I'm Joe Devine and welcome to the TIFO Football Podcast. Today I'm joined by Ben Roberts, writer of gunshots and goal posts, the story of Northern Irish football, and of our YouTube mini-series of the same name. I spoke to Ben about football in Northern Ireland during The Troubles. And for our listeners who maybe aren't from the UK or who

aren't aware of what we refer to as the Troubles, I'm going to quickly read a synopsis as well

from an article on the BBC's History Archive, just to make sure I'm getting it right. The Troubles

refers to a violent 30-year conflict framed by a civil rights march in London Derry on the 5th of October

1968, and the Good Friday Agreement on the 10th of April 1998. At the heart of the conflict

lay the constitutional status of Northern Ireland. The goal of the unionist and overwhelmingly

Protestant majority was to remain part of the United Kingdom. The goal of

the nationalist and Republicans, almost exclusively Catholic and also a minority, was to become

part of the Republic of Ireland. This was a territorial conflict, not a religious one, at its heart

lay two mutually exclusive visions of national identity and national belonging.

The principal difference between 68 and 98 is that the people and organisations pursuing these

rival futures eventually resolved to do so through peaceful and democratic means.

This ascendancy of politics over violence, though, was not easily achieved.

During the troubles,

the scale of the killings perpetrated by all sides, Republican and loyalist paramilitaries

and the security forces eventually exceeded 3,600, and as many as 50,000 people were

physically maimed or injured, with countless others psychologically damaged by the conflict,

a legacy that

continues to shape the post-1998 period.

So that's a short synopsis of what we refer to as the troubles in this episode.

Firstly, I did ask Ben to expand on that, slightly on the background of that period.

A little bit later on, we get into talking more specifically about football

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