The Troubles in Northern Ireland

6 Nonfiction Books About the Late 20th-Century Sectarian Conflict

Bloody Sunday: British soldiers take cover behind armored vehicles while using CS gas during the Derry protest march.

The guerilla war of retribution known as the Troubles was a complicated and tragic chapter in Irish history which spanned the 1960s–1990s and even spilled over into the early 2000s in isolated incidents. Over 3,500 people lost their lives in the conflict, most of them innocent civilians. Northern Ireland, formed by the Government of Ireland Act 1920, is made up of six counties in the province of Ulster. Prior to the Irish War of Independence (1918–1921), which served as a steppingstone to the creation of the 26-county Irish Republic, the country of Ireland was predominantly Catholic with a Protestant minority primarily based in Ulster.

In Ireland, whether practicing religion or not, the native Irish people identified as Catholic, while the Anglo-Irish (descendants of British colonists from the Plantation era of the 16th and 17th centuries) identified as Protestant. After the separation of the northern counties in 1920, Catholics in Northern Ireland found themselves in the minority in their own country and at a social disadvantage. Catholics were discriminated against in voting rights, jobs, and housing. Witnessing the effectiveness of the Civil Rights marches in the United States during the 1960s, Catholics were inspired to organize their own marches to protest for equality. Marches were met with violence from local law enforcement and Protestants. Rioting broke out in mixed Belfast neighborhoods in 1969. Protestants burned Catholics out of their homes, forcing them to either flee south to the Republic or to Catholic neighborhoods. The Irish Republican Army (IRA), formed during the Easter Rising of 1916 to fight for independence from England and largely dormant by the late 1960s, saw a resurgence in membership as young men—and a select number of women—felt the need to defend their communities and retaliate against their colonizers. Rival Protestant paramilitary groups formed in response. As violence intensified, England sent the British Army into Northern Ireland to diffuse tensions. Catholics initially welcomed the soldiers, believing them to be neutral peacekeepers. It soon became clear, however, that the British Army was largely on the side of the Protestants for their shared loyalty to England. In response, the IRA ramped up their bombing campaigns against what they perceived to be new invaders. Violence reached its zenith in 1972, the year of Bloody Sunday in Derry and Bloody Friday in Belfast.

The following books I will review chronicle key events and players in the Troubles, offering perspectives from all sides of the struggle. As the product of a mixed Protestant/Catholic household myself, I can attest neither religion condones violence. Though labeled a sectarian conflict, the division in Ireland is rooted more in national loyalties and ethnic heritage. Irish Catholic nationalists wanted equal rights in their own homeland. Many felt like joining or supporting the IRA were their only options. Anglo-Irish Protestant loyalists had lived in Ireland for several generations. They were afraid of being a minority under an Irish Catholic-ruled government and felt the IRA was an existential threat to their livelihood. Many people—Catholic and Protestant alike—wanted to live together in peace (and had previously done so for decades) but were forced to pick sides, tearing communities apart. In the later years of the Troubles, the hatred of one another festered and became inbred. Today, survivors and bereaved families are still healing from the trauma inflicted by the senseless political and sectarian violence and still seeking reconciliation.

1 | Those Are Real Bullets: Bloody Sunday, Derry, 1972 Peter Pringle & Philip Jacobson

In protest of the recent internment without trial law, which has led to the wrongful imprisonment of hundreds of innocent Catholic men since August 1971, an illegal civil rights march is organized in the Catholic Bogside and Creggan neighborhoods of Derry on Sunday, January 30, 1972. Tensions have been escalating since the arrival of the British Army in 1969. Rioting frequently breaks out with no real harm done. Youths throw stones at the soldiers, who fire back with rubber bullets. On this Sunday, however, the British Army is prepared for bloodshed. They bring in their toughest unit, the Parachute Regiment (known as the “Paras”), who are despised in Belfast for their aggressive tactics. Rather than the usual rubber bullets intended to deter troublemakers, they are armed with live rounds. When the inevitable rioting begins, the British Army swoops in to make arrests and begins indiscriminately firing real bullets into the crowd.

By the end of the day, 27 people have been shot by the Paras. Thirteen men are dead, seven of them teenagers. Over forty people are arrested, some of whom are paramedics (and even a priest) who had been tending to the wounded and dying. Afterwards, the British Army provides contradictory false statements about being fired upon by IRA gunmen and people wielding bombs to justify their shooting. They even claim four of the victims are wanted IRA men. But no one shot that day was armed – two men were seen with their hands raised in surrender; another man was shot while crawling down the street. Five were shot in the back. No weapons are found on the victims and, subsequently, no evidence supports the British Army’s claims they were returning fire on would-be assailants. The public outrage for what would become known as Bloody Sunday would influence many young men to join the IRA and further fan the flames of sectarian violence raging throughout Northern Ireland.

