On April 18, an agreement signed by the two sides in Senegal appeared to bring the trouble to an end, but in the last week, it has unraveled, and a delegation of African diplomats who flew in to try to salvage the accord left this weekend empty-handed.
Bloody Sunday, of course, also brought the Troubles into sharper perspective for those on the mainland; it even influenced British culture.
The Good Friday Agreement, which brought the Troubles to an end, seemed to validate everything we had worked toward, whether "we" were Irish or British or German.
Ever since childhood, he has blamed himself for bringing the Troubles down on his family - and his father's physical abuse seemed only to reinforce his guilt.
The fallout precipitated the suspension of Stormont, legitimised the IRA in the eyes of many, gave Noraid in the US what they called "our first big publicity break", and brought the Troubles dramatically south, with the burning of the British Embassy in Dublin.
Lockton argues that the NRA brought the troubles on itself, by amping up its rhetoric to the point of radioactivity.
And in all these cases the official view — with which many commentators and a substantial slice of public opinion seemed to agree — was, essentially, that the artists and scholars had brought the trouble on themselves.
And many of the things that have brought the trouble -- electronically contagious sentiment, elusively fluid terrorist networks, widely available recipes for homemade weapons -- will similarly haunt a heavy-handed approach anywhere else in the world.
There seems to come a thirst for more incriminating evidence about the victim – a trace of marijuana in the blood, say, or a grainy selfie on Instagram with pants sagging low – a search for justification that the victims brought the trouble on themselves.
