In Europe

Volunteers began terror-ising the Catholic neighbourhoods, and the IRA came back to life.
    On the surface at least, the conflict in Northern Ireland resembled the one in the Basque Country. The movements in both places fought for their own rights. But whereas the issue for the Basques has been the preservation of a vanishing people, for Northern Irish Catholics it was about the ascendancy of a majority that was not yet recognised as such. The Catholics produced more children than the Protestants, they were the winners in a demographic sense, but they remained oppressed. The routes taken by the traditional Orange marches are telling in this regard. Until far into the twentieth century, the Protestants marched only through Protestant neighbourhoods. Gradually, however, those same neighbour-hoods became populated by Catholic families; the routes, though, remained identical to what they had been thirty years before. Detours from theritual path, after all, would have amounted to a recognition of the fact that those neighbourhoods were no longer predominantly Protestant.
    The Catholics increasingly came to regard the marches as an annual provocation, the supreme symbol of discrimination and humiliation. And so, in summer 1969, things erupted: the Protestant marchers in Catholic districts were pelted with stones and bottles. The neighbourhood riots grew into small-scale popular uprisings. British troops were called in, and within a few months the violence had escalated into a civil war that would last for more than three decades.
    At first most of those killed were Catholics: the retired farmer Francis McCloskey, who wandered into a riot on 14 July, 1969, had his skull bashed in by the police; contractor Samuel Devenney, father of nine, died three days later from injuries sustained in an attack by the RUC in April; bus conductor Samuel McLarnon was struck down in his own living room by a police bullet.
    The British government decided to knuckle down in Northern Ireland. Catholics briefly hoped that the British would rescue them from the harassment of the Protestant militias. But soon the situation deteriorated even further; in 1972, 467 people were killed in bombings and shooting incidents; in 1973 that figure was 250; in 1974, 216 people were killed; in 1975 it was 247, and in 1976 the death toll was 297. Belfast became a war zone, neighbourhoods were cordoned off with barbed wire, sentry posts and armoured cars. Successive British governments proved unable to mediate. During their terms of office (1974–9), Labour prime ministers Harold Wilson and his successor James Callaghan allowed the situation to get completely out of hand. Countless IRA suspects were imprisoned without due process. Margaret Thatcher wrote in her memoirs that her ‘own instincts were deeply Unionist’. With only a tiny majority to keep him in power, her successor, John Major, was entirely dependent on the Unionist MPs. In 1984, more than a third of all adult Catholic males in Ulster were unemployed. For years, the annual death toll hovered around eighty. Only after Tony Blair's Labour government came to power in May 1997 was there room for a breakthrough.
    Compared with many other twentieth-century conflicts, the civil war in Northern Ireland was relatively limited and isolated. The extent of the drama only becomes clear when one sees how small Ulster really is: notmuch larger than Friesland province in the Netherlands. The conflict there nevertheless has claimed more than 3,500 lives, and left at least 30,000 people injured. Around 1995, one out of every twenty inhabitants of Northern Ireland had been the victim of a bombing or a shooting, one in five had witnessed a bombing, and the same number knew someone in their immediate surroundings who had been killed or badly wounded.
    The lives, long and short, of the 3,637 victims to date have been detailed in the encyclopaedic
Lost Lives
, including the circumstances leading up to their deaths: militancy, camaraderie, loyalty, revenge, brotherly love, the luck of the draw. The book had just come out when I was travelling around Ulster, and everyone was talking about it. With its 1,630 pages, it was the result of eight years of research by a little group of independent journalists. Its impact was shattering.
    Take lost life number seven, the first child to be murdered: Patrick Rooney, nine years old, schoolboy, killed on 15 August, 1969 by police bullets while lying in his bed. His mother would later