Journalists Peter Pringle and Philip Jacobson piece together the events of this single horrific day in history with their own independent eyewitness interviews given in the days and weeks following the massacre. They include follow-up interviews conducted 16 years later, along with news articles and inquest files and transcripts. Graphic descriptions of the damage inflicted by the bullets on the victims’ bodies are pulled from autopsy reports.

I have always understood Bloody Sunday to be an unprovoked civilian massacre by the British Army. After reading Those Are Real Bullets, I understand it’s not quite so black and white, though I am still of the opinion that the army was clearly in the wrong. Rioting was commonplace in Derry but had not yielded any life-threatening injuries prior to Bloody Sunday. It was reasonable for the British Army to act in self-defense when having debris such as bricks, chunks of paving stone, planks of wood, bottles, etc. thrown at them. Protest marches were banned at the time, so rowdy demonstrators could expect to face criminal charges. A few IRA men were indeed in the area, though they were not a significant threat, having agreed not to incite violence. A handful of potshots were aimed at troops with inferior, unreliable guns after the Paras started shooting, but the British Army suffered no injuries, and none of the gunshot victims were members of the IRA. The British Army’s choice to bring live rounds into the equation, compounded with their obvious lies in the aftermath and their brutal abuse of those arrested firmly categorizes their actions as unjust. Even soldiers from other, less confrontational regiments acknowledged they saw no weapons and wondered why unarmed civilians (many of whom were uninvolved in the rioting, just merely passing by or rushing to aid the wounded) were being shot. Those Are Real Bullets is a technical, informative, and infuriating account of one of the most infamous, shocking incidents of the Troubles.

My Goodreads Rating: 4 Stars

2 | Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland Patrick Radden Keefe

One night in 1972, Jean McConville, a widow and mother of ten, is abducted from her home in Belfast by the IRA and fails to return. For thirty years, her children are kept in the dark about what happened to her. Following a civil rights march in 1969 that ends with the marchers being attacked by Ulster loyalists, Dolours Price, daughter of a prominent IRA family, joins the Irish Republican Army herself. She is no longer convinced a unified Ireland free from British rule can be achieved peacefully. However, she does not anticipate being assigned to a covert group called the Unknowns, who would be responsible for “disappearing” informers. She unwittingly plays a role in the disappearance of Jean McConville, which would become one of the most controversial incidents of Troubles.

In 1981, Dolours is released from prison for her involvement in the 1973 bombing of the Old Bailey Courthouse in London. She renounces her IRA activity and tries to live quietly and start a family. However, guilt and depression consume her, leading her to become an alcoholic addicted to painkillers. She learns of a confidential oral history collaboration called the Belfast Project, which guarantees her anonymity until after her death. In her recorded interviews, she confesses details of her actions with the IRA during the Troubles, including the fateful night of Jean McConville’s disappearance.

As the Troubles drag on with no end in sight and an ever-increasing body count, public sentiment shifts away from support for the armed struggle to a call for peace. Gerry Adams, once the leader of the Belfast Brigade unit of the IRA, sees no future in continued violence. He distances himself from the IRA and begins to pursue politics. As the head of the Sinn Féin party, he is instrumental in the peace talks leading to the 1994 ceasefire and 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The cost is the complete denial of his IRA membership. No respectable politician would negotiate with a former terrorist. Adams’ betrayal of his close friend, high-ranking IRA officer Brendan Hughes and other IRA members leaves them burdened with the guilt of everything they have done under orders in good faith that the end would one day justify the means. Instead, Hughes and Price come to the crushing realization that all the death and violence have been for nothing.

Say Nothing is an engrossing, all-consuming read. It immediately became one of my top ten favorite books (top five in nonfiction) and prompted me to write my first ever Goodreads review. I kept it short and bittersweet: “A fascinating and heartbreaking narrative account of violence, loss, and betrayal during the Troubles in Northern Ireland.” Much of the information in the book originates from the released transcripts of the Belfast Project interviews of Dolours Price and Brendan Hughes. Both named Gerry Adams, the president Sinn Féin at the time of recording, as the man who ordered the execution of Jean McConville, as well as the other “disappeared.”

Say Nothing had been adapted into a fantastic FX/Hulu miniseries. The series narrows the scope of the book to focus on the life of Dolours Price, but still features many of the supporting characters, including Brendan Hughes, Gerry Adams, other IRA members, and a handful of the people they disappeared. I thought all the actors were phenomenal. The period-appropriate music selections were top-notch, paired with a few haunting contemporary end credit tunes. I felt the series captured the heart and soul of the book. I highly recommend it. The events of Say Nothing are also depicted in the feature-length documentary I, Dolours, which draws primarily on her 2010 filmed interview with journalist Ed Moloney (who, coincidentally, is the author of the next reviewed book).

