A2 · Elementary
11 min
historyconflict and peaceeuropean affairsterrorism
The City That Cannot Forget: Belfast and an Unfinished Peace
La Ciudad que No Olvida: Belfast y la Paz Incompleta
A 66-year-old man has been charged with terrorism in Belfast after a car bombing outside a police station. Fletcher and Octavio dig into the history of Northern Ireland, the Good Friday Agreement, and why peace is always harder to keep than it looks.
Un hombre de sesenta y seis años está en la cárcel en Belfast después de un atentado con coche bomba cerca de una comisaría. Fletcher y Octavio hablan de la historia de Irlanda del Norte, el Acuerdo del Viernes Santo y por qué la paz es tan frágil.
8 essential A2-level terms from this episode, with translations and example sentences in Spanish.
| Spanish | English | Example |
|---|---|---|
| antes | before, previously | Antes, Belfast tiene mucha violencia. |
| ahora | now | Ahora, Belfast tiene restaurantes y turistas. |
| frontera | border | Hay una frontera entre Irlanda del Norte e Irlanda. |
| paz | peace | En 1998, hay un acuerdo de paz. |
| todavía | still, yet | Los muros todavía están en la ciudad. |
| violencia | violence | Antes, hay mucha violencia en Belfast. |
| comisaría | police station | La bomba está cerca de una comisaría. |
| confianza | trust | La paz es una cosa. La confianza es otra cosa. |
I was in Belfast in the summer of 1998, a few months after the Good Friday Agreement was signed, and I remember standing in the city center thinking, genuinely thinking, that something had actually been fixed.
And then on May Day this week, a car bomb outside a police station in Dunmurry, and a 66-year-old man in custody on terrorism charges.
Sí.
Yes.
Belfast está en Irlanda del Norte.
Belfast is in Northern Ireland.
Irlanda del Norte es parte del Reino Unido.
Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom.
Right, and that distinction, part of the UK, not part of the Republic of Ireland to the south, that's been the center of the conflict for more than a century.
Un hombre tiene una bomba.
A man has a bomb.
La bomba está en un coche.
The bomb is in a car.
El coche está cerca de una comisaría.
The car is near a police station.
And the man is 66 years old, which tells you something.
This isn't some young guy radicalized online.
This is someone who was already an adult when the peace deal was signed in 1998.
Antes, Irlanda del Norte tiene mucha violencia.
Before, Northern Ireland had a lot of violence.
Mucha, mucha violencia.
A lot, a lot of violence.
This period Octavio's referring to is called the Troubles.
Roughly 1968 to 1998.
Thirty years of bombs, assassinations, paramilitaries on both sides, and the British army on the streets.
Around 3,500 people dead in a region of about one and a half million.
Hay dos grupos en Irlanda del Norte.
There are two groups in Northern Ireland.
Los unionistas y los republicanos.
The unionists and the republicans.
And before anyone simplifies this as a religious war, it really isn't, not at its core.
Catholics tended to be nationalist, wanting a united Ireland.
Protestants tended to be unionist, wanting to stay in the UK.
But the lines were about identity, land, political power, economic exclusion.
Religion was the badge, not the cause.
Los republicanos quieren una Irlanda.
The republicans want one Ireland.
Una sola Irlanda, sin el Reino Unido.
A single Ireland, without the United Kingdom.
And the main republican paramilitary group was the IRA, the Irish Republican Army.
At its peak, it carried out bombings not just in Belfast but in London, in Manchester, military targets, civilian targets.
The British government and the IRA were, effectively, at war.
El IRA tiene muchas armas.
The IRA has many weapons.
Muchos hombres.
Many men.
Es muy peligroso.
It is very dangerous.
I interviewed a former IRA commander once, in 2003, in a pub in Derry, and the thing that struck me was how completely normal he seemed.
He ordered tea.
He talked about his grandchildren.
And then he explained, very calmly, why he'd spent fifteen years planting bombs.
