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.

As an adult, I realise that his heavy Belfast accent probably should have tipped me off, but I wasn't that clued in as a kid.

The reason for my epiphany was that Cork was playing Down in an All-Ireland and the house phone rang when Aidan Farrell scored Down's goal to set them up for a victory, my grandfather delivering some (mostly) good-natured slagging to my mother.

Jim Stafford: He did not speak much about this past in the North.

I vividly remember my older brother explaining to me that just because Grandad lived in the narrow house on the hill in Blackpool did not make him from Cork.

But, despite idolising him, I never interrogated his past.

The fact that he could just be Grandad Jim to me and not 'My grandad who left Belfast because of the Troubles' is, I think, down to the fact that we were children of a generation that didn't worry about the North but didn't understand it, either.

Seventeen days after that goal and that phone call and 18 before Down would beat Dublin in the final, the IRA announced a "cessation of military operations".

So we came of age in the march to the Good Friday Agreement and its passing, though memorable, just felt natural. 

My first trip to the North was free from any military checkpoints, from any fear of violence. But that wasn't the country my grandfather left behind.

When his family returned to Belfast after the war, they made their home in Ardoyne, a working-class nationalist area of the city that would become notorious during the Troubles. 

In his book Ardoyne 69: Stories of Struggle and Hope, Brian McKee writes that 99 people from the village lost their lives. It had a population of around 6,000.

"Few families escaped the impact of the violence that had been simmering under the surface with sporadic unrest taking place before eventually erupting in brutal violence in August 1969," Mr McKee writes.

Jim and Nan Stafford settled in Blackpool in Cork.

That violence came first in the killing of Sammy McLarnon, shot as he pulled the curtains on the home he shared with his wife and three children on Herbert Street.

Over the years that followed, dozens more names would be added to his, men and women killed by the RUC, the British army, the IRA, loyalist paramilitaries.

My grandfather's family was, like many, not involved in armed nationalism and sought to leave the Troubles behind them but after settling in a unionist area they were advised to leave and made for England. 

My grandfather returned to Ardoyne, but by 1976, he had had enough. 

His car was stolen for use in an IRA raid and he spent three days in Crumlin Road Gaol before his innocence was established to the satisfaction of the RUC.

With work harder and harder to come by in Belfast, he and the brand new Renault 12 headed south for Cork, the car bearing the bulletholes of the botched robbery.

A few years after his arrival in Cork, he met my grandmother and they married and settled in Blackpool on the city's northside.

My grandfather died in September 2020, a year and two days after my grandmother as covid ran through the country and didn't allow for a full funeral or the send-off he deserved. 

In the aftermath, there were stories as there always were, but it felt then and has since that my knowledge of his life was somewhat incomplete. 

Jim Stafford in Patrick's St, Cork, with Paul's aunt Mary and his sister Michelle.

If I didn't know the details of his time in Ardoyne, how could I have really known him?

But he left a warzone — really left it — to the point where he worked hard not to meet people from Belfast while in Cork. 

Home was a place where he saw a friend shot in the street and regular violence. 

Even the story of his car being stolen by a friend feels like a caper but would have been a real reminder of the immediacy and severity of the violence he was surrounded by. 

He did not speak of it because it wasn't something he necessarily wanted to relive and, in hindsight, you see how much it meant for him to have his family shielded from that same violence.

But at the same time, I grew up in an age where understanding the North was just not expected of us.

Despite the fact that a bloody campaign was being waged across a border just 100 miles away, we were not asked to grapple with it — nor should we, really as we were just kids. 

I understand that instinct from people my parents' age. 

There was violence on this island and if you could get by without feeling its effects, if you could protect your children, why wouldn't you?

I remember the Good Friday Agreement signing and I have benefited from it — I cross the border for work or to play American football and barely register the change in road signage — but I did not really have to consider what it was designed to do until I was an adult.

And that is, for me, one of the great tragedies of partition.

That there are people of the same age on this island who had vastly different lives because of which side of the border they were born on.

Ignorance of what the Troubles were was a privilege afforded to you if you grew up in west Dublin by way of Cork. 

If you had come the harder route — from Ardoyne to the banks of the Lee — it was something you lived with every day. 

Even if you didn't speak about it much.