My Goodreads Rating: 5 Stars

3 | Voices from the Grave: Two Men’s War in Ireland Ed Moloney

In the aftermath of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, two men from opposing sides of the conflict secretly record hours of tape recounting their paramilitary experiences as part of Boston College’s Belfast Project. After their deaths, the transcripts are released to the public, prompting journalist Ed Moloney to tell their previously unknown stories.

Brendan Hughes, a Catholic, joined the Provisional Irish Republican Army (PIRA) following the 1969 riots—which saw Catholics burnt out of their homes in mixed neighborhoods—to defend his community from loyalist mobs. Rising to Officer Commanding of the IRA, he was on the front lines of the fight to expel the British and unify Ireland. He played a major role in the planning of the disastrous Bloody Friday bombing campaign, eliminated a British surveillance team posing as a laundry van, staged a successful solo prison break, and initiated the 1980 hunger strike (which was eventually called off and followed up a year later with the infamous strike which took ten men’s lives). He was perhaps the most wounded by the betrayal of longtime friend Gerry Adams when he refused to acknowledge his role in the IRA and its operations. Adams had been the statesman, calling the shots while keeping his hands clean; Hughes had been his right-hand man, carrying out the dirty work. The latter would bear the heavy guilt of everything he had done during the Troubles for the rest of his life.

David Ervine, a Protestant, joined the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) in response to the Bloody Friday bombing orchestrated by Brendan Hughes. He wanted to defend his community and exact retribution on the IRA. He was caught driving a stolen car with five pounds of explosives and sentenced to 11 years in prison. Upon his release in 1980, he shifted to politics and eventually took part in negotiating the 1994 ceasefire agreement.

Fun fact: Gerry Adams attended both men’s funerals.

I discovered this dual biography skimming through Say Nothing’s list of references. I was intrigued by the story of IRA leader Brendan Hughes, a major player in the events of Say Nothing, but not the primary focus. I quickly swooped up a copy of Voices from the Grave to learn more about his life. If this had merely been a biography of Brendan Hughes, I would have rated this book five stars. However, the purpose of the dual biography is to provide a balanced analysis of the conflict from both sides. Despite being interested in an account from the Protestant UVF perspective (I know less about it than I do the IRA), I felt underwhelmed by David Ervine’s narrative. He was less forthcoming about his actions during the Troubles and spent more time in prison, largely removed from the conflict. Author Ed Moloney filled in the blanks with general history of the paramilitary organization. Ervine’s later years were focused on his role in the peace talks which, while important, were a bit dry.

The most interesting morsel of information in Ervine’s section was about the Miami Showband Massacre in 1975 (in which he did not take part), the unjust slaughter of a popular musical group with no ties to any paramilitary organization. The massacre was staged by the UVF and the British military at a fake checkpoint to look like the band was smuggling bombs across the border for the IRA. The ploy was exposed when the planted bombs went off early, prompting the UVF to open fire. Two band members survived and eventually learned the truth of why they were targeted. I highly recommend watching the Netflix documentary Remastered: The Miami Showband Massacre for the full story.

My Goodreads Rating: 4 Stars

4 | Ten Men Dead: The Story of the 1981 Hunger Strike David Beresford

The British government’s removal of Special Category Status for political prisoners in 1976 leads to a series of protests. Originally granted in 1972, Special Category Status treated prisoners convicted of paramilitary-related offenses as POWs and allowed them certain rights and freedoms, including the right to wear civilian clothing and to refrain from prison work. When the status is revoked, political prisoners are treated as common criminals. From within Long Kesh (officially HM Prison Maze), the IRA launches a series of protests, beginning with the blanket protest, during which prisoners refuse to wear prison uniforms and only cover themselves in blankets. Tensions between prison guards and prisoners escalate into the “no wash” or “dirty” protest. Prisoners refuse to shower and smear their excrement onto their cell walls. After no progress toward the restoration of their special category privileges, the IRA decides to pull out all the stops and confront Britain with a moral dilemma. They will go on hunger strike until their demands are met. The first strike begins in 1980, led by Brendan Hughes (the very same Brendan Hughes featured in Say Nothing and Voices from the Grave). It is called off just before the first striker slips into a coma and reportedly begs Hughes not to let him die. By the following year, a new line-up of prisoners, headlined by Bobby Sands, are queued up for their turn at the hunger strike, ready to die for Ireland.