En 1998, hay un acuerdo de paz.
In 1998, there is a peace agreement.
El Acuerdo del Viernes Santo.
The Good Friday Agreement.
Es muy importante.
It is very important.
The Good Friday Agreement is genuinely one of the most remarkable pieces of political engineering of the twentieth century.
It brought together people who had been trying to kill each other for thirty years.
The IRA agreed to decommission its weapons.
Both governments, British and Irish, agreed to share sovereignty in a new power-sharing assembly in Belfast.
It wasn't perfect, but it held.
La gente en Irlanda del Norte vota.
The people in Northern Ireland vote.
El setenta y un por ciento dice sí a la paz.
Seventy-one percent say yes to the peace.
Seventy-one percent.
In a society that polarized, that was extraordinary.
And the architects of it were genuinely unlikely people, John Hume, David Trimble, Gerry Adams, Mo Mowlam, with Bill Clinton playing a surprisingly crucial behind-the-scenes role.
It cost a lot of political capital on every side.
Pero algunos hombres no aceptan el acuerdo.
But some men do not accept the agreement.
Ellos continúan la violencia.
They continue the violence.
This is the part that gets complicated.
Within months of the Good Friday Agreement, a splinter group called the Real IRA carried out the Omagh bombing, August 1998.
Twenty-nine people dead, including a woman pregnant with twins.
The mainstream IRA had said yes to peace.
The dissidents said the peace was a betrayal.
Ahora hay grupos pequeños.
Now there are small groups.
Ellos todavía quieren luchar.
They still want to fight.
Todavía tienen bombas.
They still have bombs.
Groups like the New IRA and Continuity IRA have been active for decades since 1998, car bombings, attempted assassinations of police officers, intimidation campaigns.
Small, but persistent.
And here's what makes this week's arrest interesting: the man charged is 66 years old, which places his political formation squarely in the heart of the Troubles.
Este hombre tiene sesenta y seis años.
This man is sixty-six years old.
En 1998, él tiene treinta y ocho años.
In 1998, he is thirty-eight years old.
Exactly.
He was a fully grown adult when the peace was signed, old enough to have lived through the worst of the Troubles as a young man, and he still didn't accept the settlement.
That's a particular kind of ideological commitment, or rigidity, depending on how you look at it.
Los jóvenes en Belfast hoy no quieren violencia.
Young people in Belfast today do not want violence.
La vida es diferente para ellos.
Life is different for them.
That's true, and it matters a lot.
The generation that grew up after 1998 in Northern Ireland, they know the peace as their normal.
They go to mixed schools, they work together, they intermarry across the old divide in ways that were almost unthinkable a generation ago.
The dissidents are recruiting in an increasingly thin pool.
Pero Brexit es un problema grande para Irlanda del Norte.
But Brexit is a big problem for Northern Ireland.
Un problema muy serio.
A very serious problem.
Brexit hit Northern Ireland differently than anywhere else in the UK, and this is where history and current politics really collide.
The Good Friday Agreement worked partly because the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland was invisible.
Open.
You drove through and barely noticed you'd crossed it.
Brexit threatened to change that.
Hay una frontera entre Irlanda del Norte e Irlanda.
There is a border between Northern Ireland and Ireland.
Ahora es un problema otra vez.
Now it is a problem again.
The so-called Irish backstop, then the Northern Ireland Protocol, now the Windsor Framework.
Every version of the post-Brexit border arrangement has been politically toxic for someone.
Unionists felt betrayed by being separated from the rest of the UK.
Nationalists worried a hard border would revive old grievances.
The dissidents watched all of this and saw an opportunity to say: see, the peace was never real.
Los disidentes usan el problema de Brexit.
The dissidents use the Brexit problem.
Ellos dicen: la paz no funciona.
They say: the peace does not work.
And that's the recruitment pitch.
Not, come join us because we're winning, but, come join us because you feel forgotten, cheated, left behind.
