Always written with a capital T and always with 'the' in front: the Troubles. It is the name Irish people use for the long political fight over Ireland's relationship with Britain — and, most often today, for the violence in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s until the peace agreement in 1998. Bombs, shootings, soldiers on the street, about 3,500 people dead in a place smaller than Taiwan. The word itself is strange, and that is the point. 'Trouble' is such a small, soft, everyday word — you have trouble with your homework, trouble with your car. Using it for thirty years of killing is a kind of understatement, the way people sometimes make a terrible thing smaller in their mouths because saying the true word out loud is too much. Some people there choose it for exactly that reason; others resent it, because it makes a war sound like a bad week. The name is also used for an earlier period, the fighting around 1919-1923 when Ireland was becoming independent, so if you meet 'the Troubles' in an old book, check which years the writer means. Outside Ireland the pattern has spread a little — you may see a journalist write 'the troubles' about conflict somewhere else — but that is borrowing the Irish word, and readers hear the Irish echo in it.