Lost Lives

I wanted to just recommend a small docu/film called Lost Lives that recently aired on BBC based on a book of the same name. The book aimed to document every one of the lives lost as a result of The Troubles in Northern Ireland. In total, and not wishing to appear flippant, the number of lives lost over several decades is less than a bad week in Syria or Yemen, but it happened right here in the UK, the UK excluding Northern Ireland where most of the carnage occured. And that makes it personal, that it should happen in the west, in Europe, for decades, in a modern first world country, a liberal country, with the rule of law. I also acknowledge that the numbers don't really compare to what happened in the Balkans but this was right here in a modern democracy.

I was born shortly before The Troubles started and it took me decades to understand it for what it really was. the main problem I had was, apart from my age I guess, the reporting of the time always referred to the religious aspects of the conflict whereas the reality was it was always to do with nationalism and the right to self determination.

Maybe the religious aspects were largely lost on the English because religion was already on a steep decline within England at the time and having almost nightly reports about Catholics vs Protestants bombing and shooting one another on the news every evening was bound to have a further negative impact upon religion in a society that was just coming to terms with the Beatles, Rolling Stones, LSD, minis and the mini skirt!

The conflict even came close to me on a couple of occasions. I was born and raised in one of the mainland towns and cities that were subject to bomb attacks. On the evening of the attacks in my town my father and grandfather had gone out for the evening for a couple of drinks. These being the days long before the mobile phone had been twinkle in some Japanese/Norwegian/American engineers eye, the only way of contacting people was by fixed landline phone. So having heard the 'Breaking News' reports interrupting normal TV about explosions and dead and injured just minutes from where we were and uncertain where our family members were, we could only wait. And when they returned they were completely oblivious to what had happened as they had headed in a different direction.

The second occasion I was close to the conflict was when I was in London and a bomb had been planted near to a venue I was at and had to be evacuated to a safety zone. But this is trifling considering what the people of Northern Ireland had to endure on a daily basis for years and years!

This film focuses on a subset of the deaths that occurred and is quite hard to watch and I don't know how to suggest watching it. On its own it is not the kind of 90 minutes you sit down to watch with a glass of wine. It might be the kind of film you watch while trying to do something else because focussing on what people did to one another for such little point is hard, at least for me. But it will drag you in because it is extremely well made and the simply of the recited details of the death of so many people, mainly young people, is so very sad.

I guess the difference between the film and living through it in real time is that the handful of deaths that are documented in the film, which is only a small subset of the total number, brings in to sharp relief the story of the individuals and their families.

At the time, it became almost just another story on the news, it became normal in some awful way and the lives of the individuals were not gone into in any detail on the evening news. There were programmes that tried to report on the lives and the communities and the grievances at the time but for some reason they did not have the resonance that they should have, for me, that was probably just because I was young and found it hard to understand. This film brings it home.

Maybe it only brings it home to me and my generation but it does sting. Simply listening to how a 14 yr old boy was taken off the street and tied up, hooded and shot in the head or how a 19 year old was literally blown to bits when he was making a bomb such that pieces of flesh had to be picked from roofs, gutters and roads and put in plastic bags for burial is gruelling but it is worth the watch.