Quote:
Originally Posted by PoorOldPo
Did you live through the troubles? What was it like?
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Well yes I did, though obviously I lived, and live, south of the border. But it was bad. You'd hear on the news virtually every day (I'm not exaggerating) about a bomb going off in Belfast or Antrim or somewhere else, and once it came down here. I remember my ma was on the way home from work when we turned on the news and they said a bomb had gone off in O'Connell Street! We were so scared until my ma came home, late.
It was awful though. Nobody went over the border (Newry? What's that?) and trains were constantly being turned back because of bombs on the line, real or just threatened. You'd also hear about bombs going off on the mainland, and the likes of the Birmingham Six and the Guilford Four were in the news. All in all, a terrible time and no-one's sorry to see the back of it.
If you get a chance try to catch "Reeling in the years" for that period: it gets a lot of the atmosphere and dark disquiet and despair of the time.
Two stories from that time: I worked in a freight company and we were often getting quotes for jobs. One came in from I think Austria, and they wanted to ship a consignment of guns to Northern Ireland! Bad enough, but we checked it out, then they revealed the guns were for the RUC (Royal Ulster Constabulary, the NI Police Force, sworn enemies of the IRA) and we said er no thanks: nobody from Ireland is going to risk delivering guns to the RUC!
Also, when one of our hauliers went up to NI he deliberately had the driver go through the proper area --- I can't recall if it was Republican or Loyalist, but whichever way his name, Browne, was spelled by one or the other sides, that's the route he was to take. That's no joke: stray into the wrong area in a southern registered truck with say Catholic spelling in a Protestant area, you were looking to have your truck burned out and get yourself killed.