The final season of Derry Girls aired in the UK and Ireland this spring, and finally arrives on Netflix in the U.S. today. While the show is nominally about five teens who make up the Derry Girls gang and their families — and how much of a timeless banger “Dreams” by the Cranberries is — it’s also set against the backdrop of the Troubles.
The Troubles was a period roughly spanning from 1968 to 1998, though its political roots go back much further, and its ramifications are far from resolved. Ready for a brief Irish history lesson?
Ireland was England’s first colony, with the Normans arriving in the 1100s and Protestant settlers arriving in Ireland in the 1600s. British Protestants became the ruling class, and the Irish, who were at the time majority Catholic, were colonized. As an Irish American, I was raised hearing stories about how our family struggled as Catholics in Northern Ireland, leading my grandmother to emigrate here to the U.S. — a common tale, one connected to the trope of the 19th century potato famine migrant. (While a famine did play a role in mass Irish migration to the U.S., that famine was a result of colonialism, which had forced Irish peasant farmers to produce potatoes for English and Anglo-Irish landowners, exposing them to crop failure resulting in mass starvation.)
In 1922, after centuries of struggle between Irish political factions and the British, the Irish Free State was established; and the Republic of Ireland was established in 1949. However, the British retained control of the six counties that now make up Northern Ireland. Sectarian tensions between British-aligned “Loyalists,” who were generally Protestant, and Irish-aligned “Republicans,” generally Catholics, continued throughout the century, leading to the Troubles.
Derry, the location of Derry Girls — officially called Londonderry by the British and by loyalists — had a significant role in the Troubles, as the site of Bloody Sunday in 1972. You might’ve heard of the U.S.’s Bloody Sunday in 1965, the famous incident where John Lewis and other civil rights marchers were attacked by state police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge walking from Selma, Alabama to the capital of Montgomery. However, the Irish Bloody Sunday was, for example, the subject of U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” On the day of, during a civil rights protest march led by Catholics, British soldiers shot 26 civilians, killing 14, in what was the deadliest mass shooting of the era. The day went on to become one of the most defining ones in the Troubles.
I visited the Museum of Free Derry this past January, where programming around the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday was underway. The museum’s site is an homage to the Catholic community of Derry and their historic neighborhood of the Bogside.
Following the partition of Ireland into 26 counties of the Republic and 6 counties of the North, Unionist politicians pushed for “a Protestant state for a Protestant people,” the museum quotes the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association as explaining in 1978. That state would be “[based on] foundation of sectarian discrimination, biased administration and a barrage of totalitarian legislation, which both protected unionism and instilled a deep sense of social injustice in the non-unionist population.”
The museum makes the point of connecting the struggle in Northern Ireland to the global civil rights movements at the time, like the civil rights movement in the U.S. and the anti-apartheid struggle in South Africa. When I attended a Derry rally for Bloody Sunday’s 50th anniversary, participants like scholar and organizer Eamonn McCann reiterated this connection.
On Bloody Sunday itself in 1972, the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association convened a protest against internment, a policy introduced by the Northern Irish government empowering British forces to incarcerate the Irish without trial, in response to bombings across Northern Ireland from warring factions. Such protests were banned by the government; ultimately, the British Army opened fire on the protesters, killing fourteen, all Catholic. Earlier this year, the BBC categorized Bloody Sunday as “widely regarded as one of the darkest days of the Northern Ireland Troubles.”
The conflict carried onward for decades. In 1998, the Good Friday Agreement was signed, ostensibly enforcing peace and creating a ceasefire between the factions as well as between Ireland and the United Kingdom. This is the subject of the final episode of Derry Girls. (The episode features a cameo from Chelsea Clinton, as the Clinton administration played a significant role in the outcome of the agreement. More on that here.)
This is hardly history. Since the Brexit vote in 2016, political commentators have repeatedly expressed concern about how free movement across the Irish-Northern Irish border, a key pillar of the Good Friday Agreement, might be impacted. In the last few years, reports of sectarian conflict and crossfire have begun to eke out from the North. In 2019, 29-year-old journalist Lyra McKee was killed at the hands of “Irish nationalist militants” while covering a potential skirmish; McKee had been studying the Troubles at the time of her death, and was celebrated in her life for her work platforming the LGBTQ+ experience in Northern Ireland.
It goes to show how significant Derry Girls has been, presciently arriving at this time, providing humor and levity without hiding the conflict or its gravity. “For those of us who’ve lived through the Troubles or continue to grapple with the complicated legacy of the conflict, Derry Girls presents something many of us recognize – that combination of light and dark,” Caroline Magennis, an academic who teaches on Northern Irish literature at a British university, wrote for the Guardian earlier this year. Similar courses have been taught using Derry Girls as a reference point stateside, too.
That light and dark is something I’ve always contended with. My experience of being Irish, staying connected with my family and wider social movements in my family’s homeland, is something I’m proud of. Growing up, as I developed my own politics, I struggled to understand why Irish-Americans as a whole weren’t more interested in joining social justice movements here in the U.S., despite the colonial violence that brought the Irish here in the first place. In the twentieth century, while the Irish over home were struggling for civil rights, Irish Americans were assimilating into the political category of whiteness; worse, the Irish are now sometimes used praisingly by reactionary right-wing people to downplay the severity of slavery and discrimination itself, which to me flies in the face of the goals of the Irish civil rights movement.
Derry Girls’ stateside popularity is a necessary intervention in this ahistorical tendency, decentering Irish Americans from their overwriting of Irish identity while informing a new generation about the Troubles. For me, learning about the Troubles, and understanding why my family emigrated, was part of what helped me get involved in movements for racial and social justice as a young organizer. I’m grateful for it, and for Derry Girls, for spotlighting a part of history often untold here despite its real consequences — and doing so with humor and chaos that sometimes feels pulled out of my own home.
It’s a needed and wonderfully human dynamic. Magennis notes that while there is no shortage of great Northern Irish literature, Derry Girls has a unique ability to help her students connect to that legacy: “Alongside the rich literary output from the North, Derry Girls injects a kind of wildness that my students responded to with unbridled enthusiasm. All of a sudden, they could clearly imagine themselves, with all their hobbies and aspirations, living their lives in spite of the hum of chaos around them.”