Deep Dive with Shawn

From Belfast to Boston: Can the Troubles Happen Here? (Featuring Oisin Feeney)

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In the United States, it's difficult to imagine how civil violence could break out in the United States - how civic and political breakdown could actually manifest in our neighborhoods. The Troubles - the conflict that tore Northern Ireland apart for decades - offer a stark warning for America's increasingly polarized society. In this episode, Oisin Feeney, creator of the acclaimed "The Troubles" podcast, walks us through how a society descended from peaceful civil rights protests into thirty years of paramilitary violence, bombings, and assassinations.

This conversation helps explain how ordinary communities became battlegrounds. Feeney explains how Catholic nationalists and Protestant unionists retreated to extremes when moderate voices could no longer be heard, and how paramilitaries filled the vacuum when people lost faith in government institutions.

The parallels to America's current situation are impossible to ignore. From the rise of paramilitary-adjacent groups to increasing political violence, from deep economic inequality to the drowning out of moderate voices, the warning signs are flashing. Feeney discusses how violence becomes normalized, how communities cope with prolonged conflict, and what the difficult peace process in Northern Ireland can teach us about both the fragility and resilience of democratic societies.

The lesson? Societies can fracture quickly, but rebuilding takes generations. For Americans concerned about our democratic future, this conversation offers critical perspective on what's at stake and what we must protect before it's too late.

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Oisin:

You know, like Martin McGuinness would have been the biggest player for the provisional IRA, and he always says that when he was a teenager he was turned away from a number of jobs, and for one reason, and one reason only he was a Catholic. He walked into a place can I have a job? And they said, no, you're a Catholic, you can't work here. We don't want a Catholic here. If he had grown up in a society where everybody was just given jobs on their merits and not on their religion, you know, would this have happened the way it happened? Probably not. And was the troubles born out of this economic slump? I don't think so. I don't know. Maybe it's an ingredient in it, but I think this was an inevitability, this was going to happen. This had to come to a head because, you know, a two-tiered society can't exist for this long in unity. Uh, once realizes that you know it's not there for them.

Shawn:

Welcome to Deep Dive with me, s C Fettig, and happy St Patrick's Day. For the better part of the latter half of the 20th century, northern Ireland experienced sectarian violence, political upheaval and deep social divisions that left thousands dead and communities profoundly fractured. The Troubles, as that time is called, offer profound lessons for understanding what happens when democratic institutions falter and the rule of law begins to erode. Today, as America grapples with its own rising polarization, weakened institutions and increasing political violence, we are asking what can the Troubles teach us about preventing similar fractures in American society? How did ordinary life break down when violence became normalized and how did communities cope or even heal afterward? My guest today is Oishin Feeney, journalist and creator of the wildly popular podcast the Troubles. We discuss that period of time, dynamics of escalation, consequences of prolonged social and political unrest and some warning signs that we should be looking for in the United States to preserve our own peace, stability and democracy. My guest today is A Feeney, creator of the wildly popular podcast the Troubles. We discuss that period of time dynamics of escalation, consequences of prolonged social and political unrest and some warning signs we should be looking for in the United States to preserve our own peace and stability in democracy. Just a note before we start there were a lot of players and groups involved in the Troubles and it can get confusing really quickly. I would highly suggest you take a listen to Ashene's podcast. It really is fantastic and it sets the board very nicely. I've dropped a link in the show notes For the purposes of this episode, though here's an oversimplified primer that should help you follow the conversation.

Shawn:

On one side of the conflict were Republicans and Nationalists, predominantly Catholic, who sought a united Ireland, with the Irish Republican Army, the IRA and the provisional Irish Republican Army, using armed struggle to end British rule. On the other side were Unionists and Loyalists, mostly Protestant, who wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom. On their side, paramilitary groups like the Ulster Volunteer Force, uvf, and Ulster Defense Association, uda, engaged in violent campaigns to counter the IRA. While the British government and security forces were officially neutral, they were often accused of bias toward the unionist cause. The Irish government also played a complex role in the Troubles, balancing its constitutional claim to Northern Ireland, where the Troubles were occurring, with its opposition to violence. So while it supported the Nationalist cause in principle, it condemned the IRA's armed campaign and worked to suppress Republican paramilitaries within its borders.

Shawn:

All right, if you like this episode or any episode, please give it a like, share and follow on your favorite podcast platform and or subscribe to the podcast on YouTube. And, as always, if you have any thoughts, questions or comments, please feel free to email me at deepdivewithshawn at gmailcom. Let's do a deep dive, a. Thanks for being here. How are you?

Oisin:

No complaint. Well, actually no complaints. I'm smothered with the cold, but I'm getting better.

Shawn:

You started to say no complaints, and then you hedged your bets but said no complaints ultimately, yeah, look, I'm on the other side of it.

Oisin:

It'll be.

Shawn:

I've had this bad flu there for two days. So it's on the mend today. Okay, well, glad to hear it. So you know, I've always been fascinated by the troubles and I've been, I think, a bit surprised that it doesn't get much attention in the United States. In school, when we study historical conflict around the world, this just doesn't really come up. That's interesting because the United States did play a role at certain times in the troubles political and social.

