TAKE THE TROUBLES AWAY

Between the 1970s and 1990s, a remarkable project took place in a small Dutch town called Hazerswoude Rijndijk.

Every two years, a new group of teenagers from Belfast – half of them from a nationalist Catholic area, half of them from a unionist Protestant area – came to the Netherlands for three weeks.

In Belfast, their neighborhoods were separated by walls and barbed wire. In the Netherlands, they went on group outings together and stayed with local host families in mixed pairs, sharing a bedroom with the “enemy”.

The project was supposed to bring a generation born on different sides of the Northern Irish conflict closer together, but little was known about what happened after the teenagers returned home.

Inge Oosterhoff was a toddler when her own parents hosted two teenage girls from Belfast. Thirty years later and on the brink of Brexit, Inge tracks down the women who once shared a bedroom in her home, to find out how look back on their stay in the Netherlands. She discovers the trip changed their lives forever, but for entirely different reasons than suspected.

‘Take the Troubles away’ (Drie weken zonder Troubles) aired on Dutch public radio on November 24, 2019.

*The sample below includes spoilers.