Looking for a resource about "Derry Girls" and The Troubles

[MisterOJ]

So my 14-year-old daughter has been watching "Derry Girls" on Netflix. It's a fairly straightforward comedy about a group of Catholic high school girls in Derry in the early 90s. (Plus one off the girl's male cousins, who is having to attend their all-girls school because he's English and it was determined the local all-boys school would be much too dangerous for him.) What I've seen of it is cute and funny. But it also has quite a bit to do about The Troubles of the time. It's more going on in the background, but it's prominent enough to have my daughter asking questions about what it was all about.

Now, I only have the most surface level knowledge about what was going on in Northern Ireland at the time. But after I explained to her what little I know, she's still interested in finding out more about it. I've tried looking on my own and while there seems to be plenty of information on the Web about that time, I haven't been able to find anything... concise. 

So, if any of you are aware of a good YouTube video or podcast or article that would sort of concisely sum up that period of time for a teenager, I'd love to hear about it so I can pass it on to her.

Thanks!

 

[Lykos]

I can't claim to know much more than you do, but here is how I approach things like this:

I take a look at the Wikipedia page on The Troubles

, skim the page for usefull information and scroll right down to -see also-, references- and -external links-.

There I found a link to an old documentary called Ulster       (10:27 min) that gives some backrground and a name your daughter might identify with,

Bernadette Devlin. Here is a youtube portrait of Bernadette Devlin (21:24 min).

You can just continue following links until you find something interesting during the 1990s.

 

You can also play one of the few interesting songs by U2 to get the feeling.

[Zorral]

There are many histories and other studies of the era (as well as the eras of violence preceding this one).

I recommend this right at the top since the person who is curious is a young person. Included here is a view by an adolescent, as he recalls those years as an adult-- and specifically about Derry. It includes mention of several books, including a series for kids, with two  girls from opposite sides being friends.

https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/giving-voice-to-the-troubles-how-literature-has-told-the-north-s-story-1.3642490

There's enormous amounts on this.  What is more difficult is finding materials that are good for introducing a young adult to all of it, that doesn't get bogged down with everything that anybody doesn't know, and whose family, maybe for generations, hasn't lived this history, and yet make the 1990's comprehensible.

However, it might be of interest to your daughter if you all watch programs together, is how deeply connected to the Troubles is Mrs. "S" in Orphan Black, and how particularly so are then Sarah and Fe.  Knowing more about the Troubles makes some of the seasons and episodes of Orphan Black all the better.

Here's a good bibliography:

http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/bibdbs/bibliography/index.html

Another:

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/feb/22/bestbooks.politics

 

 

[Shaun Snow]

It might be a bit heavier than you're looking for, but there was a film starring James Nesbitt set in Derry during the Troubles, detailing one of the most controversial parts of it to have happened here. It's called Bloody Sunday. My mother was at the march it is based on and it led to her getting involved with the IRA.

[Which Tyler]

 

[Zorral]

1 hour ago, Shaun Snow said:

It might be a bit heavier than you're looking for, but there was a film starring James Nesbitt set in Derry during the Troubles, detailing one of the most controversial parts of it to have happened here. It's called Bloody Sunday. My mother was at the march it is based on and it led to her getting involved with the IRA.

I saw that film the first time when I was in his daughter's age group and didn't understand a thing about it.  But then, already, she does know more than I did then.

[Iskaral Pust]

This is a sprawling kind of question.  I’m not aware of any succinct summary because (1) the roots extend back centuries and (2) no-one I knew needed one because all of my contemporaries and I lived through the final violent convulsions of “The Troubles”: I grew up in Ireland at the same time Derry Girls is set, and we all learned a very detailed political history of Ireland including the many failed rebellions and risings that culminated in partition.  You’d need a full length history book to unpack this topic. 

I can give you a quick list of historical highlights from memory, and if you read about those on Wikipedia or elsewhere you might piece together a summary (and correct any errors of memory):

- In the 12th century, Normans arrive in Ireland supporting a recently defeated petty king.  They conquer and hold a large section of the east of the country, including a large proportion of the highest quality farmland.  King Henry II of England insists upon their fealty and so part of Ireland comes under the sway of the English crown.  Castles are built to garrison and control the area, and feudal land ownership and vassalship is introduced (as unpopular with the Irish as it was for Saxons in England a century earlier).

- Over the next few centuries there is an uneasy detente as English/Norman influence is limited to The Pale, while Irish/Celtic culture remains intact in the remainder of the country.  Most English/Norman nobles become increasingly like the Irish/Celtic locals.

