# Noel Gallagher's Painful Childhood in the Irish Community of Manchester Amidst IRA Bombings
Key Highlights :
Noel Gallagher, the renowned British singer, songwriter, and guitarist of the band Oasis, has recently opened up about his painful childhood in the Irish community of Manchester amidst IRA bombings. Growing up in the mid-1970s, Gallagher and his family were often subject to searches and interrogations by British soldiers with sniffer dogs. This experience had a lasting impact on Gallagher, who was too young to understand the full implications of the IRA bombings.
The 55-year-old musician recalled coming home to Manchester after family summer holidays in Mayo with his granny. He said, “When you’re with your parents, you feel safe. But when they’re taking your Uncle Paddy out of the car, and then you go off into a room and the sniffer dogs come out and they’d have mirrors underneath the car? I didn’t really realise then what they were searching for.”
Gallagher, who recently split from his music publicist wife Sara MacDonald, went on to explain how the Irish community in Manchester was demonized and he felt it at the time. He said, “I was too young to understand. I was old enough to hear it on the news but young enough not to completely understand it. Obviously, I know more about it now than I did then — like the Birmingham Six and all that. The Irish community in Manchester circled the wagons, because the Irish community were demonised. I felt that at the time. But I would only have been six, seven, eight when it [the IRA bombing campaign of mainland Britain] was going on in 1974 and 1975. I was born in 1967.”
Gallagher has since moved on from his painful childhood and is now working on his new album Council Skies with his band, Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds, which is set to be released in June. His Belfast-based friend Davie Holmes has worked on the album, doing a remix of I’m Not Giving Up Tonight and producing Gallagher’s last album, 2017’s Who Built The Moon?
When asked about Belfast, Gallagher said, “Belfast is a great European city. It’s funny to think of the history of violence in that city, but I don’t get to see any of it. I whizz in, do the gig, it’s all great and then you come out again. I was going to David’s house one day. It was through an area that was full of Union Jacks. The pavements were painted red, white and blue. I was a bit: ‘Oh, f**king hell!’ And the opposite side of it as well,” he says, presumably meaning the tricolours in republican areas of the city. “You come in on the plane and you see the places that are walled off, it’s like, ‘Jesus’.”
Gallagher’s story is a testament to the pain and suffering that the Irish community faced in Manchester due to the IRA bombings. Although he was too young to understand the full implications of the violence, he still felt the effects of being demonized and targeted by British soldiers. It is a reminder of the importance of understanding and respecting the history of the Irish community in Manchester and the need for peace and understanding between different cultures.
