{"id":562,"date":"2007-08-05T17:05:00","date_gmt":"2007-08-05T23:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/?p=562"},"modified":"2007-08-05T17:05:00","modified_gmt":"2007-08-05T23:05:00","slug":"northern-ireland-now-just-a-police-state","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/2007\/08\/northern-ireland-now-just-a-police-state\/","title":{"rendered":"Northern Ireland: now just a police state"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span class=\"dropcaps\">B<\/span>elfast\u2019s own <span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Peter Barron<\/span> <a href=\"http:\/\/www.bbc.co.uk\/blogs\/theeditors\/2007\/08\/blogs_not_bullets.html\" target=\"_blank\">blogs<\/a> on the end of British army operations in <span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">Northern Ireland<\/span> after 38 years. Having taken a call from the <span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">IRA<\/span> announcing they were going to blow up <span style=\"font-weight:bold;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.irelandsown.net\/toengland.html\" target=\"_blank\">Whitehall Place<\/a><\/span>, walked through streets paved with broken glass after having had my windows blown out in the <span style=\"font-weight:bold;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Bishopsgate\" target=\"_blank\">Bishopsgate<\/a><\/span> bomb, and having spent the day of the first IRA ceasefire watching <span style=\"font-weight:bold;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/John_Hume\" target=\"_blank\">John Hume<\/a><\/span> pad around his Derry home in carpet slippers, Northern Ireland was part of my formative journalistic years. But in the words of <span style=\"font-weight:bold;\">John Goodman<\/span> in <span style=\"font-weight:bold;\"><span style=\"font-style:italic;\">Barton Fink<\/span><\/span>, I was \u201cjust a tourist with a typewriter.\u201d<span id=\"fullpost\"> <\/p>\n<p>Talking to participants in \u201cthe troubles,\u201d it often seemed that terrorist violence was like salt &#8211; it gave their lives a mortal flavour, and lent obscurity an importance their everyday existence could never hope to match.<\/p>\n<p>Now they have peace, and just the police to take care of them. Still, I grew up in rural Norfolk: pop. 0.83m; plod 1,500. Northern Ireland: pop. 1.75m; 9,100 police officers. The army may be gone, but there is still a long, long way to go&#8230;<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Belfast\u2019s own Peter Barron blogs on the end of British army operations in Northern Ireland after 38 years. Having taken a call from the IRA announcing they were going to blow up Whitehall Place, walked through streets paved with broken glass after having had my windows blown out in the Bishopsgate bomb, and having spent [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-562","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=562"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/562\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=562"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=562"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adrianmonck.com\/about\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=562"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}