Dan Snow's History Hit - The Troubles: How It Started

Episode Date: February 2, 2022

With Kenneth Branagh film, Belfast, hitting cinemas - we run down the historical background of the early years of the decades-long conflict in Northern Ireland.Dan is joined by Tim McInerney, co-host of The Irish Passport podcast, for this deep dive into the pivotal events of 1969 to the early 1970s.This episode will establish the century-long roots of sectarian tensions, paint a picture of the political atmosphere in Northern Ireland as the decade came to a close, and track the series of escalating conflicts that climaxed in the deployment of British Troops.If you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Belfast is the new film from Kenneth Branagh. It stars people like Judi Dench. It's his most personal film ever and it centres on a young boy's childhood in the tumult of Belfast in the 1960s as the so-called troubles are getting underway. You know what we like to do on this podcast? We like to get to some of the history behind what's going on at the moment, what people are talking about.

People are talking about Belfast, they're talking about the troubles, talking, they're talking about Gwynedd Brennan. And we thought we'd try and take on the big subject itself. What caused the Troubles? Why did they start? What form did the early Troubles take? We're going to Tim McInerney. He is a lecturer in British and Irish cultural history. He's the co-host of the Irish Passport podcast, a brilliant podcast. Go and subscribe, everybody. And he's going to tell us all about how Northern Ireland came to be such a seething cauldron of protest, how people have been disenfranchised, marginalised, were suffering in an unjust system. Well, we're going to do it all right here on this podcast. Buckle up, everyone. It's the big one. If you want to listen to other podcasts about Irish history or watch TV shows about British, Irish, and world history,

get a history hit TV. It is the best history channel in the world. It's a safe space for true history fans. Tens of thousands of people are on there, all subscribing. It's great fun. I'm in Antarctica making a TV show for it at the moment. So it's all happening really. You just follow the link in the description of this podcast. You click on that little link, you get taken away,

you get taken there. And for less than the price of a drink, a posh cappuccino, a mocktail, you can get a month of history at TV. You'll never look back. Head over there now and do it. But in the meantime, before you do, here's Tim McInerney talking about the troubles. there now and do it. But in the meantime, before you do, here's Tim McInerney talking about The Troubles. Tim, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. It's my pleasure, Dan. Nice to be here. You know, I'm a bit nervous about this because we're going to set out, we're going to go through, we're going to explain The Troubles. So are we ready? How can we do this? Yeah, I don't know if anyone's ready, honestly, because like so much history, you know, there are different perspectives on this

and really, really markedly different perspectives on this. So everything I say, I would maybe like to make a caveat. A lot of people would see these events maybe in a very different perspective from me, but that's all we can work with and try and be as objective as we can. Talk to me about the late 1960s in Northern Ireland. It's a majority Protestant part of the United Kingdom.

There are Irish, predominantly Catholic, who identify as Irish. Do the Protestants in Northern Ireland identify in this period as they call themselves Irish? It depends, and it still depends today, and it depended then. The thing is that there is actually no adjective like UK-ish, right? Yes, it's a fascinating, weird thing, isn't it? Yeah. So it's a bit of an awkward one because technically speaking, British only refers to the island of Britain. And I'm not sure how it would have worked before Irish independence,

but you don't really see Irish people talk about themselves as British before that point. And a lot of people in Northern Ireland would very comfortably call themselves Irish in the context of the part of Ireland that belongs to the UK. So we've got these two communities living alongside each other. What are the inequalities, injustices, access to work, housing, etc? Can you just paint me a bit of a picture of how Northern Irish society works at this time? Sure, right. So I think there's maybe three things that we need to keep in mind when we're approaching this history. So first of all, there is a very widespread misconception, for understandable reasons, that the conflict in Northern Ireland was about religion. And this is something you still see in international media, in particular, kind of lazy

takes on this. And you can see where that came in particular, kind of lazy takes on this. And you can see where that came from because, of course, we have these terms Protestant and Catholic that are used all the time, right? These terms Protestant and Catholic are actually shorthand essentially for the post-colonial dynamics of Ireland after independence. After the Irish Revolution in the 1920s, we see Ireland being partitioned between a majority Catholic South and a majority Protestant North. Now, the reason that the North part of Ireland remained in the United Kingdom after independence was because it was the site of these huge big colonial plantations back in the 17th century.

