Troubles exhibition to launch at Imperial War Museum

The Troubles in Northern Ireland lasted for three decades

The Imperial War Museum (IWM) is set to hold its first ever exhibition about the Northern Ireland Troubles.

The museum is more than 100 years old and the exhibition will be the first in its history specifically about the Troubles.

It will be held at the IWM in London from 26 May until 7 January 2024.

Museum staff have been visiting Northern Ireland on a regular basis to prepare for the exhibition.

It will contain stories and perspectives from loyalist and republican paramilitaries, soldiers, police officers and civilians.

The Troubles started in 1969 and lasted for almost 30 years.

It cost the lives of more than 3,500 people.

The Imperial War Museum in London was founded during World War One

The Ulster Museum in Belfast opened an expanded exhibition about the Troubles in 2018, which included objects from members of the security forces, former prisoners and paramilitaries, as well as civilians.

The IWM was originally founded during World War One.

It now runs five sites including the World War Two cruiser HMS Belfast on the River Thames.

The Northern Ireland: Living with the Troubles exhibition is to be held at the London museum, which also has exhibitions about World War One, World War Two and the Holocaust.

In information about the exhibition, the IWM said it would contain both recently collected objects and "new first-hand testimony".

"While there are key events and defining moments that make up the history of the Troubles, there is often no single story that everyone involved can agree on," a museum spokesperson said.

"Visitors will hear from individuals on all sides of the conflict, from republican and loyalist paramilitaries to British soldiers, local police and ordinary civilians.

"These first-hand testimonies - recorded in 2022 for IWM's oral history collection - highlight what it was like to live through the Troubles."

The spokesperson said the exhibition would also present new objects "never-before-displayed in the museum".

"They cover the familiar - rubber bullets, propaganda posters and a Good Friday Agreement booklet - as well as rarer items, for instance, a screen-printed handkerchief made by prisoners of war in the Long Kesh internment camp."

Part of the exhibition will look at the experiences of those affected by the conflict

But rather than a chronological history of the conflict, the IWM's exhibition will be based around four themes.

One will be the events of the night of 27-28 June 1970.

There was widespread violence in Belfast including at St Matthew's church on the Newtownards Road in the east of the city.

Other parts of the exhibition will look at the violence in the 1970s and 1980s, the experiences of those affected by the Troubles and the legacy of the conflict in present-day Northern Ireland.

The IWM said the exhibition had been "developed in close collaboration with a broad range of individuals with lived experience of the conflict as well as an advisory panel of experts and historians".