Why a curfew is nothing new to those who remember 1970 in Northern Ireland

The Army had gone into the area to raid houses for weapons held by the Official IRA and been confronted by organised mobs. When I arrived the Army had withdrawn and the narrow streets around the Grosvenor and Leeson Street had almost a carnival atmosphere. I could smell the lingering traces of CS gas in the air.

Several houses had buckets on the doorstep with water mixed with vinegar for people to dip their hankies in to make masks that would neutralise the gas.

So, we wore masks then too.

I saw a man in a brown corduroy jacket with a rifle under it, the barrel pointing down. He looked more like a school teacher than one of the street fighters and the rifle looked clean and new.

My brothers and I left when a helicopter overhead announced through a loud hailer that the area was being placed under curfew. We would have been in some difficulty if we hadn't got out, with nowhere to stay.

We climbed over a wall and dropped on the other side to see ranks of frightened soldiers squatting in the street, all facing us, all seeing plainly what we were doing and none making any effort to speak to us as we walked past them.

Their intense concentration on what they were about to do next made it plain that this was a major operation for them and that they were not infected by the excitement on the other side of the wall.

We walked right past them, up onto the Falls, and, if I remember rightly, went then to the new Chinese restaurant that had opened in that little recessed row of shops beside Casement Park.

Later we heard more gunfire from the safety of home.

That was a huge event in the early Troubles. It was read as a sign of the new Conservative Government getting tough. It was also viewed as slightly naive of the Army to take on the Officials like that when most of the trouble had been coming from the Provos.

And it produced its casualties: Charlie O'Neill, run down by an armoured personnel carrier; Tom Burns, shot at his front door; and Zbigniew Uglik, visiting from England, shot by soldiers.

Hundreds of weapons were confiscated by the Army in the coming days. The curfew added to the stock of stories about the Troubles too. A woman, Margaret, told me she wrestled with a pram load of guns and was helped over the kerb by a soldier.

The curfew ended on the Sunday when women marched down the Falls to demand access. There were other, localised curfews imposed by paramilitaries, in Poleglass occasionally in the 1990s as part of a measure against joyriders, but the formal requirement by the state to stay in your home is something new.