And most Protestants who lived there were still descendants of those colonial settlers. And if we kind of think about the context of that original colonization, Ireland was colonized at the same time as North America, and in the same way, with the same strategies, even with the same street plans. And the idea of the settlers versus natives was more or less the same as well. The original kind of vision of this, the native Irish people were seen like Native Americans, They were a nuisance to be gotten rid of. And the colonial settlers were seen as a civilising force, a superior ethnicity. And this idea absolutely hangs around in the 1960s in Northern Ireland. So for instance, if you think about a prime minister of Northern Ireland for a good 20 years, his name was Basil Brooke. He was a landed aristocrat. He once asked his constituents not to

employ Irish Catholics and to employ quote-unquote good Protestant lads and lassies instead. So this kind of moral idea that Protestants are just actually better people than Catholics. Or I mean more violently in 1969 we hear Ian Paisley, who was of course the founder of the DUP, he once said that Irish Catholics breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin. So there is this very kind of ethnicised sense of the Irish Catholics as an underclass, which is rooted in this colonial history. The second thing I think is important to think about, or rather the third thing, because I actually covered two there, is that there's a big class issue here. Historically,

throughout the colonisation of Ireland, Protestants were generally more privileged, quite dramatically more privileged than Catholics. And in Northern Ireland itself, that kind of old world order or that idea that Catholics were a social underclass absolutely continued. What we see after partition is that essentially being enshrined in policy and in law. And so there are issues around housing, for example. What's the political atmosphere in the late 1960s in Northern Ireland that leads to the outbreak of this round of trouble? Right.

So after partition, the two parts of the island go in extremely different directions. In the south, what we see over the decades after partition is quite an anti-imperialist point of view from the government, and the country being taken over essentially by a rising class of middle-class Catholics. In the north, what we see developing is what has been called the Orange State. Now, this was born partly out of paranoia. Northern Ireland was surrounded on all sides by this revolutionary state of the Irish Republic. Westminster didn't particularly put that much interest into it, so they felt a little bit under siege from all angles. One of the consequences of partition was that the border was drawn specifically to ensure that Northern Ireland had a huge unionist Protestant majority. That was the absolute raison d'etre of the border.

But in order to make that happen, the border had to take in huge swathes of areas that were predominantly Irish Catholic. So not only was Northern Ireland as a territory under siege from the outside, it was under siege from the inside. There was a huge minority, about 30 to 40 percent of people who lived within the border of Northern Ireland who did not want Northern Ireland to exist. So what this Orange State was out to do was essentially to make sure that these Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland never got into political power or into economic power. And they did this in a number of ways. So the ruling party in the Northern Irish Parliament at Stormont was the

Ulster Unionist Party. For a full 50 years after partition, it was just a one-party state. And the Ulster Unionist Party effectively denied membership to Catholics. Catholic and Protestant, in this context, by the way, are very handy because these are public identities. You know who's Catholic and you know who's Protestant, and you can use those identities to figure out people's political allegiance. So this is why those markers again become so predominant. The police force was almost entirely Protestant and therefore probably entirely Unionist, and there was also quasi-military reserves like the B Specials who were notorious for targeting Catholics. There were special laws enacted like the Special Powers Act of 1922 and that basically meant in Northern Ireland that the police, who remember were almost entirely

Protestant Unionist, could arrest anyone for basically anything under the pretext of them acting in a prejudicial way to the peace. And in practice that essentially meant that they could arrest Catholics whenever they wanted and did. There were policies like flag policies. So flying the Irish tricolour could be a criminal offence if the police decided that it was provocative. However, the British flag was completely protected and could never be considered provocative if it was flown. So little things like that were just kind of daily ways to keep the Catholics in their place. But more systematically what you mentioned there were three issues which was housing and employment and voting. So after the Second World War when we see the rise of the welfare state in the UK and the building of

a lot of council houses and things like that, what was happening was that Catholics were not being given these new council houses and Protestants were. Instead of these new council houses, and Protestants were. Instead of being given council houses, Catholics were put on these waiting lists, which was a way, basically, to ensure that they never got one. So, for instance, in 1965, in the city of Derry, which was a majority Catholic city, there was about 2,000 Catholic families on a waiting list, and no Protestant families. All the houses had been given to Protestants. Now this had a knock-on effect because houses actually decided how you vote. In local government elections, you could only vote if you lived in a house of a certain value. So all of these Catholics who didn't have homes or who

