What to watch
One of British television’s most versatile and incisive documentary-makers, Vanessa Engle returns with this terrifying and wholly admirable survey of a particularly bleak fortnight in the chequered history of Northern Ireland pre-good Friday Agreement. In March 1988, three IRA members were killed by the SAS in Gibraltar. Flown home via Dublin (Belfast airport staff refused to handle their bodies), they were driven to Belfast for a funeral that was left unpoliced by the RUC or the British Army, and then attacked by loyalist Michael Stone, leaving three dead and many injured. Days later, two British army soldiers were attacked by a mob and executed by the IRA after disrupting the funeral of one of Stone’s victims.
As a portrait of an apparently intractable mess, Engle’s film could hardly be bettered. She talks to people on both sides of the conflict (some of them speaking for the first time), probing without provoking and extracting, if not the whole truth, then some startling revelations and bracing honesty. She is helped by astonishing footage of both funerals and the whole thing is a chilling reminder of a very dark time in the history of these islands. Gabriel Tate