The Troubles... again

My oldest son was born six years after the ceasefires here in the north. At the time I remember wondering what world we had brought him into and if he would have a drastically different childhood than that of my husband and I.
Because, in all honesty, we were not afforded a ‘normal’ childhood. We saw things children shouldn’t have and we lived in fear for our young lives. For us murders, bombs, shootings, soldiers and tension were as normal and everyday as homework and hanging around street corners.
Like it or like it not our memories are forever peppered with the horrific events that shaped our early lives as well as Northern Irish history.
When I was a young girl, not much older than my oldest son, I saw a man shot dead by the army as I stood, bag of sweets still in hand, outside the shop at the bottom of our street. I, along with a lot of other people who call this place home, had many other traumatic experiences growing up. As a teenager fretting about boys was as normal as bomb scares, a first kiss more daunting than a full-scale riot. It is frightening to think back on what passed as ‘normal’ in our young lives.
Our street was a stone’s throw away from one of the largest and most frequently bombed army bases in Northern Ireland. The Europa Hotel had literally nothing on Fort George Barracks. My husband grew up within an area within Belfast affectionately called ‘The Murder Triangle’ and had many, many harrowing experiences that kids should not have had to bear witness to.
I know, in the grand scheme of things we two got off relatively lightly. We were extremely lucky in that none of our immediate family were killed in the Troubles here but we, like every single other child of the conflict, were affected deeply by our own individual experiences.
This is not something I want for my children.
Last week dissident republicans attacked our city again. They planted a car bomb across the street from where I grew up, where my mother still lives. My mother – ever the drama queen – was actually driving past the scene when it exploded after having persuaded a police officer to let her home through the security cordon. She wasn’t injured, just badly shaken up.
Dissidents activity is now the norm in this city, bomb hoaxes an everyday thing. We have come to expect the odd bomb, a fact in itself which makes me mad.
Despite what the police and the politicians say these people are doing a good job at dragging us back to the old days. Not only are they planting massive car bombs they are planting seeds of sickening fear and suspicion once again our minds.
And what’s different for me personally this time around is that I have children to protect. It is the most natural instinct for a mother to want to keep her children from harm and it’s relatively easy when that which may harm them is visible. When that danger could be in the car parked beside you in the shopping centre, being assembled in a house nearby or being transported in the van stopped alongside at traffic lights it’s all the more worrying.
It sickens me that the path we walk home from school is once again littered with debris from the latest bomb, that the shops we frequent have shattered windows and twisted shutters. It sickens me that I have to try to explain the reasoning behind this new conflict when I fail to understand it myself. The last time it happened, I was the kid and it needed no explanation, it just was what it was – the Troubles – as much part of our environment as the constant rain.
It’s all rather bewildering to me, what must it look like to a child?
I had hoped that when the time came I could explain the Troubles to my kids with the aid of dusty old history books, now it seems I won’t have to. They can just look outside their window.