Kenneth Branagh describes his childhood in Belfast, Ireland, as “fun, frivolous, and carefree” — the idyllic way childhood should be. However, everything changed on August 15, 1969. The young boy was in his neighborhood when he believed he heard a swarm of bumblebees approaching. Rather than that. A mob rioted in the streets.
This was no ordinary commotion. Tensions between Protestant loyalists and Catholic nationalists had been building for years and had erupted into unthinkable violence, particularly traumatizing in the eyes of an eight-year-old boy.
“They removed the paving stones,” he explained on WBUR’s Here and Now program. “Within a few hours, those paving stones transformed into barricades. And the world was literally turned upside down… Without a doubt. My life would never be the same again.”
What began then culminated in a three-decade period known as the Troubles — sectarian violence that claimed nearly 3,600 lives and over 30,000 injuries between the late 1960s and late 1990s.
Ireland was fighting to reclaim Northern Ireland from British rule. With Protestant unionists and loyalists opposing the effort, while Catholic nationalists favored Ireland’s unification as a single nation.
For a young Branagh growing up amid all of this. The political turmoil was a watershed moment in his life — one that he has now captured in his film Belfast.
Branagh grew up in a very close neighborhood
To say that Belfast was a close-knit community prior to the Troubles is a gross exaggeration. Branagh summed it up best when he explained that when a mother needed to summon their child for tea. They simply yelled their name, which triggered a chain reaction in which neighbors called out their names as well, until the child returned, he told WBUR.
“My Belfast childhood was defined by freedom,” he told the BBC in 2018. “Here was a city—a large city in my child’s estimation—that never felt like a village. It appeared as though you couldn’t get lost. Everyone was familiar with you, or knew someone who was familiar with you.”
While his early years were marked by strong community ties, they were also marked by modesty. “My father was a joiner and my mother worked in a chip shop.
And money was scarce, and even then. I was interested in the arts,” he told Irish News. He visited the former Grove Theatre on Shore Road as a child. Where he was able to absorb the wonders of theater through performances such as A Christmas Carol.
When the riots began, his life was forever altered
Priorities shifted dramatically the day the riots began. “That rupture was the defining moment of my personal life,” Branagh explained to The New York Times. “There was a sense that I knew who I was and was at peace before that mob came up the street.
From that point on, a plethora of identities and masks were created…. From that point forward, there was a guardedness, an inability to roll with the punches as one had done previously.”
After all, the underlying principle was difficult for him to comprehend, as he had always been taught to embrace everyone equally, regardless of their religious or political beliefs.
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“My father instilled in me the belief that as long as people are honest, decent, and true, it makes no difference where they came from, what they were, or what they did,” he continued. “As rose-tinted as that may appear, that is exactly how I feel.”
The young boy had begun to notice his Catholic neighbors being targeted, but was perplexed as to why they had suddenly vanished, WBUR reported. Technically, the Branaghs have been relegated to the sidelines.
“We were always nominally Protestant in the sense that that is where we came from and that is the church to which we were sent,” Branagh told The New York Times. “However, my father was essentially an independent.” “He promoted independent thought.
His family established a new life in England.
Despite their receptiveness, the Branagh family chose to relocate to England when Kenneth was nine years old. They arrived in a town about 40 miles west of London, where he worked to “smooth out” his Irish accent, as he explained to The Washington Post.
The big move was all action and little emotion, possibly masking the pain of leaving a place and life they adored but no longer existed in the way they knew them.
Read more: Public Press Magazine