lived in substandard homes effectively couldn't vote. So this was a way of taking away their vote as well. Now Protestants not only were more likely to be able to vote because they were more likely to have a house, but you were more likely to vote if you had a good job. If you owned a limited business, for instance, you could nominate extra votes, up to six votes. So that effectively meant that wealthy Protestants had multiple, multiple votes, while very poor Protestants and most Catholics probably had no votes at all. Employment then at the same time was very instrumental. All these public service jobs after the war

were being given out, you know, like welfare officers or librarians or bus drivers or whatever. Practically all of these jobs were given to Protestants and not to Catholics. So Catholics felt that the ultimate aim of this was to push them so far to the margins of society, to make them homeless, to make them jobless, to give them no future in Northern Ireland, so that they would emigrate. They felt like they were being forced to emigrate either to the Republic or to America or wherever. Speaking of America, is this where this international dimension is important, this civil rights struggle in America? These young Northern Irish activists, were they influenced by what they were seeing across the Atlantic? They absolutely were. Yeah, they

absolutely were. And there was, because of this kind of segregation, this institutional segregation, the fact that it was to do with voting, the fact that it was to do with housing, there were all sorts of analogies that could be made with the segregation that was going on in America at the same time in the USA. So Northern Irish Catholics were extremely influenced by the civil rights movement in the United States. Now, something else that kind of helped this was because Northern Irish Catholics were not effectively being governed within Northern Ireland. They kind of had to govern themselves. So in cities like Derry and in Belfast, and throughout Northern Ireland actually, Catholics had been funneled into certain districts. This was a way to prevent them voting again. So in a city

like Derry, for instance, practically all the Catholics were crammed into one electoral district, which meant that even though they were the majority, they could never vote in a majority of seats in local governments, for instance, because the other districts were less dense, but had more votes. So what you effectively end up with are these huge, big, teeming Catholic districts forming organisations to look after themselves, to fix the potholes in the roads, or to find houses for the homeless grandmother down the street. They had to do all this themselves. So they were already organising. And in the 1960s, these groups started marching, inspired by the civil rights marches in America.

And this is where things start to kick off with the conflict. Is there one particular march? Is there a particular moment? There's a few. One significant one was on the 5th of October in 1968. This is where NICRA, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association and the Derry Housing Action Committee, two of these organisations, they marched together from the Catholic district in the city of Derry called the Bogside. They marched from there to the city centre of Derry. And this was Protestant territory, essentially. Catholics were

not supposed to be this publicly visible, really, on the streets of Northern Ireland, in people's minds. So the police reacted, they really went over the top reacting to this, and they violently beat those marchers back into the Catholic districts. Now, that was actually quite a small march, but the thing was, it it was televised and this changed everything. That got onto TV screens. It was actually, the film was smuggled across the border to the Republic and from the Republic it was sent out all over the world and people all over the world saw these RUC police officers beating down these civil rights marchers and everyone was thinking, you know, what the hell is happening in Northern Ireland? It also was televised in Northern Ireland. So suddenly all of these Catholics start coming out in support of the

civil rights marchers in Derry. And this leads to another really significant moment, which is the Long March the next year. This is formed by another new group called the People's Democracy that was formed by students in Queen's University in Belfast. And they wanted to show their support for the civil rights marchers. So they did a Long march, which was inspired, of course, by the long march from Selma to Montgomery in the United States. And they marched from Belfast to Derry, which is really long. It's about four days, you know, it took them to march there. Just before they got to the city of Derry, they were attacked by a Protestant mob to try and stop them doing this. But that's not really the problem. The problem was that Protestant mob was actually made up of quite a lot of off

duty police officers. And the police who were there accompanying the march essentially let this mob beat up the marchers. And before the march had even got to the city of Derry, word had spread about this. And riots just broke out immediately across Derry. You know, this was the straw that broke the camel's back. We can't trust the police. We can't trust anyone to protect us. Nothing is going to change with peaceful marching. Anger just overboils completely.

To the point that eventually we see a huge big battle between the police and the people of Derry, known as the Battle of the Bogside, which goes on for about two days, where the police surround the Bogside district and where the residents, the Catholic residents of the city, are defending the Catholic district with barricades and with Molotov cocktails and with stones, you know, against this armed police force. And the thing was, they were kind of successful. There was a kind of irony in this Battle of the Bogside because so many Catholics had been crammed

into this one district of the city that they all lived in these high-rise buildings. And it was very hard for the police to storm these buildings from below. They had created, essentially, a fortress by mistake. And the fact that all the Catholics were in one area made them quite a formidable force to deal with for the police. This is Dan Snow's History Hit. We're talking about the Troubles. More coming up.