Shawn:

But the more that I think about what civil unrest and social instability and political violence might look like in the very near future in the US, the more I think about the troubles and I think that period of time could really help us understand what our future here in the US could look like if we continue to experience extreme polarization and I would almost characterize it as a sectarian division. For us it's between conservatives and progressives, and during the Troubles it was between broadly Catholics and Protestants. But there's more specifics to this. Your podcast is really well researched, it's so well done. It goes deep into the troubles, the history, the people, the events. So I'm glad to have you here to talk about it.

Oisin:

Cheers. I'm looking forward to seeing where we can draw similarities.

Shawn:

Before we even dive into that. I rarely have the opportunity to talk to other podcasters. I rarely have them on as guests, so I kind of want to pick your brain a little bit about that. First of all, I guess I'm wondering what is it about the troubles that's particularly interesting to you, and how did this develop into a podcast?

Oisin:

Well, I'm 34 now and when I was maybe, I did media in college back long, long, long time ago, and after that I got a graduate visa, which essentially is a one year visa to go to the USA. So I went to Chicago and I was like, oh, I'll apply for a job with this American Life. This seems like you know, I'll get the job, because at that age I kind of believe that any job you applied for, you just get. I didn't realize that this American Life internship was one of 50,000 people a year apply and so I didn't get it. And then I parked that part of my life for a while. I had a great time in chicago and I worked for a news radio station there for a year.

Oisin:

But, um, yeah, I'd always just said I wanted to start a podcast. I always just I listen religiously, listening to podcasts for the past 10 years. Um, I just said I think this is something I'd like to do. So come maybe a year before COVID, let's say 2018, I love kind of just deadpan telling of history. I love taste file. It's one of the most popular true crime podcasts out there today. It's an Australian guy and I was like, okay, if I ever did a podcast, I'd do it in that style. And then I was thinking, well, what's the niche? You know, because nobody just wants to listen to me talk for the sake of talking. So where's my niche?

Oisin:

And then I heard about the assassination of louis mountbatten. So lord mountbatten was this famous british royal, british monarch. He was the uncle of king charles. Now I think I think it was his uncle. He was involved in the partition of india and because he wants to get back and go fishing, he did it kind of quickly and he, instead of like three months, he did it in a couple of weeks and he displaced 30, I think 50 million people by by drawing this, hacking up this border between india, pakistan. And then he comes home and then he's, you know, summering in ireland during the height of the troubles and the ira decides, hey, this is a guy we could take out. We could, and it'd be a huge PR win for us to take out a British monarch, because his role during Troubles wasn't huge, but the fact that he was a reigning monarch.

Oisin:

So anyway, I'm getting a bit long-winded into it, but I saw the story beats there. I saw there's a plot, there's a plot to kill Mountbatten. There's what happened. They planted a bomb in his boat and as it went out in the morning, they detonated the bomb. There's what it took to catch the attackers or to catch the perpetrators. It's got all the story beats there.

Oisin:

And then what made it most interesting for me was the ethical stuff. At the very end, which the IRA agreed, they said we're going to kill Mountbatten, we don't care who's on that boat. And when that bomb went off, I think six or seven people were killed, including two children. And the IRA said that this, these were word, this was a worthwhile endeavor because we got Mountbatten, whereas most, most people around the world probably wouldn't say that, or so I just kind of said to myself there's all the story beats. This is a fascinating period in history.

Oisin:

And then I was like, as an Irish person, how do I not know anything about the Troubles? You know, like Northern Ireland for me was where my dad drove up to get us fireworks because they were illegal down here when we were kids, and that was it. And then I said to myself oh my God, there's a wealth of these stories, these bombings, these assassinations, and if a guy an hour away in need can't understand what went on in Northern Ireland. How could anyone around the world understand? How could anyone in England, in America, understand these very, very dense moment in history, I guess?

Oisin:

So I said, ok, I'm going to make it, and I'm going to make it simple. I'm not going to make it like I don't want to make anything too what's the word too scholarly. I want to just kind of distill each episode about a person, each episode about a bombing and put it out to the world. Yeah, so I guess I want to do a podcast. And then I found the niche I found was the troubles. There wasn't anything else in podcast form about the troubles. It from the way I was planning on doing it.

Shawn:

And then you just finished like your fifth season, right?

Oisin:

yeah, yeah, five seasons and 15 episodes a season.

Shawn:

To the listener, and I think this is probably true of a large segment of at least American listeners. They don't really know, probably, what the Troubles are or were, and it's very complicated and it can become quite convoluted. So one I would direct people to your podcast, the Troubles podcast. But could you maybe broad strokes explain to podcast the Troubles Podcast. But could you maybe broad strokes explain to me what the Troubles were, who the main players were, what the conflict was about?

Oisin:

Basically like Ireland as an island. If you look at that, it was a bunch of, like, high kings ruling different parts of the island. They didn't have a notion of Irishness. One of the high kings of Ireland, dermot MacMurray. He said one day oh look, these Normans over here are pretty strong. The Normans were based from Normandy in France but they also had a kind of role in the crown and in the monarch in England. We have that. We have the Normans, we have the English and we have the native Irish bunch of high kings. So one of the high kings he decides if he marries his daughter off to one of these Normans, he will have the might of the Normans who can come over and take over other areas, expanding this king's influence in the area. So the king's name was Dermot MacMurray and he married his daughter Aoife to Strongbow. If you recognize that name, strongbow was a famous Norman leader and we're talking around the 1100s. Now at this stage, strongbow comes over with the Normans. He realizes this is actually pretty good. Ireland has space for us, we can take space here.