- The early 16th century sees an escalation as the Tudors have won the War Of The Roses in England and now Henry VIII, as part of his claim to absolute monarchic power (bitterly disputed in England too), claims kingship over the entire country of Ireland.  Plus he insists that Catholic Ireland now submit to the English Reformation and become Protestant.  Irish Catholic nobles of English/Norman descent, first Silken Thomas and later Hugh O’Neill and Hugh O’Donell lead rebellions against Henry VIII and Elizabeth I.  At this point, Catholic France and Spain support the Irish rebellions as part of their own resistance to the Reformation, which is a threat to the Tudors from their continental enemies (think of the Spanish Armada during Elizabeth’s reign).  Ireland’s westerly location has become more important after the discovery of America and the opening of Atlantic sea routes.  These Irish rebellions are defeated by the much larger English armies (experienced veterans of the War Of The Roses) and the Irish people are harshly oppressed afterward as punishment for defying the Tudors.  The Penal Laws of the early to mid 17th century are an explicit attempt to economically, politically and culturally destroy the Catholic Irish and force them to submit to the Reformation.  These are eventually rescinded under Charles I, the new Catholic king of England.

- Religious conflicts deepen during the English Civil War as Protestant hardliners rebel against Charles, who is supported by Catholic nobles in England and Ireland. After Cromwell’s Protestant army (the first new modern, professional army) defeats Charles, he leads punitive, almost genocidal, reprisals against Catholic Ireland.  Towns and cities are put to the sword and civilians mass executed (herding the populace into the church/cathedral to be burned alive is the favorite weapon).  This is part political terrorism, part religious genocide.  Perhaps not unlike the wars that ravaged Germany in this era.  A lot of Irish men of fighting age now depart Ireland in fear of their lives, and end up on the Continent in the armies of France and Spain, called “the wild geese”.

- After the Civil War, plantations are introduced in Ireland.  Huge tracts of land are granted to Protestant landlords and Protestant English/Scottish “settlers” are imported to be tenants on the land in Ulster.  The Catholic Irish are dispossessed and forcibly expelled from their land.  The Penal Laws are reinstated and once again there is severe political, economic and cultural oppression: Irish Catholics cannot own land or livestock/bloodstock above certain value (which also means they are compelled to sell any to a Protestant if offered that value), education is illegal for Irish Catholics, Catholic mass is illegal, the Irish language is banned in all civil institutions, Irish Catholics are ineligible for any roles in government, laws of inheritance are changed to require Catholic landholdings to be continually sub-divided to the point of inadequacy, etc.  Previous plantations (in Munster and Leinster) had granted massive tracts of land to English Protestant landlords for Irish Catholics to pay them rents as tenants, but the Ulster plantation is the first attempt to use huge numbers of Protestant colonists to dispossess and replace the ethnic Irish Catholics.  This brings us into the 18th century.

- Next is the era of Irish Republicanism, where uprisings stem from the common people rather than Catholic nobility of English/Norman descent.  Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen attempt a French-style revolution in 1798, supported by the French, but are defeated.  England, at war with Bonaparte and increasingly concerned by the potential for violent Irish rebellion while their army is in Spain, pass the Act of Union and bring Ireland under even closer control (end of any local political power or self-determination for the Irish).

- Then in the 19th century there is a popular political non-violent resistance led by Daniel O’Connell that finally leads to the Catholic Emancipation Act in 1829, repealing the worst of the Penal Laws.  The economic oppression and dispossession of the Catholic Irish reaches a nadir as the Great Potato Famine 1845-1849 causes a 20-25% decrease in population from starvation and forced emigration, even as Ireland produces a huge food surplus to feed the growing English population.  Political non-violent resistance continues under figures like Charles Stuart Parnell, leading to Land Acts of the 1870s that start to redress the dispossessed land and eventually regain a local Irish parliament in 1914, only to be immediately suspended as WWI started.  But there are serious limits to progress through this avenue.

- Early 20th century sees the displacement of agricultural workers (same in England) and mass protests of the labor movement.  This bleeds into a renewed sense of uprising that produces the Easter Rising of 1916 and ultimately the Irish War Of Independence 1919-1921, whereby sustained guerrilla warfare finally forces England to agree Irish independence.  But Ireland is partitioned and six counties in Ulster, where a Protestant majority (mostly just in Belfast) are a legacy from the plantation settlers.  Ireland has a civil war 1922-23 over whether to accept this, and eventually, exhausted by war, accepts partition.  Ireland later becomes a full republic (no longer part of the British Commonwealth) in 1949.

- In partitioned Ulster, now called Northern Ireland, the religious/sectarian and ethnic divide persists.  Protestants feel like an embattled enclave, Catholics are still economically excluded from most jobs and politically from the police force and most government positions.  People live in segregated neighborhoods and inter-marriage is rare. Demographically, it’s only a matter of time before Catholics have a majority, but in the meantime there is a bitter resistance.  The British Army is present as an occupying force.  Economic decline in de-industrializing Britain increases the tension and competition.  A large generation of young Catholic men practice civil unrest in the 1960s, which is repressed by the British army and morphs into a guerrilla terrorist campaign in the 1970s and 1980s.  In the 1990s there is a negotiated peace that lasts until today.