By this point in the trip, my need to be up super duper early in the morning and do a million things has settled a little bit, so this day was much more relaxed than usual. Grace and I had a nice slow start to the day with RTE playing on the hotel TV.
Today was also Grace’s tattoo day! I accompanied her to this cool tattoo shop we found, Sphynx Tattoo, that was women-owned. In true Irish fashion, Grace decided to get a harp tattoo which turned out glorious.
For our study portion of the day, we had guest speaker, Niall Gilmartin, who spoke about the Troubles and conflict in general in Ireland and how bits of it related to the media at the time. He discussed how the troubles though marked by religion were moreso about nationality and alliance to the monarchy or wanting to be separate from the United Kingdom.
There were rather subtle but still stark differences between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland even down to the smallest things such as what media they consumed. Certain newspapers were more typically bought and read by the different groups.
In terms of broadcast, there were various events during the Troubles that were televised such as the Civil Rights march in Derry. In 1968, Derry’s Civil Rights march was televised on television. There were more extreme instances broadcast as well that eventually led to more regulation and brought attention to the violence in these areas.
One of these instances was when a car with British soldiers drove near the crowd of an IRA funeral and the crowd pulled them out of the car and executed them. These brutal acts are things that were filmed and circulating in the late 80s, early 90s. In 1988 there was a broadcasting ban where stations could not broadcast IRA members’ voices on air, so there would be dubs over videos of them.
Though a lot, this information was helpful when preparing to visit Belfast and understanding the history in that specific location.
