Last updated 09:05, Saturday, 01 November 2008

IT WAS a heaving-sigh kind of mood that greeted another Ulster retrospective, until realisation struck that by now there’d probably be a whole generation unaware of how atrocious Ireland’s troubles have been.

But whether we needed so-called celebrities to deliver the history lesson many of us could have benefited from was another matter.

Forty years of fighting has left deep scars on the character of Ireland and the Irish, as Eamonn Holmes’s film about the conflict – The Troubles I’ve Seen (ITV) – set out to show.

Growing up in the 1960s in Belfast, he’d experienced a lot of the worst troubles that could have hurled at any family. And it was with a mix of horror, regret and a strangely affectionate nostalgia that he recalled his formative years in a city torn by ugly hostility.

He remembered bombs exploding nearby as he played in the streets; his uneasy acceptance of dangerous divisions as a norm no child should ever have to embrace as an acceptable way of life.

Holmes’s contribution was touching and honest.

Introducing actors might not have been the best plan though. Corrie’s Jim McDonald revealed how his friends had been jailed for possession of firearms and Patrick Kielty talked about the murder of his father by Loyalists.

All were relevant but they did somehow underpin the mindset that nothing has really happened until it has happened to someone famous... for being on TV.

Which, for the generation that didn’t know, was a shame.