Oisin:

The English king at the time said this is problematic. If the Normans take Ireland, they can use Ireland as a springboard to invade us. So that's when the British English king at the time invaded Ireland. So the invasion of Ireland again happened in the late 1100s and that would be the first time that we would have had these kind of foreign entities over here, if we exclude the Celts and the Vikings. But that would be what we would argue is the start of Ireland's occupation, I guess. So we're going to fast forward up to the 1600s and the English are trying to exert influence in ireland. Now we have also the split from the church the catholic church is split away from the, protestantism is split away from catholic church and the english are trying to exert dominance in ireland. But it's not really working. The irish people want to hang on to their religion, they want to hang on to their language, all of this sort of stuff. So what the english do is they start plantations all over the island of ireland, and a plantation is very simple you send over, you promise people in england or scotland large amounts of land and you say you have to go over here, we'll give you all this land, and you can't hire irish people and you also have to bring like a minimum of 30 or 40 people with you to kind of try and stamp out this rebellious Irishness and grow your English influence in Ireland. So most of these plantations didn't really work out.

Oisin:

The native Irish in Ireland fought back or you know there was boycotts or there was all these sort of things. But the problem was in Northern Ireland, aka Ulster, ulster or Northern Ireland, where the most fertile soil was. So you know you had these people coming primarily from Scotland over to Northern Ireland and they were settling and this is the Cromwellian plantations, what it was called. And when the native Irish people said where do we go, they said you can go to Hel or you can go to Connacht. Connacht is on the west coast of ireland and it would be pretty shite land in the sense that you know it's beautiful for tourism nowadays but at the time there's nothing. You can't grow your crops on it and you know having fertile farming land is the most important thing during this period. So the people who settled in northern ireland, you know they were given huge amounts of land. They, over the next 200, 300 years they prospered and again they couldn't hire Irish people. Irish people, native Irish people couldn't own land in the same way that these settlers who were given their land did.

Oisin:

So if we fast forward now to the 1960s, so you have these we call them like Protestant, unionist people who had arrived over this country two or 300 years before this and the generational wealth had continued and generational influence. And then you have the native Catholic Irish who had the lands taken off them two or 300 years before this and that sort of two-tiered system had existed and actually grown deeper in a way in that two or three hundred years. So the population demographics, I think, were about 70 percent, 30 percent, 70 percent in favor of the Protestants at this stage. That's drastically changed now because Irish Catholics are having a rake of caves. But you have this I think it came with the advent of free education on secondary level as well. You have these young Catholic Irish in the 1960s who say hang on a second. Here we're living in a two-tiered society. You know they saw the kind of the civil rights movement in the US and they realized that. You know that's the problem over here. We have a two-tiered society where Northern Ireland is what it was known as a unionist country for unionist people. Again, remember, unionist is the Protestant people who came from England 300 years ago.

Oisin:

That like, let's, let me just explain. Like if you were a catholic in northern ireland, there was a bunch of ways in which you were not really allowed to ever really move up in the world. You know, like there was this thing known as gerrymandering. So if there were like catholic areas where catholics were the majority, that area would all be split up so that in government the catholic people would then be the minority. If that makes sense, does that make sense? Yep, we have. People would then be the minority. If that makes sense, does that make?

Shawn:

sense Yep. We have the same thing in the US.

Oisin:

Okay, perfect. And then there was also like it was only rate payers could vote. Rate payer essentially means homeowner anyway, and since you know, most unionists owned their homes whereas most Catholics were renting homes and the unionists were the ones voting, you know, catholics couldn't a job in the civil services, couldn't get jobs in the police. If a Catholic person went for social housing it would always kind of the priority would go towards the unionists. So it was this kind of. It was a direct knock on effect from 300 years before that. That just got deeper and more divided.

Oisin:

And then, with civil rights movement in the US and slightly better access to education in the 60s, that's when the Catholic or nationalist population started to advocate for their rights, to peacefully advocate for their rights, which wasn't really met very well by the other side. So the police force, the RUC, were attending these peaceful protests and in some cases they were standing back, while unionists or loyalists now it's a new word we're introducing individuals started attacking these protests and in some cases they were standing back, while unionists or loyalists now it's a new word we're introducing individuals started attacking these protests or in some cases they attacked the protests themselves. So suddenly we have the Catholic people saying we're trying to peacefully protest and they're just beating us up and they're shooting us and killing us. And things just got worse from there, so much so that the Northern Irish government was dissolved is that the word Basically basically direct rule from England was imposed. The British army were then sent over to Northern Ireland.

Oisin:

The British army initially were welcomed by Irish people, but like nationalist people, saying, oh, thank God, you're here, you're going to help us against this biased police force who are killing us. But then the British army started doing the same. They started well, let's look at Bloody Sunday, you know, where we saw 12 to 13 people shot in the back, unarmed Irish men, unarmed nationalist men, shot as they were running away by the British army. And then basically everything just kept going, getting worse and worse and worse and worse. And then we have the emergence of the paramilitary groups, so the emergence of the provisional IRA on one side, and then we have the UVF and the UDA on the other side. And then it was just a really, really awful 30-year period of tit-for-tat killings. A bomb would go off on the Shankill and kill six people, and the next day the UVF would make sure they wanted to get their pound of flesh as well. They make sure to kill six catholics on the other side, and it just got worse and worse and worse, with no end in sight.

