Politics & Power Quote by Neil Jordan

There is a sly double move in Neil Jordan's line: a shrug of autobiography that doubles as a moral dare. "I mean" and the casual, almost conversational cadence sound like someone waving off pretension. But the sentence is a trapdoor. By saying you'd have to be "consciously blinkered" not to think about political violence, Jordan frames ignorance as a choice, not an accident. In an Irish context, that word "blinkered" lands hard: it's not just about being sheltered; it's about actively narrowing your vision to avoid responsibility.

The time stamp matters. Jordan anchors the awakening to "19 years old or 20", the age when politics stops being abstract and starts arriving as sirens, funerals, headlines, and the social pressure to pick a side. He doesn't name the Troubles, but the omission is its own realism: in Ireland, you often didn't need to name it. Everyone knew what "the story" was. That phrase is doing cultural work, capturing how political violence becomes a narrative people inherit, repeat, revise, and sometimes exploit.

Coming from a director, the line reads like an artist's alibi and a mission statement. Jordan suggests that making work about violence isn't fascination; it's a refusal to look away. The subtext is also defensive: if his films linger on moral ambiguity, it's because the lived experience did. In that world, neutrality can look like complicity, and art becomes a way to keep your eyes unblinkered.