All stories grow enamelled over time, and I worried at first that James Bluemel’s new five-part documentary series Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland would struggle in the face of wisdom-after-the-fact and post-dated bravado; that the years gone by would bring with them a concealing tidiness, an opacity that is of no use at all to a journalist film-maker.
When Billy McVeigh, a man who can still be seen in a famous Republican mural on the side of a Derry terrace, talked in the first film of the “good craic” in the run-up to what would come to be known as the Troubles – at the time of the Battle of the Bogside in 1969, he was just 17 – I doubted it would be even half so good as Bluemel’s last (the brilliant and award-winning Once Upon a Time in Iraq).
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