Bethany Moore was 7 years old when she asked her parents to explain what a barricade was. By her age, they would have long since known about how Catholics and Protestants made barriers to keep each other — and the British army — out of their streets during three decades of violence in Northern Ireland known as “The Troubles.” Her mother explained that she had often gone through the barricades on her way to school.
Moore, now 24, belongs to the generation born since the 1998 Good Friday Agreement brought an end to the conflict in the region. Despite growing up in a Catholic household in Derry, a flashpoint city also known as Londonderry, she didn’t learn much about its harrowing past until she was older.
The past and its legacies are “often peppered throughout our conversations” in Derry, she said, but her family is “very much focused on the present and future.”
