The series covering the Troubles on the podcast The Rest Is History is really quite good. The hosts, Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland, have a knack for digging into the best recent books on the history. Their reliance on Peter Taylor’s excellent series of books in which he interviews members of different groups — Provos: The IRA and Sinn Fein, Loyalists, and Brits: The War Against the IRA — grounds the series in the actual impression of the parties. I appreciate that the hosts aren’t wedded to some of the older narratives or early schools of revision and seem to have looked at the material with fresh eyes. I think Sandbrook is quite right that the Troubles were not stumbled into by accident — except perhaps by the representatives of the state in Stormont and Westminster. The Troubles were willed, many times by exceptionally cynical operatives, who hoped to get something, whether political advantage or even a simple thrill, out of the violence.
Before its creation, intelligent people responsible for governing in Ireland predicted that a Northern Irish state would be tiny and short-lived, perhaps five or ten years. I wrote about its persistence and how it has survived by the credible threat of violence.
One of the underrated factors is the presence of recent Irish immigrants in America in the 1970s and 1980s. While many from Ireland were leaving for economic opportunities during a very down period, captured ably by the Pogues’ “Thousands Are Sailing,” a healthy portion came to escape the violence in the North. And their presence and perspective supercharged the efforts of groups like NORAID, which had a virtual monopoly on explaining the conflict to Irish-Americans. Such groups succeeded at getting many Irish-Americans whose ancestors had moved here long ago to be more nationalist, and more militant, often in a reckless way, than the average person living in the Republic of Ireland.