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Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder. Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. What is the upshot of the Battle of the Bogside?

Yeah, that has absolutely huge ramifications as well, similar to the very first march that we were talking about there. Because, again, it was televised. What we see is an explosion of support and anger from Catholic communities all around Northern Ireland who are saying, we're not putting up with this anymore. So riots start to break out in Belfast now. And this was really scary for the establishment in Northern Ireland for multiple reasons.

Belfast was a predominantly Protestant city and it had a different geography, urban geography to Derry. So instead of just one big Catholic area, what we see in Belfast is a predominantly Protestant city with like Catholic enclaves, like little islands dotted around the city. So the capacity for real violence to break out in Belfast was very real. And it does. So Catholics start to riot in Belfast. And in response, Protestant mobs start to form to put them down. All of this is just way too momentous for the police to even begin to address. So Protestants start to burn out Catholic homes, entire streets and neighbourhoods,

they start to burn them. And what we see are thousands of Catholic refugees fleeing the United Kingdom, basically across the border to safety in the Republic. Now, this is a real crook's point, because what happens is the Irish government in Dublin in the south, send the Irish army to the border, as this is happening. Now, essentially, the Irish government in Dublin in the south send the Irish army to the border as this is happening. Now, essentially, the Irish army had no intention of doing any more than that. They were setting up field hospitals to welcome the refugees, to house them and stuff,

fleeing Northern Ireland. But for people embattled in the Bogside or in Belfast, for Catholics there, they were thinking, finally, you know, finally the Irish army is coming to save us from the police, from the British state. And they expected the Irish army to cross the border and to liberate the Catholics or somehow to put an end to these, you know, pogroms that were breaking out. When that didn't happen, the Irish Catholics felt this huge sense of betrayal. The Irish had not come to save them from across the border. So they were

going to have to take this in their own hands. They had no friends. The police were against them. Their neighbours were against them. Britain was against them. Ireland wasn't helping them. They were all alone. So that's one factor of that. On the other side, when Protestants saw the Irish army coming to the border of Northern Ireland, they thought the exact same thing. You know, the Republic of Ireland was going to invade Northern Ireland, and that only spurred on more violence against Irish Catholics, because in the minds of Protestants in Northern Ireland, they were in cahoots with the Republic. So if there was an invasion, you know, they were part of this enemy invasion as well. So everything falls to pieces. And what we see at this point is Catholics crossing the border

to get guns, to defend themselves against the police and to defend themselves against Protestant vigilantes. And this is where we see the resurgence of the IRA. Now, it's really important to underline here that the IRA was not around really, you know, before this. It had almost disappeared. And also that Catholics in Northern Ireland were not huge fans of the IRA. After partition, Catholics in Northern Ireland had felt completely betrayed by the IRA because the IRA had won independence for the South and had just abandoned them. So there was very low support in Northern Ireland for the IRA before all this. And now what we see is Catholics in Northern Ireland essentially forming a new version of the IRA, which became known as the Provisional IRA. And the original

point of this was to protect their own districts. But of course, as the conflict got worse and worse and worse, this became a battle first against the police and then against the British army, with the ultimate aim of dismantling the Northern Irish state entirely. The IRA, how are they armed, organised, supported? Well, in these early years, it was extremely ad hoc. When we think of the IRA today, we often think more about the IRA of the late 70s and 80s. And by that stage, it had become really quite professional and it had really serious artillery and, you know, was quite a force to be reckoned with. At this stage, these were just people with guns, you know, people with guns that they had found somehow. And they were often old guns from the 19th century sometimes. These were ancient old guns or any guns that they

could get. So it was very ad hoc at this point. There's all kinds of terrible ironies here and terrible kind of things that make you wonder if things could have been different. Because when the British army was sent in on the 14th of August 1969 to restore law and order to Northern Ireland, the Catholics rejoiced. The Catholics in Northern Ireland were absolutely thrilled about this. Because in comparison to the RUC and the Northern Ireland police force, these guys were neutral. This was the British army. They were going to make sure that the law was followed. They were going to bring everything back to normal and make sure that the police weren't going to murder people, right? You know, that was how the Catholics in

Northern Ireland saw that. They would go out with tea and cakes to the British army and welcome them into the Catholic districts. The Protestant establishment and the British government was worried about that. They were worried about how much the Catholics liked the British army, basically. And that was not good, right, from their kind of PR perspective. So they kind of pushed on the British army to be tougher on Catholics. And what we see very quickly is the British army following the exact same playbook as the police and the RUC and the Orange State, targeting Catholics pretty much exclusively and using these very heavy-handed tactics. So for instance in 1970 we see the Falls Road area in Belfast, this is a big Catholic area in Belfast, being surrounded for a curfew. And this happened all the time.