Shawn:

I mentioned this in the preamble the tension between Catholics and Protestants, and sometimes I feel like these are just covers for other things. So we also have the rise of the religious right wing, and it's gotten to the point where, if somebody tells you that they are religious, the assumption is that they are conservative or Republican Republican. The reason I'm even bringing this up is that I don't always know that what we're really talking about is religious, as much as religion is just masking something else, and so the question I have for you is when we talk about this as being a Protestant versus Catholic thing, at what point did this stop being religious and just become a name that we gave to understand the two sides?

Oisin:

Well, I think when the world looks at the troubles, they also look at palestinians versus catholics, but, like you know, in in the way I just explained it, it's it's settler versus non-settler. I guess, when does somebody who begins to live on a land earn the right to have that land over the other person? That's all, that's all. This is that in its absolute, simplest form. So the people who came over from Scotland, primarily they settled over here and in reality, these religion. This was an era where religion was very important, especially at the 1960s. Everyone in Ireland was religious, everybody. So it was a huge point of divisiveness, I guess. But I would argue that it all goes back to. It doesn't matter about religion, it just matters. You're the people who settled here 300 years ago and we're not. You're loyal to the Queen of England, we're loyal to a free Ireland. You know, it's that simple.

Shawn:

I guess this is a third prong to this. So we talked about the gerrymandering which kind of dilutes power, and we talked about the religious factor, but the other and you've brought this up already is economic inequality, and these kind of all interplay with each other, right, and so in Ireland Catholics experienced economic inequality at the hands of Protestants, and how much do you think that that actually contributed to not just the tension but the outright violence? And the reason I ask is because we are experiencing an extreme period of economic inequality in the United States right now and I wonder if that's also just another recipe in the soup that is similar to what happened in the Troubles. That could be something we point to as a warning sign.

Oisin:

I think your recipe in the soup is very important. Recipe in the soup because these are all small contributing factors that lead to something else. So in Northern Ireland at the onset of the Troubles, everybody was broke. It's very hard to describe but, like you know, there was massive amounts of working class areas, these massive, big dimmest flats, these government built flats that were in awful condition. But even in the early days of the Trunkwoods there was a lot of this socialism-type stuff where unionists and nationalists initially were interested in working together to overthrow the society that's keeping them both down, basically. Now that all petered out fairly quickly.

Oisin:

Another paramilitary group similar to the IRA was the INLALA. They would have been a lot more socialist leaning and pretty, pretty violent in the acts that they carried out. Could you say that a lot of the the violence came out of working class areas in Northern Ireland? I'd say that's true. Had these places had you know, like Martin McGuinness would have been the biggest player for the provisional IRA and he always says that when he was a teenager he was turned away from a number of jobs and for one reason, and one reason only he was a catholic. He walked into a place can I have a job and they said no, you're a catholic, you can't work here, we don't want a catholic here.

Oisin:

If he had grown up in a society where everybody was just given jobs on their merits and not on their religion, you know, would this have happened the way it happened? Probably Probably not. And was the Troubles born out of this economic slump? I don't think so. I don't know. Maybe it's an ingredient in it, but I think this was an inevitability. This was going to happen. This had to come to a head because, you know, a two-tiered society can't exist for this long in unity. Once one realizes that, you know it's not fair for them.

Shawn:

So the violence reaches a point at which the British government decides at some point that they have to intervene. I think that we like to think maybe naively that when especially democratic governments get involved, that the safety and security of the populace is front of mind. And so therefore, despite how convoluted or how violent the situation might be on the ground, that government intervention could be a defining factor toward an end of peace. But the British government's intervention didn't achieve that quickly.

Oisin:

Well, hang on.

Oisin:

Sorry, before you ask this question, this was a really really really complicated period in the sense that, like the northern irish government, the unionist government obviously they they lost rule. But then, when things like bloody sunday happened or was it the battle of the bog side as well the irish government what is their role when you're in the republic of ireland and you have people across your border that would consider themselves Irish citizens? So the Irish government set up triage. There was a risk that the Irish government would send soldiers over the border into Northern Ireland to protect their own, but they didn't, and they've always drawn a lot of criticism for that, for not necessarily being in the corner of the Irish people who are trapped across this border. So the Irish government had a very difficult position at this point and they didn't really act and the Northern Irish government was dissolved and then the British government basically had to make the decision to send in the army and I feel like every single decision that the army made when they got to Northern Ireland fed and fueled the troubles.

Shawn:

So I guess that was my question, but I also wonder how much of this was a Maggie Thatcher leadership problem. Had there been somebody maybe more skilled and less rigid, do you think that this would have played out differently, because I feel like Thatcher made the situation worse.

Oisin:

I'm going to go back a little bit. So first off, Thatcher didn't come in until 1979 at Google that Right.

Oisin:

So let's say the troubles kicked off in 1969. You know, I'm not too sure how much prominence she would have had 10 years before that, but the point that I wanted to make is I was reading a book recently that said it's undeniable that the British government created republicanism in Northern Ireland. You know, two of the biggest instances were well, one Bloody Sunday, which I've talked about before, but also the second one was called internment, where the British army came over here and they said, okay, we need to smash the IRA. So internment happened over a period of I think it was just two days, where over a thousand people were scooped up and no Protest protestants, there are only people who were accused of being members of the ira and they were kept illegally, without question, without question, without any representation, some of them for up to two years.

