Jean Seaton’s Unreported Britain project examines The Remembrance Day bombing 30 years on

The Unreported Britain project, run by The Orwell Prize and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation this week examined the Remembrance Day bombing 30 years on, and how parents in Northern Ireland are teaching children to put aside religious differences.

In an extended article by Stephen Armstrong the detonation of a bomb by the IRA beside the town war memorial in Enniskillen on Remembrance Day in November 1987 – which killed 11 civilians – serves as a starting point in exploring the process of healing religious and political tensions.

The article, which can be read in full here,  opens with the following passage;

On the last warm day of the year, boys kick a football around the playground at St Mary’s Primary School in Brookeborough, County Fermanagh. Dotted in small groups around them, girls jump rope and clap out complicated pat-a-cakes. It’s about as ordinary a scene as you’d expect in any school across the country. The only anomaly is that half the kids are wearing the dark-blue jumpers of St Mary’s and half are wearing the green jumpers of Brookeborough Primary, half a mile away. And in Northern Ireland, that makes all the difference in the world.

St Mary’s is a Catholic school, Brooke-borough is Protestant and the small town itself nestles on the edge of south- east Fermanagh – close to the border with the Irish Republic. During the Troubles, IRA groups made incursions across the border from the south while British army patrols and checkpoints were regular, heavy and sometimes trigger-happy.

As a result, Fermanagh’s county town, Enniskillen, saw at least one violent death a year across the 1980s, from a British soldier shooting  a young woman in 1981 to the bomb – detonated beside the town war memorial on Remembrance Day in November 1987 – with which the IRA killed 11 civilians.

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