Life in a Hedge

Northern Ireland, and in the streets of Belfast, British troops stand guard to keep the peace between Catholics and Protestants.

It's commonly accepted that Northern Ireland's problems are the result of its religious divisions, which are themselves embedded some 300 years back in the province's history.

But it's no longer so certain that religious hatred is the only flame that keeps Northern Ireland on the boil.

We'll start in the 1960s.

In Northern Ireland, tensions were rising after decades of political exclusion, economic inequality and contested national identity for the Catholic community.

Civil rights protests had escalated into sectarian violence, which saw the re-emergence of armed organisations like the Irish Republican Army, the IRA, and loyalist groups like the Ulster Volunteer Force, the UVF.

British troops were initially sent in as peacekeepers in August 1969.

By the early 1970s, parts of Northern Ireland were effectively ungovernable.

As violence intensified, the army became part of the conflict itself.

I spoke to SAS soldier John, it's not his real name, who was in Northern Ireland during those early days of the conflict.

He now studies the history of military involvement in Northern Ireland.

I mean, wars of all hues and persuasions are driven by demographics.

I mean, dare I say it now, we're looking at some big conflagration in the Middle East.

The Middle East has the demographics to support wars.

You know, there's hordes and hordes of young men.

So we flipped to Northern Ireland.

There was huge unemployment out there, particularly if you were a Catholic, where you perceived housing was set against you, work was set against you, and politically you had very small little representation.

So this sort of summer of 69, you know, on the mainland here, it's a summer of love.

Out in Belfast, suddenly the sort of protests that have been running for several weeks just absolutely exploded.

It was last Thursday night that Diver Street,

a Catholic pocket just west of the city centre, was set alight.

That night, five people were killed and 120 injured in machine gun battles between police and gunmen.

The IUC, who were the incumbent police force there, were completely caught out by the scale of it, the size of it.

I mean, people sit in Britain and they sort of look at the form, you know, what happened in Yugoslavia and they look at Africa and they look at the Middle East and say, we could never do that.

Believe you me, in Northern Ireland, people did the most appalling things to each other.