Oisin:

And when these people came out, you know they got out of prison. Many of them. The first thing they did was join the ira because they they had been mistreated so poorly by this government that was apparently acting in their interests. So it just seems that time and time again, the British government made the wrong move when it came to trying to resolve the violence in Northern Ireland and instead they just flipped it up. I've totally forgotten your question, by the way.

Shawn:

I guess what I'm wondering is like how much of this was just so embedded in the on the ground real world situation that was happening, that was going to unfold, regardless of intervention from the British government?

Oisin:

You have to look at the characters. You know the people, the players. So the paramilitary groups were huge. You know the UDA and the UDF membership. Like the UDA had jeez was it? 20,000 people involved and the UDF kept it down to like 2K. But there was huge amounts of people who were choosing to react. Let's just say the word react.

Oisin:

And then the other point I kind of want to make. I'm not sure how relevant it is to this question, but is that like if you were in Northern Ireland and you're a unionist and you want to fight back against this violence, where can you go? You can join the police force, you can join the army at UDR and you can legally, you know, defend your, the values that you have. If you're a nationalist in Northern Ireland and you want to defend your values, the only option you have is to become a paramilitary.

Oisin:

Now you could go down the political route, but it was believed that the political parties had their hands tied around their backs. You know the Nationalist Political Party, so they didn't really have that chance of efficacy, I guess. I think the cogs were firmly in motion by the 70s and I'm not too sure how different things would have been with a different prime minister. You had Ian Paisley stoking the flames of violence in Ireland, in Northern Ireland, doing these huge fire and brimstone sermons. You know that got a lot of people involved and made a lot of people want to violently react.

Shawn:

Yeah, Since we've brought up the paramilitary groups as an outsider having limited knowledge about this. I think about the IRA, I think about UVF, and I'm not quite sure. They seem like they were incredibly organized and that became at least the IRA became an international organization to some degree, or at least with international support and supply, and so that had an immediate and intense impact on the conflict in Northern Ireland. That was irrespective of the government's intervention, so that was playing out regardless. But I don't know that people really understand what the IRA was or what the opposing paramilitary groups were in Northern Ireland. So maybe could you just explain what they were and who they were composed of.

Oisin:

On the nationalist side you would have had primarily two, three I guess. The IRA at the start of the Troubles split into the officials and the provisionals. The provisionals was just like hey guys, what do we call these? We'll just call them provisionals until we think of a better name. And then provisional became the main name. The officials didn't believe in the violence that people were demanding at the start of the troubles and that's why the IRA split and the provisionals were. They were determined to carry out wage war, violence against the British establishment, basically.

Oisin:

Then you also have the Irish Nationalist Liberation, inla, but they were the socialist leaning version of the IRA, basically. And then on the other side you have the Ulster Volunteer Force who I think were set up by Edward Carson at the turn of the century. They would have been a lot more strict and more rigid Again. They were down to about 2,000 members. But the other loyalist group would have been the Ulster Defense Association, the UDA, which would have had 20,000 members but would have been considered like the UBF, were considered like a battalion. They were the leaders in the UVF were all ex-soldiers. They were really strict. They offered. They would have actually been disgusted at the UDA and there would have been a lot of kind of I see myself as higher up than you, blah, blah, blah, because I'm in the UVF, not the UDA, and the provisional IRA in a sense would have been the same. You know, if you were a criminal, the provisional IRA wouldn't take you on. They were really determined to be perceived as we are purely violent for political means and no other means. That's what they wanted to do, but then their actions dictate other ways, you know. But they would be the four main players.

Oisin:

I'll say one more thing on the loyalist side. I always find this really funny. I find this similar to like maybe American religions and stuff. There was a bit of a cult of personality when it came to loyalist paramilitary figures. So the loyalist side had so many schisms is that the word where you know where people went off and they joined this one specific loyalist character and his smaller paramilitary group. So the best example of that was Billy Wright and the Loyalist Volunteer Force, the LVF. But the Loyalists split a lot more than the Republicans did.

Shawn:

So this next question I'm going to preface with the reason that I'm asking, which is we have some paramilitary groups of our own in the United States. The world probably knows them best from the January 6th insurrection, but so I'm talking about the three percenters, the proud boys, yeah, the oath keepers, etc. And I don't know that we could draw a direct line and character to something like the IRA. But where I do see some potential similarity is that these paramilitary groups often espouse and I'm talking about the US groups, often espouse some very deep ideological affinities and that this ostensibly drives their activity. And that is true of groups like the IRA in Ireland or in Northern Ireland.

Shawn:

But at the same time there was also just almost a dedication to violence and terrorism that seemed free of ideology in certain circumstances, the use of innocence to blow up vehicles. The IRA doing that often turned off some of their own supporters. Right, it just seemed like it wasn't in pursuit of a goal that was worthy, right? We have some of the same character and same behavior on our side and I guess I'm wondering how much of that do you think contributed to a weakening of the IRA? Or maybe a better way to ask the question is. Is there a possibility that and I'm just focusing on the IRA but is there a possibility that the IRA was deeply ideologically rooted, in a position that, over time, evolved to the point that it became nonsensical to the average citizen and just became violence, irrespective of ideology, in such a way that it ultimately undermined the movement?

