Opinion | Northern Ireland’s Unfinished Peace

Kevin Barry O’Donnell told me that he and his friends wanted the Troubles to come back. “The madness, the riots, the shooting, the bombings, everything,” he said of the 30 years of conflict between mostly Catholic republicans who wanted to reunite Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland and the mostly Protestant unionists who wanted it to remain a part of the United Kingdom.

I was interviewing Mr. O’Donnell in 2017 for a film I was making about life after the Troubles. He was 16 years old and living in Derry, the city in Northern Ireland that was famous as both the site of the conflict’s beginning and one of its worst atrocities, the killing of 14 Catholics by British soldiers in 1972 in an event known as Bloody Sunday.

Mr. O’Donnell remembered none of it. The Troubles officially ended in 1998 with the signing of the Good Friday Agreement — before he was born. But he expressed a potent nostalgia.

Twenty-one years later, it seems as if the madness has returned. Last week, Lyra McKee, a brilliant 29-year-old journalist, was shot dead during an anti-police riot in Derry. Mr. O’Donnell had dismissed paramilitaries to me as “hoods with guns,” but like him, many of the rioters were teenagers born after the 1998 agreement.