The Troubles: Murder in Belfast (Part 1)

**SPEAKER_1** (0:12)
Oh, God, we pray for a great smashing of the chains of apostasy in this land. Open the eyes of thy people. Open the eyes of the Protestants of Ulster.
Help them to say that through Hegemonism, their heritage is being bartered, their liberties are being sold. And Lord, may they shake the dust from off their feet and come out and join with us in this battle, that we may stand together in the name of the Lord of Hosts.
We thank thee, that thou didst bless the reformers, as they fought this battle in the sixteenth century, as thou blessed the Covenanters, as they refought this battle in the era of the Puritans. And thou wilt bless us in the twentieth century, for God is still the same. And he has not changed, nor ever will. And his truth shall reveal, and his word is quick and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword. And these Irish Presbyterian ministers, and Methodist clergymen, and Church of Ireland rectors, if they need to be rectified, they would all take us back to Rome. Well, we're not going. We're not going. You can go if you want, but we will not go.

**Tom Holland** (2:14)
So to anyone under the age of 40, that will sound as though I have been having a stroke. But to anyone who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s, that I hope will be a very familiar sound because it is the Reverend Ian Paisley and he was giving a sermon there entitled Why I Am a Protestant on the 1st of March 1965
And Dominic, he was the voice of hardline Protestant Ulster fundamentalism, wasn't he? He was the sworn foe of that whore of Babylon, the Church of Rome and the champion of the Ulster loyalist cause. And the thing that's sensational about Ian Paisley is that, I mean, he really does sound like he is ringing all the Reformation greatest hits. He sounds like he stepped out from the pages of a 16th or 17th century anti-papist tract. But the amazing thing about that, I mean, he made it in the year that Help was released.
When London was starting to swing, when the mini skirts were coming out, NASA is preparing to send a mission to the moon. The 60s are turning very, very groovy. But I mean, Ian Paisley, he's not groovy, is he? Whatever else you say about him, he's not groovy.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (3:40)
No, and I don't think he would wish to be called groovy, Tom. I have to say that was tremendous. That was a tremendous version of Ian Paisley. You were riddled with uncharacteristic self-doubt before that recording.

**Tom Holland** (3:51)
I've been practicing quite a lot this morning.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (3:53)
I think fair-minded observers will agree that was a tremendous performance.

**Tom Holland** (3:57)
I woke up my friend Loz with the stentorian tones of my rhetoric.

**SPEAKER_1** (4:03)
It's lying in a bed like a slatter.

**Tom Holland** (4:09)
That's why I told her.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:11)
Well, we'll come back to Ian Paisley later in this episode. He is an extraordinary character. It's amazing to think that he ended up as First Minister of Northern Ireland and Coalition with Shin Rui, by the way.

**Tom Holland** (4:21)
With Martin McGuinness, wasn't it? They were the chuckle brothers because they just spent the whole time chortling with each other.

**Dominic Sandbrook** (4:26)
That's a twist that actually nobody could possibly have expected. Anyway, for four decades or so, his was one of the sort of identifiable trademark voices of a conflict that claimed thousands of lives, including the lives of almost 2,000 entirely innocent civilians, British and Irish. Today, we call this conflict The Troubles, which is a very euphemistic way to talk about one of the darkest episodes in modern British and indeed Irish history. To give people a massive overview, it began with sectarian rioting in the streets of Northern Ireland, but it escalated into something much more sinister. Effectively, a low-level civil war between rival paramilitary groups and the British Army, and indeed murderous bombing campaigns both in Ireland and in Britain. At the peak of the violence in the early 1970s, which is the period we'll be talking a lot about in this series, almost 500 people were being killed every year, and a bomb was going off in Belfast every single day. The victims of the troubles included not just British MPs, but as viewers of The Crown will know, the Queen's second cousin, Lord Mountbatten, the last viceroy of India who was killed by a bomb in 1979
Of course, it also killed shop assistants and barmen and singers and hairdressers and housewives and school children who were shot and blown up because they had the wrong name, or they belonged to the wrong church, or because they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.