Paul Hosford: Ignorance of the Troubles a privilege afforded to me, but not to my grandfather

To me, he was Grandad Jim and not ‘My grandad who left Belfast because of the Troubles’. We were the children of a generation that didn’t worry about the North but didn’t really understand it either

Paul Hosford with his grandfather Jim Stafford and his siblings Sinead, David, and Michelle.

I was around eight years of age when I first realised that my grandfather wasn't from Cork.

At that age, as a contrarian child who had taken the city of his birth to heart over the city his parents had moved to — Dublin — I couldn't conceive how someone who lived in Cork wouldn't be from there.