The Troubles: Historical Photos Depict Northern Ireland Conflict During The 1970s

The Troubles was a decades-long political and sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland that lasted from the late 1960s until the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 — 33 years in total. More than 3,000 people died during that period, with 1,617 deaths recorded in Belfast alone. The roots of the conflict stretch back centuries, but the modern crisis grew directly from British rule over Ireland and the partition that followed.

In 1919, the Irish rose up against British rule. The result was the creation of an independent Irish state made up of 26 southern counties. But six counties in the northeast — collectively known as Northern Ireland — remained part of the United Kingdom. That division left two deeply opposed communities sharing the same territory: unionists, who were mostly Protestant and wanted to remain part of Britain, and nationalists, who were mostly Catholic and sought reunification with the Republic of Ireland. By 1969, the tension had broken into open violence, and the British Army was deployed to restore order.

The Falls Road in west Belfast became one of the most contested stretches of ground in the conflict. In July 1970, the British Army imposed a curfew on the area — a move that killed five Catholics, wounded 60 others, and left many homes destroyed. Soldiers flooded the streets, searching houses and detaining residents. The operation hardened nationalist opposition to the British military presence and fueled recruitment into the Irish Republican Army.

By 1971, the violence had escalated sharply. Bombings, shootings, and riots became routine. In February of that year, rioters set fire to buses and used them as burning barricades. A timber yard fire in Belfast’s dockland burned for three hours and lit the sky above the city. In the New Lodge Road area, a crowd of around 200 people set cars, vans, and lorries alight after an army scout car struck and killed a five-year-old girl.

Bomb attacks struck commercial and civilian targets across Belfast throughout 1971. A supermarket on Cavehill Road was destroyed. The North Street Arcade had eight shops wrecked in a single blast. The Red Lion Bar bombing on November 2 killed two people and injured more than thirty. A police station on Chichester Road was gutted by an explosion that killed a police inspector. Army bomb disposal teams worked constantly, detonating suspected devices in city streets and dealing with booby traps.

The human cost extended to those trying to help. Father Hugh Mullan, a 37-year-old Catholic priest and curate of St. John’s on Falls Road, was shot and killed on August 10, 1971, while attempting to administer last rites to a wounded parishioner. His death came in the immediate aftermath of the British government’s announcement of internment — the policy of detaining suspected IRA members without trial. Hundreds of mourners attended his Requiem Mass at Corpus Christi Roman Catholic Church on the Ballymurphy estate.

Army bomb disposal experts faced extreme danger on every call. Captain David Stewardson, 29, a Royal Army Ordnance Corps disposal expert, died in a Belfast hospital on September 9, 1971, from wounds he suffered when a booby trap bomb detonated while he was defusing it. He was one of many soldiers killed performing that role throughout the conflict.

Internment without trial, introduced in August 1971, was one of the most divisive policies of the entire conflict. Hundreds of men were arrested and held at Long Kesh, a former World War II airfield that had been converted into a detention camp. The camp’s hutments were fitted with central heating, but its existence as a site of detention without charge became a major rallying point for nationalist opposition. Joe Cahill, the Provisional IRA’s chief in Belfast, held a press conference in a school gymnasium in Ballymurphy shortly after internment began, publicly rejecting the British Army’s claim that the IRA had been nearly defeated.

Street-level enforcement by British troops became a constant feature of daily life in nationalist neighborhoods. Soldiers searched civilians, patrolled alleyways, and manned checkpoints throughout Belfast and Derry. Children drew IRA slogans in chalk on pavements. Others threw stones at army patrols. Some residents responded to the soldiers with hostility, while others offered small gestures of normality — a woman on one Belfast street handed a cup of tea to a soldier at a checkpoint.

The Ardoyne area saw its own surge of fear and displacement in August 1971. Protestant families moved belongings out of their homes under threat of being burned out, joining the tens of thousands of people across Belfast who were forced to relocate as neighborhoods fractured along sectarian lines. Punishment beatings and public humiliations by paramilitary groups also took place. In January 1971, a youth was tarred, feathered, and tied to a lamp post on Falls Road — one of three such incidents in a single 24-hour period.

Soldiers operating in Belfast’s market district faced sniper fire and used shop doorways and walls as cover. In November 1971, three British soldiers sheltered behind a wall in the Andersonstown area during riots that followed the shooting of two policemen. One was armed with a Stirling sub-machine gun. An elderly woman who discovered a British Army sharpshooter on her doorstep in the same period reacted with visible shock, a rosary around her neck.

Political figures on both sides of the divide were active throughout this period. Brian Faulkner served as Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister and was responsible for introducing internment. Reverend Ian Paisley, the prominent Protestant unionist leader, led the Protestant Easter March through Armagh in April 1971, with British troops standing guard along the route. Bernadette Devlin, the 24-year-old Member of Parliament for Mid-Ulster, took the nationalist cause to London. She staged an all-night protest outside 10 Downing Street in October 1971 and addressed students at the London School of Economics, urging them to show solidarity with the people of Northern Ireland. Earlier that same year, she spoke at a civil rights rally in Trafalgar Square.

In November 1971, Mother Teresa arrived in Belfast to begin a mission in the city. She was photographed meeting local children — a striking image in the middle of one of Northern Ireland’s most violent periods. That same month, traffic near the Catholic Unity Flats was forcibly halted by republican extremists armed with clubs during the funerals of Catholic riot victims.

The conflict continued into 1972 with no sign of slowing. On January 30 — Bloody Sunday — British soldiers arrested demonstrators in Derry during a civil rights march. That day, 14 civilians were shot dead by the British Army’s Parachute Regiment. In March 1972, an IRA car bomb on Donegal Street in Belfast killed six people and injured 146. The Official IRA declared an unconditional ceasefire later that year, but the Provisional IRA fought on.

By 1973 and into the mid-1970s, the British Army’s footprint in Northern Ireland had grown into a permanent and heavily fortified presence. Soldiers from multiple regiments rotated through the province. The Gordon Highlanders patrolled city streets. The Worcestershire and Sherwood Foresters manned watchtowers in Crossmaglen, deep in South Armagh — one of the most dangerous postings of the entire conflict. Explosive ordnance disposal teams worked near the Irish border and in towns like Omagh, where a 660-pound ammonium nitrate bomb was defused in 1974.