Fire on the streets of Northern Ireland
The Story
The Times
3.9 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 15 April 2021
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Tensions have erupted in Northern Ireland once again, as leaders attempt to preserve a long-standing peace deal in the region. Twenty-three years after the Good Friday Agreement, why does peace in Northern Ireland seem so precarious and what happens next?
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Guest: Henry McDonald, Author, journalist and contributor to The Sunday Times.
Host: David Aaronovitch.
Clips used: Ruptly.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Picture this, static cars, idling engines, angry horns, now picture you, zooming past |
| 0:12.4 | it all, light and breezy, ah, the sweet feeling of whizzing past traffic. |
| 0:21.0 | Make your train journey via vantewescoast.co.uk, a vantewescoast, feel good travel. |
| 0:38.0 | The key moment was on wednesday night, the rioting in the middle shankle loot area that's a |
| 0:45.0 | loyalist hardland if ever there was one. For the author and journalist Henry McDonald, it |
| 0:50.4 | was the night when the so-called peace war in Belfast was stormed that he knew things |
| 0:55.5 | were serious. It's actually a gate that cuts off a road called Lanarkway which leads |
| 1:01.1 | on to the republican west Belfast. When that gate was breached by rioters, they used |
| 1:10.9 | stolen burnt vehicles to ram the gate open. They got to within yards of young republicans |
| 1:19.3 | who were riding on the other side of their throwing missiles over the peace barrier into |
| 1:24.0 | the Protestant and vice versa. That was the moment when it got dangerous. That was |
| 1:29.5 | the moment when this whole thing could have turned very, very ugly in nasty. |
| 1:35.2 | Why has the peace in northern Ireland suddenly come to seem so precarious? What happens next? |
| 1:44.7 | You're listening to stories of our times and the times and the sunday times. I'm David |
| 1:48.6 | Aronovich. Today, fire on the streets of northern Ireland. |
| 1:58.4 | Well I'm Henry McDonald. I'm Belfast born. I'm a journalist who's been working in this |
| 2:02.5 | business for about 35 years. I covered the northern Ireland troubles extensively. I've |
| 2:08.5 | written seven books in relation to the troubles. Henry, why are you living at the moment? |
| 2:13.8 | I'm living back in Belfast after being an exile in Brighton for a couple of years so |
| 2:18.0 | back to the old ungrind. What was it like to go back? I was expecting to go back anyway. |
| 2:22.8 | It was extremely quiet because of lockdown and things were, you know, it was all about |
| 2:28.8 | the pandemic. Politics, that was it. And then we had this sudden eruption of street |
... |
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