Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland TV review — a moving and introspective history of the Troubles
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“For what?” Fiona asks herself. For what did her brother and more than 3,500 others lose their lives during 30 years of violence?
An outstanding new BBC/PBS documentary mini-series about the Troubles opens with this short yet searching question and continues to grapple with it throughout. Over five episodes — spanning the tinderbox 1960s to the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 — Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland recounts the devastating conflict by delicately piecing together personal and previously undisclosed testimonies.
These arresting accounts are shared in present-day interviews and feature alongside hours of well-curated archive material. But there’s otherwise no authoritative narrator or commentary, with director James Bluemel preferring to emphasise reflections over external expert interpretation. The result is an exhaustive history that’s as informative as you’d expect but also emotive, immersive and introspective.
Underpinning the series is the finely-tuned balance such a sensitive subject demands. We hear “from all sides” — from former IRA recruits to a UDA bomber and a British soldier. Most, however, are civilians from across the divide, many of whose families were devastated by paramilitaries and the brutal control they imposed on peoples’ lives.
There is balance too in how the show alternates between landmark moments and revisiting everyday existence amid the cycle of bloodshed and brutality. Footage of Bloody Sunday and Bloody Friday, of the hunger strikes at Maze prison, and recollections of loved ones callously executed are harrowing. So too are the accounts of what became “normal”: shots of children being escorted to school by the military, people stepping over rubble while out shopping, residential streets combusting in spontaneous riots.
Occasionally light cuts through the darkness — tales of love and culture flourishing at the non-partisan Harp bar are wonderfully touching — but the prevailing sense is that horror became mundane and people fatalistic. It was a time and place where “life meant nothing”, as one contributor recalls.
The series never loses sight of the immense human cost. Trauma, grief, shame transcend all tribal lines and binary oppositions. Some justify what they felt they had to do, but the feeling of collective sorrow and regret for what happened is palpable.
The documentary does not redeem or exonerate, but it does give its subjects an opportunity to process their hitherto fiercely-guarded emotions. With more people having died by suicide in Northern Ireland since 1998 than were killed during the Troubles (in part ascribed to lingering trauma), it is hard to overstate the significance of a project such as this in encouraging open discussion about a past that remains raw. Once Upon a Time is, then, of vital importance to those involved, and necessary viewing for those who were not.
★★★★★
On BBC2 from May 22 at 9pm and on BBC iPlayer
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