, part 8 (which presumably brings us from 1975 to 1981) is currently missing from YouTube. Nonetheless, what remains brings us a detailed look at the developments of the Troubles period made at a time in which it seemed the period would never come to an end.

Here are a few of the ways in which this documentary deepened my own understanding:

--I have never before heard the Russian word "pogrom" used for anything other than the killing and destruction of Jewish people and villages. In this film, many interviewees use the term for what was done to the Catholics of the North in the early years of partition in the 1920's.

--A helpful Northern Ireland map with orange representing areas of Protestant majority and green representing areas of Catholic majority is frequently employed in discussing the problems of partition.

--The Black American Civil Rights Movement was even more of an influence on the Catholic Civil Rights Movement than I had realized. The introduction of television to Northern Ireland just at the time that Black American people were agitating for voting rights, integration and fair treatment is pointed out as a seminal influence on the movement.

--Protestant politician Alan Cooper seems an even more forceful advocate for Catholic Civil Rights than the 2002 film Bloody Sunday shows him to be.

--The Civil Rights protests--even when they were totally nonviolent--were hugely controversial and threatening to the Unionist power structure.

--Police brutality in the early Troubles period was even worse and more blatant than I thought.

--We teach about Catholic/Nationalist resentment of the United Kingdom, but we could do more with the frustrations of the Protestant/Unionist contingent at the way the British government has treated them (such as the taking away of power from Stormont in the period after Bloody Sunday). There are truly (at least) three sides in this conflict.

--The Loyalist/Unionist internal feud between Paisley's Loyalists and Faulkner's "official" Unionists in 1973-'74 over power-sharing (the Sunningdale Agreement), and the resulting Protestant strike of 1974 that destroyed this agreement, is an important and interesting wrinkle, but perhaps too much to include in a very short high school course.

--Riots in the Bogside over the Apprentice Boys parade happened every year during the Troubles, not just in the 1969 Battle of the Bogside. They became so commonplace, in fact, that--according to this documentary--the newspapers simply stopped reporting them.

I am slowly making my way through the book Making Sense of the Troubles by David McKittrick and David McVea (while also going through Inventing Ireland by Declan Kiberd and Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World by Maurice Walsh) in preparation for this trip. It will be interesting to see how McKittrick and McVea cover this same content.