That's a much more durable message, and it's not unique to Northern Ireland.
You hear versions of it everywhere that a peace process has left someone feeling like they got the worse end of the deal.
La policía en Irlanda del Norte tiene un nombre nuevo.
The police in Northern Ireland has a new name.
Antes es la RUC.
Before it was the RUC.
Ahora es el PSNI.
Now it is the PSNI.
The renaming of the police was actually one of the most symbolically significant parts of the peace process.
The Royal Ulster Constabulary was seen by nationalists as a partisan force, heavily Protestant, historically implicated in abuses.
The new Police Service of Northern Ireland was designed from scratch to be cross-community.
Dissident attacks on police stations are attacks specifically on that symbol of a shared future.
Belfast hoy tiene restaurantes, museos, turistas.
Belfast today has restaurants, museums, tourists.
La gente vive bien.
People live well.
The transformation of Belfast physically is genuinely striking.
The Cathedral Quarter, the Titanic museum, the waterfront.
When I was there in '98, you still felt the city holding its breath.
Now it has a craft beer scene and walking tours of the peace walls.
The peace walls themselves are a tourist attraction, which is either hopeful or deeply strange, maybe both.
Pero los muros todavía existen.
But the walls still exist.
Los muros de paz todavía están en la ciudad.
The peace walls are still in the city.
That's right.
There are more than a hundred peace walls in Belfast, concrete barriers separating nationalist and unionist neighborhoods, and most of them are still standing.
The original plan was to take them down within ten years of the agreement.
That was 1998.
They're still there, and surveys show the majority of residents in those areas want to keep them, because the distrust hasn't fully dissolved.
La paz es una cosa.
Peace is one thing.
La confianza es otra cosa.
Trust is another thing.
Las dos son diferentes.
The two are different.
That is a genuinely important distinction, and I want to sit with it for a second.
You can have a formal end to violence, laws in place, institutions working, and still not have trust.
Northern Ireland has shown that you can keep the violence mostly suppressed for nearly thirty years while the underlying social fractures are only slowly healing.
A car bomb in Dunmurry is a reminder that suppressed is not the same as resolved.
Mira, los jóvenes son diferentes.
Look, young people are different.
Ellos tienen la misma ciudad.
They have the same city.
Ellos comparten la ciudad.
They share the city.
And that's where the actual hope lives.
Not in any political framework, as useful as those are, but in a generation that has grown up without the visceral memory of funerals and bombings and soldiers on their street corners.
The dissidents are, by most accounts, a marginal and aging force.
This week's suspect is 66.
That tells you something about where this is going.
Oye, Fletcher, antes usas 'antes' mucho.
Hey, Fletcher, earlier you used 'antes' a lot.
'Antes, la ciudad tiene violencia.' ¿Qué significa 'antes' exactamente?
'Before, the city has violence.' What does 'antes' mean exactly?
Actually, that's you who kept using it, and I noticed.
'Antes hay mucha violencia,' 'antes es la RUC.' It's the word for before, right?
Before now, in the past?
Sí.
Yes.
'Antes' es para el pasado.
'Antes' is for the past.
'Ahora' es para el presente.
'Ahora' is for the present.
'Antes hay guerra.
'Before there was war.
Ahora hay paz.'
Now there is peace.'
So it's a clean pair, antes and ahora, before and now.
No complicated tenses, just those two words doing the heavy lifting for time.
In English we'd say 'used to' or 'back then' and reach for a past tense.
In Spanish you can just say 'antes' and stay in the present.
Exacto.
Exactly.
'Antes, Belfast tiene muchos problemas.
'Before, Belfast had many problems.
Ahora, Belfast tiene muchos turistas.' Simple.
Now, Belfast has many tourists.' Simple.
Antes, problemas.
Ahora, turistas.
That might actually be the most concise summary of Northern Ireland's last thirty years I've ever heard.