It was called a cordon and search operation. And what would happen is the army would surround, usually a Catholic neighborhood, and search all the houses one by one to make sure there was no guns in there. Now, this was at a time when there would have been guns around. The IRA was on the rise. But they surrounded this area, which, remember, is a residential neighborhood. This is full of children, you know is a residential neighborhood. This is full of children, you know, and young families. This is not a military situation. And they pumped the area

full of CS gas to try and smoke these people out of the houses. And riots went absolutely mad within the area. They had learned their lesson at this stage. They kept journalists out of the curfew zone to make sure nobody saw what happened. And in fact, out of the four people who were killed during the Falls curfew, one of them was a journalist who was trying to take photographs of what was happening, a Polish journalist. So actions like this essentially made the relationship between Irish Catholics and the British army irreparable. You know, there was no coming back from this now. There were so many moments when all of this could have been resolved, but it just was made worse, you know. So to answer your question, it's like every single one of these moments, of course, leading up to Bloody Sunday in 1972,

each of these moments is one more motivation for people to turn more violent, because more and more options are being closed off to them, essentially. Should we quickly talk about Bloody Sunday in 1972? Let's get there. January the 30th, what happened? Right. Yeah, this is, hmm, I mean, a lot happened between those two years. I know. To make a long story short, the British government had reintroduced internment without trial in the wake of all this unrest. Thousands of Catholics had been swept up and interned, put away in essentially what were concentration camps, like huge big prison complexes. Without any explanation, nobody knew when they would get out, nobody knew why they were there. And this was a huge big mistake in more ways than one, largely because most of the people who they swept up had nothing to do with the IRA.

They were just random Catholics. But by the time they got through that, they were more than willing to join the IRA because they had been so alienated, right? So that was a big problem. There was a huge, big march once again in Derry. Derry is kind of the epicenter of a lot of this because it's a very symbolic place for the conflict. There was a huge big march against internment in Derry, which was illegal because at this stage all marches had been banned. The British army essentially went completely out of control. They opened live ammunition on the crowd, killed 14 people, and then tried to cover it up. For decades afterwards, they said these people were terrorists, that they had guns, that they were trying to shoot at the army. Everyone knew this wasn't true. Everyone in Derry knew this wasn't true. This was clear for everyone who had been anywhere near Bloody Sunday

that this was a lie. And the lie was more harmful in many ways than the massacre, because it went on for so long. And there was just, you know, all of these people, this entire city that didn't see justice for decades. It also reinforced the fact that the Catholics of Northern Ireland were not going to get justice from Westminster. They were not going to see Westminster tell the truth, you know, which again, like it's one of these things, it takes away an option, right? And it pushes people into violence. Anyway, after Bloody Sunday, there were reportedly queues,

queues and queues of people lining up to join the IRA. So it had the exact opposite effect, as was intended. It's tragic. All of this is, you know, really tragic in more ways than one. I think something I might mention, actually, which is important to realise is that the Protestant majority, for most Protestants in Northern Ireland, this was just their lives. You know, this was just the status quo. The education system in Northern Ireland was segregated, along with everything else. And in the state school system, which was almost exclusively Protestant in Northern Ireland, you didn't learn about this. There was no history education about what was going on. Protestants in Northern Ireland learned British history. They learned about British kings and queens, but they didn't really learn about why

they were in Northern Ireland. So a lot of Protestants in Northern Ireland, they didn't understand why the Catholics were so angry. They literally didn't understand what was happening to Catholics because, of course, they weren't experiencing it firsthand. Very similar to what we see in systemic discrimination today, right, where people who aren't being systemically discriminated against don't see what the big issue is. You know, they just actually can't grasp it. And I think that's completely reasonable and fair back then. They didn't have any tools to understand this. They didn't have words like systemic privilege or anything like that to deal with. For them,