Oisin:

Yeah, okay, that's a good way of phrasing it, because again, we had the IRA active in Ireland 100 years ago resisting British oppression, blah, blah, blah, and they're looked at as heroes. So people are like, well, why aren't the IRA of the 70s looked at as heroes? And I'd say the simple fact is because they blew up kids and because their car bombs were sloppy. In a lot of cases the bombs weren't where they called them in, the detonation wasn't correct and a lot of people lost their lives. I'm pretty sure the IRA enacted the highest civilian death toll of all of the groups during the Troubles. So initially the plan was the IRA is only allowed to kill British soldiers or policemen, I guess. But then this expanded and then it was prison officers and then it was. But by the late 80s it was. If you worked at a chef on a British Army base, then I'm thinking specifically of Patsy Gillespie who I'm pretty sure he was a chef on a British Army base, but that was it. You know, heained to the chair.

Oisin:

So yeah, when you hear those stories it's very hard for very hard to continue supporting that and that's why the likes of my parents generation will never support Sinn Féin, who are the political party that would be associated with the IRA, who are the political party that would be associated with the IRA and who have been making a lot of making a lot of progress politically in Ireland. Because my generation people in their 30s and 20s they kind of see them as, oh, the Sinn Féin they're going to, they're socialist leaning, they're going to build houses, they're going to tax the rich, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Shawn:

I'm glad you bring up Sinn Féin because in the times that I've visited Ireland, and particularly Dublin, I did notice that there are a lot of Sinn Féin posters. To an outsider like somebody like me, without having, I guess, a clear understanding of the history and how this has evolved since the Troubles and on through today, it seems to me like Sinn Féin wouldn't be accepted in polite company, but it does seem like they are be accepted in polite company, but it does seem like they are.

Oisin:

Well, whenever they're making any statement in the courts now or, you know, in the Leinster House, in our parliament, the opposition, which we are, two largest parties, senegal and Pinafog, who are in power at the moment they will always say, oh look, the bali clave has slipped.

Oisin:

Or X Y, z, you know, they'll always kind of say that, like, you are a product of your violent past and they're trying to say, no, we're not, we're something else, you know. But the problem is, I think, especially in Northern Ireland with the members of Sinn Féin, a lot of the ones who took part in the violent past moved into politics and I think that was something that was very difficult for maybe those on the other side to ever come around to. After peace was made in northern ireland we had a is a devolution where both power, both the unionists and nationalist people they elect one person to lead hand in hand, so we've power sharing. But like if you have the unionist population and they're looking at like martin mcginnis, who was the first minister, and you can see footage of martin mcginnis like a gun shooting a gun online and they're like you know, this person killed our peers. Now we have to break bread with him in the political sphere. I think that was a very difficult pill to swallow for the unionist people in Northern Ireland.

Shawn:

I'm glad you bring this up, because so the Good Friday Agreement is signed. We pat ourselves on the back and a lot of conflicts end this way right, like at some point. You know, regardless of the violence, regardless of the history, people show up, they sit down together, they shake hands, they sign an agreement.

Oisin:

Well, let's, before we jump into this, like, let's just, there had been many attempts at peace, There'd been like Sunningdale, there'd been the Anglo-Irish agreements, and these are also met with massive amounts of violence and, like you know, workers' strikes and everything. The agreements were never really. They were all stepping stones towards Good Friday. But I always put this question to people like by the early 90s, the IRA was absolutely armed to the teeth. They had, and most of these weapons and bombs came from Gaddafi, from the Libyans. We had something like six super dumps in the Republic of Ireland, and a super dump could be something that's like three or four shipping containers under the ground filled with guns and explosives.

Oisin:

In theory, when you're looking at a time when the IRA was armed to the teeth, why did people come to the table for peace? And I think one of the answers that a friend of mine, Gerard Jojuelan, always says is he was just like people were becoming grandparents now and looking at kids playing, you know, with these British army vehicles around Belfast. People were just tired of this and they wanted something else. They wanted hope. They didn't want to live in a police state.

Shawn:

So, anyway, I just wanted to get that in before you got to your next question, because I feel like it's relevant to where you're going. It is relevant, and this is why we're not talking about ancient history. There are people, a large number of people, still alive that lived through this period of time, either very actively participants or, you know, just members of society that experienced this, and many people were on one side or the other. And the Good Friday Agreement, while it seems to have succeeded in ending the violence, I imagine that there must still be challenges. There must still be tension. You've alluded to some of this. So what type of tension does exist? What does that look like?

Oisin:

Above all else, the Good Friday Agreement stops the denials. I guess because of the way it was done, it was kind of done very quickly over a couple of weeks or whatever, but it ended up basically allowing both sides to be further entrenched into their own belief systems. So there wasn't necessarily more integration of schools, these interface areas which would see catholic maybe nowadays let's just say nationalists and unionists, because people aren't that religious anymore. So you'd see nationalist communities right up against unionist communities and you'd have these things called peace walls in between them. So a peace wall is just a giant, really high barricade to prevent throwing petrol, bombs or rocks over the walls. There are what was it? 270 peace walls now, which is four times more than there ever were. So again, we have peace but we don't have unity is how I've heard it described.

Oisin:

I think that's very, very smart and as well as that, it was really strange because the two dominant political parties in Northern Ireland during the Troubles were the moderate nationalist and the moderate unionist. So the moderate nationalist was SDLP and the moderate unionist was the UUP. But since the Good Friday Agreement those two parties have been absolutely decimated and people have now retreated over to the edges. So we have the very, very nationalist Sinn Féin on the left and then we have the very, very unionist DUP, which were that was the party that Dean Paisley was a part of. So the political scene has changed.

