James Bluemel has said that his new project, Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, is not intended to be comprehensive in its analysis of the Troubles, since it comprises five hour-long episodes – not enough time to untangle decades of hurt, resentment and eventual reconciliation. Instead, it hunts, successfully, for the telling details that come from first-hand recollections and deftly chosen archive clips.
The series runs chronologically, the interviewees returning across multiple episodes, their stories taking time to develop and interlock. Episode one covers 1968-72, a formative period during which most of the personal narratives barely begin; it’s often not clear even what role the person speaking played. What the opening instalment does offer is a strong impression of how quickly injustice and difference can descend into extreme violence.
In 1968, fissures that had been built into the creation of Northern Ireland began to open wide. The civil rights movement saw Catholics rise up to protest against poor housing, as well as an iniquity that is startling to modern eyes. The right to vote in local elections was tied to home ownership, a rule that disproportionately disfranchised Catholics. The programme uses testimonies to show how such divisive policies can erode what ought to be strong class solidarity. After a Catholic remembers gazing east across the Foyle river in Derry at the nicer-looking houses on the other side, a Protestant recalls hearing Catholic complaints about having limited job prospects and making do with outside toilets: “I said: ‘That’s me. We’ve got nothing either.’ We were just working class.”
Such people were already caught up in a culture war, embodied by the Protestant minister (and future first minister) Ian Paisley. “Romanism has bred poverty and ignorance and priestcraft and superstition!” he is seen saying in one of his full-volume speeches. One of the programme’s interviewees, a Protestant, remembers his father insisting that the civil rights movement was nothing but a front for the IRA, with an inflammatory headline in a local paper offered as proof.
Catholic demonstrations were met with batons and water cannon, causing protesters to return brandishing clubs and sticks, the violent tensions coming to a head with the Battle of the Bogside in Derry in August 1969. A series well attuned to how blackly funny old news footage can be shows us a British reporter on the ground, interrupted by a flying chunk of masonry just as he tells viewers that he is in “Londonderry”. But the subsequent arrival of the British army on the streets of Northern Ireland changed everything.
Real horror was to come, but not yet. We see jarringly sunny film of men in uniform being handed trays of tea and sandwiches by grateful members of both communities. Tom, who arrived in Northern Ireland as a teenage soldier, speaks of Catholic and Protestant women competing to ply him with the most goodies.
Ultimately, though, those troops were there to serve a British government that was aligned with one side. Rather than show a descent towards civil war, the episode skips to 1971 to demonstrate how much changed in two years. Another news clip features Martin Bell inside a Catholic house, thoroughly trashed by troops on the premise of searching for weapons. In the present day, a Catholic interviewee sums up the shift: “These weren’t the same people that I was handing biscuits to. They were angry.”
Natural as it is to narrow one’s eyes when the phrase “both sides” pops up in situations involving state violence, Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland follows through on its promise to hear both halves of the story as well as it can.
Ricky, a Catholic, admits that some of those who joined the IRA before him had always been committed to armed struggle and were delighted to see the British troops arrive. Tom provides the army perspective, aided by the programme showing an archive interview with him, as well as him speaking now.
After the introduction of internment – the indiscriminate mass detention of those deemed to be potential combatants – the young Tom expresses confusion at no longer being offered cakes in Catholic neighbourhoods. The older Tom isn’t embarrassed to see himself saying “I don’t like Irish Catholics”; that forthright young man would later be seriously injured by a nail bomb. How did that make him see the people who planted the explosives? “Nothing more than terrorists.”
The episode concludes with grim footage of Bloody Sunday: 30 January 1972, when a Derry civil rights march ended with 14 people being killed by British soldiers. This was a politically pivotal event, but here the most impactful moment is old film of a grieving wife or mother at the funeral, howling: “Ohhh, I loved you,” in unfettered, almost lyrical despair. By marking how the Troubles affected individuals, Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland finds profound wider truths.
• Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland was broadcast on BBC Two and is available on BBC iPlayer
