Hey everyone. Back in February, Autumn and I spent time in Belfast, Northern Ireland.

We were invited there to facilitate speculative fiction workshops with a number of groups

of people who had survived the conflict there.

One of the people we spent the most time with in Belfast was Lawrence McEwen.

Lawrence is an incredible artist and playwright who has spent much of his artistic life telling stories about the people behind

what's often called the troubles or what we called the conflict. In case you didn't know, the conflict in Northern Ireland

dates back centuries. The most recent iteration began in the late 1960s as the

Unionist or loyalist wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the United Kingdom.

The loyalists were mostly Protestant and on the other side were the Irish Nationalist Republicans who are mostly Catholic

like Lawrence. The Irish Nationalist wanted Northern Ireland to leave the UK and

join a United Ireland.

So it's this political and sectarian conflict

that got dubbed the Troubles,

and it lasted from the late 1960s to the late 1990s.

It's this conflict which led Lawrence to join the Irish Republican Army,

also known as the IRA, you know the acronym so he joined in 1973 yeah so three years

after that in an act of IRA militancy Lawrence would fire his rifle at a police car of the

Ira militancy, Lawrence would fire his rifle at a police car. One officer was slightly injured in the attack and Lawrence was sentenced to life in prison.

While inside the prison, he participated in a hunger strike that was aimed at

restoring political prisoner status for those in prison like him who were there for offenses related to the conflict and he also participated in

several other protests which we're about to hear about and he was released

in 1992 after a campaign which successfully argued how the IRA political prisoners were being incarcerated indefinitely,

...