After two nights of riots, Belfast was on the brink. Then it remembered its hard history.

BELFAST, Northern Ireland — The morning of our walking tour of Belfast, my first task was to check Twitter for updates on local rioting the night before.

This tour covered “The Troubles” — the period in the 1970s when Catholics in Northern Ireland first marched for their civil rights, then escalated to vicious bombings to pressure the British Army to leave.

Now The Troubles 2.0 seemed to be erupting, threatening to plunge this weary city back into those dark times.

The spark was a shocking knife attack the evening of June 8; a Sudanese immigrant, who was in the country legally as a refugee, was charged in connection with it. The attempted beheading had been caught in a viral video so brutal it came with warnings.

For the next two nights, violence flared in several neighborhoods. Masked rioters quickly set up barricades, burned cars, torched the homes of ethnic minorities, and pelted police with paving stones they’d pulled from the streets and smashed with sledgehammers.

A generation after the Good Friday Peace Accords ended sectarian violence in 1998, rioting techniques live on in the muscle memory of Belfast. Need something to chuck at police? Ask your Da — he’ll show you how to break up the paving stones.

News of the riots spread internationally, and soon I had to reassure worried relatives back in the States that our vacation itinerary kept us in the city center, miles away from any commotion. Fanning the flames in the U.S. were the likes of Steve Bannon and Elon Musk, who both cheered on the pushback against immigration.

Yet over the next several days, a small miracle unfolded: There were two nights of rioting, followed by appeals for calm from the five main political parties, then a large peace march.

The march was even attended by 77-year old Gerry Adams, the reputed head of the Provisional Irish Republican Army who reinvented himself and went into politics. Earlier this week he wrote on Twitter, “Elon Musk and others who support these despicable actions from afar should shut up. Belfast says NO to racism.”

That a man whom many suspected was associated with flat-out terrorism was condemning the riots embodied the change that has taken root here.

Then lo and behold, the rioting stopped.

The incident actually dropped off the front page, temporarily replaced by this universal headline: “Belfast residents upset over pickleball noise.”

Belfast let the world know it has come too far — and its collective PTSD is still too raw — to be dragged back to that traumatizing era.

To be clear, riots or not, immigration remains a smoldering political issue in Northern Ireland. Immigrants from anywhere can apply for political asylum in any European Union country. Once that is granted, they are free to hop over to the Republic of Ireland, which is also in the EU.

From there, they can saunter into Northern Ireland without having to cross any physical border because all residents of the island are able to live, work, and travel freely between the two countries.

(As foreigners, we had to get a visa to enter the United Kingdom, but never had to show it to anyone. The only sign we’d driven across the border was a text message from Verizon, welcoming us to Northern Ireland.)

That makes Northern Ireland’s immigration concerns world’s apart from those of the United States, no matter how hard Musk wants to link them. Both the details and the scale are vastly different.

Our tour guide, who wrote her doctoral dissertation about the generation born after the 1998 Peace Accords, said what bothered her most about these newest riots was the sight of “40-year-olds egging on teenagers.”

That view was echoed by the elderly proprietor of our bed-and-breakfast just south of the border the next day. She shook her head sadly, pursing her lips as she dismissed the rioters. “They’re just young tugs” — thugs, in her Irish brogue.

That generation has grown up in peace, spared the trauma of their elders. In the key years of The Troubles, 3,700 people were killed in bombings and executions, more than half of them civilians who were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Imagine if Pittsburgh, nearly the same size as Belfast, had seen that many deaths.

We heard sickening stories of “No warning” bombs, execution-style slayings of young off-duty British soldiers out for a night at a pub, and an unrelenting stream of tit-for-tat retaliatory killings.

It was a descent into pure madness, as chronicled in Belfast, actor Kenneth Branagh’s movie about his childhood, and Say Nothing, the true-crime novel about the 1972 disappearance of a widowed mother of 10 thought to be a police informant.

Belfast let the world know it has come too far — and its collective PTSD is still too raw — to be dragged back to an earlier, traumatizing era.

The long shadow of those tragic years denied Belfast the economic development that makes Dublin a robust city of building cranes. Tourists still visit Belfast to see the Titanic Museum, but the designer shops catering to them disappear just a few blocks from City Hall.

The city’s nightlife remains muted — a legacy of the “Ring of Steel,” the fortified perimeter of barriers, turnstiles, and military checkpoints installed by the British in 1972 to protect the city’s commercial center.

Strikingly absent from this tragic landscape is any public expression of grief. Memorials to the innocent victims of the bombing campaign are absent in the “shared space” of the city center, our guide said, because they are too polarizing.

Instead, a discreet panel of ceramic tiles is embedded in a wall in Jubilee Square. Called the “Numbers Wall,” it assigns a digit to each of the first 1,500 victims of sectarian violence. However, it comes with no key, no way of telling which number represents which person. That’s intentional — a statement that each loss is equal.

Our vacation itinerary also took us 125 miles to the west, where a picturesque County Sligo harbor village has its own link to The Troubles. It’s where an IRA bomb killed Lord Mountbatten on his fishing boat in 1979, an attack designed to devastate Britain’s royal family. (See Season 4, Episode 1 of The Crown.)

Here, too, there is little in the way of a public memorial. There was a photograph displayed of the 2015 reconciliation visit by Prince (now King) Charles and his wife Camilla, but since the harbor is in the Republic of Ireland, it was soon vandalized, Mountbatten’s face scratched out.

Instead, our travels through Northern Ireland revealed many examples of artwork dedicated to peace. There is a Peace Bridge in Derry/Londonderry, peace statues and murals in Belfast, and “Peace Walls” in both. Such walls are there not to celebrate a solid peace, but rather to help protect a fragile one by separating neighborhoods.

Our Derry tour guide, who as a teenager hid under his bed whenever he heard bombs explode nearby, summed up the irony of the term: “They’re evidence we’re not in a perfect peace.”

Perhaps this last week has shown Northern Ireland’s peace may be sturdier than people thought. It teetered for a few days, but Belfast displayed the resolve it showed three decades ago, when 71% of Northern Ireland residents voted in favor of the Peace Accords, turning a page on violence.

For a city in which everyone over the age of 30 is likely to have known a victim of The Troubles, peace is more than the absence of violence. It is a tangible state of being — and precious enough to be nurtured and protected.

Kathleen OʼBrien is a retired newspaper columnist who lives in North Jersey. While her recent DNA analysis shows her to be 78% Irish, she returned from her trip feeling 100% American.