this was just how the world worked and everything was falling to pieces around them. You talk about what life was like for the Protestants living in Northern Ireland there. We're seeing Belfast the film and it's getting rave reviews at the moment. What about this Protestant family? You talk about how the Catholics felt they were being driven to migration, but this was no picnic for, as you say, these Protestant families caught up in this sudden and to them inexplicable outburst of violence and upheaval. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this was a tragedy for absolutely everyone involved. There's so many huge ironies in this history. And one of them is that, first of all, the system of segregation that was in place was not good for Protestants either

at the end of the day. Even though they did have systemically this privilege, one of the effects of it was also to split the working class in two. There was huge unemployment also among Protestants in Northern Ireland, relatively less than for Catholics, but still huge. And because Protestants were constantly being turned against their Catholic neighbours, there was no opportunity for the working class as a whole to join together and hold the establishment to account. So Protestants were losing out from this. Are you saying that the man likes to stop the development of working class consciousness by using culture wars and identity? Imagine that. Wouldn't that be novel? Yeah. I mean, it is very blatant here, right?

The 20th century was wild, wasn't it? If you think back to Basil Brook, right, that prime minister telling Protestants not to employ Catholics, you know, that's something that could have harmed Protestants. If you were a Protestant living in an area where most of your potential employees are Catholic, that's going to hurt your business, right? This is a landed aristocrat literally, you know, making working class Protestants' lives worse to ensure that Catholics don't get any power. It's pretty awful. And this is still a thing that's still kind of talked about in Northern Ireland. It's referred to as big house unionism, where you have this idea of unionism that parades as kind of protecting the union and Protestants in general and British identity. But what it really is, is just protecting middle class

and upper class economic concerns, basically. On the other end of the spectrum, then, there was this extremely violent and dangerous and extreme far right-wing political edge to unionism in Northern Ireland, mostly surrounding this very controversial figure of Ian Paisley. Ian Paisley was notoriously anti-Catholic, anti-Ireland, anti-gay, anti-all sorts of things. And he founded his own church known as the Free Presbyterian Church. And he was, of course, the founder of the Democratic Unionist Party, which played such a big part in Brexit there recently. His followers were known as Paisleyites. And there was a certain kind of almost crusader identity, a very fundamentalist religious

motivation amongst his followers that effectively set out to ethnically cleanse Northern Ireland through murder. A lot of these followers were involved in organisations like the UVF, the Ulster Volunteer Force, and the UDA, the Ulster Defence Association. And one thing that they would do is just slaughter Catholics at random. They would just find a Catholic and kill them, a civilian. This was a really kind of hate-filled dimension of the whole thing. I believe it's referenced in the film. And that's something that, just like in Catholic communities,

that's something that terrorises your own community too. In Catholic communities where you have the IRA maybe, you know, carrying out punishment beatings or executing people in kangaroo courts, you have the same thing going on in Protestant communities where you have these paramilitary pro-British organisations being set up, carrying out vigilante justice and essentially terrorising their own community. You can't even speak up to the people who are allegedly protecting you, which is a really tragic element to all of this. It's also just terrible vibes to be raising kids in that world.

I mean, it's just tragic. You know what, buddy? I think you completely nailed that. I think you covered everything. I think that hopefully in a thousand years time, the digital dark age will have eradicated everything else. And if this document survives, everyone will have a very good sense of what happened.

This will- Fingers crossed. Tim, that's amazing, everyone will have a very good sense of what happened. This will... Fingers crossed. Tim, that's amazing, man. Tell us about the podcast that you do. Right. So I'm a co-host of the Irish Passport podcast. It's a podcast on the history, culture and politics of Ireland. And what we do is look at current day politics.

And we try to make sense of them by looking at history and the story of how we got to where we are. So if you're interested in the place of Northern Ireland in recent Brexit negotiations, for instance, it would be a very good place to go and look at the background to everything that's happened in the last five years. Thanks, man. That's great. Go and listen to the podcast, everyone. Thanks so much for coming on, dude. Thank you so making it to the end of this episode of Dan Snow's History. I really appreciate listening to this podcast. I love doing these podcasts. It's a highlight of my career. It's the best thing I've ever done. And your support, your listening is obviously crucial for that project.

If you did feel like doing me a favor, if you go to wherever you get your podcasts and give it a review, give a rating, obviously a good one, ideally, then that would be fantastic and feel free to share it. We obviously depend on listeners, depend on more and more people finding out about it, depend on good reviews to keep the listeners coming in. Really appreciate it. Thank you.