This article explores how youth experiences of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’ have been dominantly imagined within post-conflict memory. Tracing representations of the young as innocent targets or potentially endangering combatants, it concentrates on those imaginaries which characterise individuals who grew up in the conflict as the members of ‘troubled generations.’ Drawing on oral history interviews with those who grew up in Belfast during the 1970s and 1980s, it addresses how such representations may obscure the broader ‘messiness’ of everyday youth experience in popular memory and in doing so contribute to a hierarchy of the ‘speakable’ and the ‘hearable’ which affects the articulation of memories at a personal level. The article concludes by suggesting scholars pay closer attention both to how dominant memory discourses may de-limit the complexities of lived experiences of violence, but also the (de)constructive potential of personal narratives spoken alongside, through, and in excess of, dominant historical imaginaries.

本文探讨了在冲突后记忆中如何主观想象北爱尔兰“麻烦”的青年经历。它追踪年轻人作为无辜目标或潜在危害战斗人员的代表，集中于那些在冲突中成长的个体为“动乱世代”成员的假想。通过对1970年代和1980年代在贝尔法斯特长大的人进行的口述历史访谈，它解决了这些表述如何掩盖大众记忆中日常青年经历的更广泛的“混乱”，并以此促进“口头表达”的等级而“可听性”会在个人层面上影响记忆的表达。。