Oisin:

Now we have the growing alliance party in the middle, which I love the concept of Alliance are saying, look, I don't care, which, you know, alliance is just trying to be firmly in the middle and try to pull people away from the edges and just say, look, we just need a functioning government. You know, it doesn't matter what side you're on, let's just get this together and make this government work. They're the ones I want to see grow the most over the next few years. Yeah, the good friday agreement stops the violence, but it's a deeply flawed agreement. Yeah, again, it just allowed people to dig further into their, their, their, it. There wasn't enough cross-community mixing done.

Shawn:

I don't know how to describe it so in a way it almost seems like theater and this is just a broad brush has moved from the streets to government, so it's being politically managed. Do you think that the temperature has come down enough that there is room for some political mismanagement and the peace still holds? Or do you think that this is managed right now in the political arena but could spill back into the street at some point?

Oisin:

The peace still holds. But the two sides find it very, very difficult to work together and the problem with devolution or the problem with this power sharing situation, is that when one of the sides disagree they can collapse the entire government. So the Northern Irish government has been functioning now for the past maybe 26 years and of that 26 year period it's been collapsed and not working for a total of nine years. So that doesn't make any sense Like that. That's ridiculous and that only that only hurts the people they're trying to work in the interest of more than anything. No, I think we're in a very they've never really worked well together and I guess if you're looking, you've got Sinn Féin leading alongside the DUP. Sinn Féin are always saying we want to unite in Ireland, sinn Féin operate in Northern Ireland and they operate in the Republic of Ireland. So the DUP is never going to trust anything they say that doesn't you know. And they're not going to say we want to function in government. The DUP don't trust them. They trust that Sinn Féin will always act in the interest of accomplishing a united Ireland. So the DUP is like well, we can't trust these guys and now we should work hand in hand with them, and then the DUP also have their own issues, I guess.

Oisin:

But then you have to look at Brexit, you have to look at the United Kingdom, essentially telling the unionists in Northern Ireland we're not thinking of you, we don't care about you. So the unionists feel like they're cut off from you know the crown that they fought for all their lives, or you know this sort of monarchy. It's a hard thing to explain, but I just find unionism is in a very precarious position right now where they're kind of stranded, in a way cut off from the mainland of Great Britain. So if we lived in a place where violence could ever happen again, I always I feel like. I feel like it could come from the unionist population and our loyalist population specifically, but I also don't think that's possible in a modern society.

Shawn:

Basically, so obviously we're in a different time. The situation in the United States is very different. We have different players and you're not deeply involved in the United States politics but as somebody that has the knowledge of what's happened in Ireland, specific to the Troubles, you've talked to a lot of people, you've researched this when you look at the United States through the lens that you do, and considering the Troubles, do you see any warning signs?

Oisin:

Yeah, you're not the first person to say this and I do find it kind of. I actually find it difficult to draw comparisons, but I know they do exist. I guess this binary opposition or this polarization, you know it can drown out the moderates. So, though 80% of the population may be these moderates, you're only going to hear from the 10% of either side who are screaming the loudest. It's frustrating, but I think it's not a realistic. You're not seeing the truth.

Oisin:

You know a loss of trust in political institutions. You know, and that's why we needed to establish power sharing. But it's also why, over the past 20 years, there's been a lot of building of trust. We had to, totally. We got rid of our old police service and established a brand new police service because we needed to build trust again, trust that had been lost needed to be rebuilt and I think at the moment now there's a lot of.

Oisin:

How do you describe what's going on in america? It's, it's crazy, but like, in the sense that there is a lot like, I just find it very fascinating that like we live in a society now where we have the most amount of news at our fingertips we could ever have and we've ever had in history. And yet it's even more difficult and convoluted to read the truth, because everyone is shouting at everyone that they're lying or they're in the pocket of somebody else. So, even though we have the most access to information that we've ever had in our entire lifetimes, we still live in a place where it's impossible to know who's telling the truth and who's not, and I feel like that obfuscation has really, really taken america by storm and I don't know who did it.

Oisin:

I don't know. Could you say trump was doing it or whoever was doing it. But I think maybe it was a deliberate cast, doubt in what the media reports, what it would have been a deliberate ploy at some stage.

Shawn:

yeah, yeah, I also feel like we in the united states we always talk about saving our democracy in the United States. Both sides are saying this, but I do wonder if you talked a little bit about needing to rebuild and restructure restructure a lot, and I feel like we might already be past that Rubicon of saving democracy and actually in a position where we need to start thinking about what rebuilding looks like.

Oisin:

you know need to start thinking about what rebuilding looks like. You know, but what would violence look like Like? How would you see violence breaking out in the US now had Trump not won the election? Maybe had Kamala won?

Shawn:

I almost feel like it's inevitable at this point. Regardless, there's so many scenarios and none of them seem good to me. Trump can't run again, ostensibly, but if he does, that could stoke violence, right. Or if he suspends elections, that could stoke violence. If the MAGA movement doesn't die with Trump and it moves on to somebody else, well, that just suggests that we're in for potential political violence around any election, moving forward, right.

Oisin:

Yeah, yeah.

