The Times we lived in

Baby BoomerPublished March 20th 1974 Photographer Ciarán Donnelly

WE’VE ALL heard of baby boomers – but this is ridiculous. Belfast, 1974. A British soldier runs a gigantic gizmo over a sleeping infant to check whether it has been up to no good with explosives.

The baby, pudding-faced in innocent slumber, is blissfully unaware. A woman, holding the child’s protective blanket in her hand, smiles at the photographer, every inch the proud mother – or proud grandmother. Behind the woman’s left shoulder, on the other side of the street, two soldiers are questioning an individual who looks uncannily like Daniel Day-Lewis playing Gerry Conlon in the film In the Name of the Father.

Without knowing to which side of the loyalist-nationalist divide the people in the photograph belong, there’s really no way of knowing whether that smile is as relaxed as it appears. A scant two years after the Bloody Sunday confrontation in Derry, Belfast was a divided city. Alongside this four-column image, which appeared on March 20th, a report from the National Council for Civil Liberties expressed concerns about the erosion of civil liberties in the North following the Emergency Powers Act and the Special Powers Act.

Another story on the same page found the British army finally admitting the presence of SAS troops in the province after years of denials. A third recorded the protests of a 76-year-old Armagh farmer and his wife who had been pulled roughly out of bed in the early hours and made to lie on the ground outside in their nightclothes while their home was searched. All this against the background of an IRA bombing campaign that featured every kind of explosive apparatus, from a pipe bomb to what is euphemistically known as a “victim-triggered device”. Under the circumstances, any smile at all seems like a small miracle.

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