Shawn:

There was a civil war in particularly Northern Ireland. There was a civil war and it wasn't a cold civil war, but it wasn't really a hot civil war either. It was just these pockets of violence, and I kind of feel like that's what it would look like, that's how it would play out in the United States.

Oisin:

Like. So it would be kind of not guerrilla warfare type things, but these would be just like explosions or killings or yeah, Happening on a small scale.

Shawn:

Yeah, we have so many guns. I see it on a daily basis as people that are clearly paramilitary adjacent at minimum walking around with guns.

Oisin:

Okay, but now again, this is an Irish guy, so my understanding of you so say, when we talk about like proud boys, we talk about all this sort of stuff, all of the paramilitaries would be Republican leaning, all the potential paramilitaries. So where do you see the potential violence? Coming from the left, or from the liberals, or how do you describe it?

Shawn:

It's interesting that you mentioned this, because earlier in our conversation this crossed my mind as well. I don't know if it was balanced, but there were two sides that were armed to the teeth during the troubles, and that doesn't exist right now in the united states. In fact, you have one side that is very anti-paramilitary, and in order to have a balance not that I'm advocating for it, but you have to have somebody that meets the paramilitary that is on one side and they have to be playing the same game, and they're not. Not that I'm advocating violence in way, but it does feel very lopsided, right, and that's scary?

Oisin:

Well yeah, but I guess what is the power of the gun when the gun comes, when the political things fail you? Know, and I guess those with the guns would be quite content right now and quite happy with the state of affairs, isn't that?

Shawn:

that's a weird dynamic. In an odd way, the fact that Trump is in office right now might actually be clipping the wings of some of these right-wing paramilitary groups because they feel safe right well, yeah, I like I had a friend visit last year from colorado, but like she, she came to visit last year because her parents wanted to kind of size up.

Oisin:

Could we live over here? If you know, if trump doesn't get into power, we believe violent there'll be a violent outbreak in the us and they were stockpiling guns because they believed that trump not winning would lead to war I mean, we are at a place now where every election is an existential battle and I just feel like that can't hold and I don't know how we, how we climb down from that I don't know, is the us just too big to have one leader, you know?

Shawn:

or, or to be one country. Yeah, honestly, if I was just all cards on the table, I don't think we come out of this as one unified country so you, you don't think there's any eventuality now like, say, next election, democrats get back in and things are back to normal.

Shawn:

You think it's too far gone I think democrats could win, assuming there is an election, and let's assume there will be. I think Democrats could win, but I just don't think that everyone calms down. I think that the parties are at each other's throats and that's just going to play out for a long time. Yeah, biden won in 2020. And everyone thought everything would go back to normal.

Oisin:

And Trump walks back in.

Shawn:

Yeah, and what if Biden was the anomaly you know, and the new normal is actually this type of politics.

Oisin:

Well, again, that's the thing. Like, irish people are simple enough people, or whatever, in our views, so they loved Obama. They knew nothing about Obama's policies, but he was just an affable guy. That simple. But I think Obama coming in was probably could it have been the start. That was the end of Bush, wasn't it? It was Bush then into Obama.

Shawn:

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oisin:

I think I feel like for many, many Republicans, Obama was like the last straw or like the catalyst, for we're not going back.

Shawn:

Yeah, that's a lot of the narrative and a lot of it is race-based, an argument that a black man suggested that white dominance was over, and that's probably part of the story and I don't want to be the Democrat that beats up on Democrats. But I also think in hindsight that Obama didn't do a very good job of really representing Democratic ideals and values. Oh, interesting. Ok, I think he focused very strongly on Obamacare. I think he wasted a lot of political capital on that and then he just didn't fight on stuff and I think he allowed that extreme Republican movement to really gain a lot of political capital on that and then he just didn't fight on stuff and I think he allowed that extreme Republican movement to really gain a lot of steam without providing any alternative.

Oisin:

Yeah, yeah.

Shawn:

Final question you ready for it? Okay, what's something interesting you've been reading, watching, listening to or doing lately? And it doesn't have to be related to this topic, but it can be.

Oisin:

I just came back from a trip to the Auschwitz concentration camp, so I've been reading up on a lot of World War II content, specifically the Battle of Stalingrad, which I'd never heard about. It was like the worst battle in the history of all of humanity, so that's pretty wild. I've also just watched the Oscar winning documentary called no Other Land, which is all about the demolition of settlements in Palestine. So that was really really well made. I thought I really enjoyed it. Yeah, that's it. I've been, oh, I've been going to. I went to a live podcast last Thursday. That was good fun. I got very drunk. There are these Irish guys called Shite Talk and it was all about Eamon de Valera and it was just really funny. Really really good night. So, a, thanks for the conversation and taking the time. Thanks for having me, s. Sorry if the head cold muddled my brain a bit, but hopefully I made sense.

Shawn:

The painful legacy of Northern Ireland offers powerful lessons about the cost of division and the undermining of democracy. Understanding these dynamics isn't just historical curiosity. It's essential to recognizing similar patterns that are emerging here in the United States today, as we stare down our own era of democratic backsliding. We need to remember and we can take lessons from other conflicts in places like Northern Ireland during the Troubles, that societies can fracture quickly, but rebuilding takes generations. So we need to stay engaged because holding it together will be much less painful and violent than trying to build it all back. Alright, check back next week for another episode of Deep Dive Chat soon, folks. Thank you, thank you.

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Shawn C. Fettig

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