Widely considered the definitive account of the 1981 hunger strike, Ten Men Dead explores the build-up to the sacrificial dispute and delves into the lives and personalities of the ten hunger strikers who gave their lives for the cause. Author David Beresford, a South African-born journalist who reported on the strike for the British newspaper The Guardian, compiles an unbiased account from interviews he conducted (including a meeting with the most prominent hunger striker, Bobby Sands), events he witnessed, and a considerable number of secret communications smuggled out of prison and delivered to IRA leadership. First published in 1987, the narrative conveys the immediacy of the hunger strike and its impact on the Troubles. Beresford also recounts public reactions on both sides of the conflict and the toll the strike took on the families as they grieved their young men or took measures to intervene and save their lives.

My Goodreads Rating: 4 Stars

5 | There Will Be Fire: Margaret Thatcher, the IRA, and Two Minutes That Changed History Rory Carroll

In the wake the 1981 hunger strike and its failure to sway the government of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the IRA considers her personally responsible for the deaths of those ten men. In response, they hatch a plan of retribution: her assassination. The attempt is shockingly close to being successful when a bomb planted by the IRA explodes at the Grand Hotel in Brighton, England on October 12, 1984, the last day of the Conservative Party Conference. Several innocent hotel guests and other members of parliament are killed or maimed in the blast, but Thatcher walks away unscathed. What follows is a massive years-long manhunt to find the person responsible for planting the bomb and nearly changing the course of British history.

Author Rory Carroll, an Irish foreign correspondent for The Guardian, presents a relatively unbiased account of the attempted assassination of the “Iron Lady.” He begins with a quasi-dual biography of Margaret Thatcher and the IRA bomber Patrick Magee, detailing Thatcher’s rise to fame, her public perception among Irish republicans, her hardened stance against political violence following the appalling, unprecedented murder of British noble Lord Louis Mountbatten, and Patrick Magee’s personal life and history with the Irish Republican Army. He also dedicates pages to Gerry Adams, who was transitioning from IRA leader to politician at the time, painting him in a more diplomatic light than in the previously reviewed books. Carroll then transitions to focus on the investigation of the bombing and the search for the culprit's identity and whereabouts, to Magee's tentative reconciliation with the daughter of one of his victims.

My Goodreads Rating: 4 Stars

6 | Bear in Mind These Dead Susan McKay

1972. Sally McClenaghan, a Catholic woman living with a Protestant man, is raped by a Protestant gang and left for dead. Her mentally disabled son is tortured and shot to death in front of her.

1974. The loyalist Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) launches a series of coordinated bombings in Dublin and Monaghan, killing 33 civilians and injuring nearly 300. Fourteen-year-old Derek Byrne, pronounced dead at the scene of a bombing in Dublin, narrowly survives and is disfigured for life.

1975. Nineteen-year-old Catholic boy Columba McVeigh is abducted and “disappeared” by the IRA. His mother spends the last nine years of her life begging the IRA to tell her where her son is. His body is never recovered.

1976. Oliver Reavey finds the dead bodies of his brothers John Martin and Brian gunned down in their home by loyalist assassins. The same night, another Catholic family is murdered a few miles away. The following day, the IRA seeks retribution by stopping a minibus carrying eleven Protestant men (one Catholic man is allowed to go free), lining them up and shooting them. Alan Black, a Protestant, is the sole survivor of the massacre. When Eugene Reavey, brother of Oliver, John Martin, and Brian, is unjustly accused of participating in the mass execution, Alan Black knows this to be untrue. The two men are friends.

1981. Nora McCabe, a young Catholic mother of three, is killed by a shot to the back of the head at close range by a plastic bullet fired from a Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) land rover.

1987. The IRA sets off a bomb near the Enniskillen, County Fermanagh war memorial on Remembrance Day, killing ten civilians—many of them elderly—and one police officer. Fifty-year-old Jim Dixon, a Protestant father of three, is critically wounded with multiple skull fractures and extensive damage to his face, in addition to broken ribs, pelvis, hips, and one leg smashed. More than sixty others are injured.

1990. Patsy Gillespie, a Catholic husband and father, is used as human bomb by the IRA. The bomb kills Patsy and five British soldiers. It is later revealed the British Army likely instigated the plan by infiltrating the IRA.

1993. Alan McBride, a young Protestant man, loses his wife and father-in-law in the Shankill bombing of Frizzell’s Fish Shop by the IRA, leaving his two-year-old daughter motherless. One IRA bomber, a member of the loyalist Ulster Defense Association (UDA), and eight Protestant civilians—two of them children—are killed. In response, the UDA opens fire on civilians in a crowded pub frequented by Catholics in Greysteel, County Derry, killing eight, two of whom are Protestant.

1996. Robert “Basher” Bates, an infamous member of the Protestant Shankill Butchers gang known for kidnapping, torturing, and butchering Catholics, is released from prison. Several months later, he is shot and killed by the son of a UDA man Bates had killed twenty years prior.

1997. On his way home from visiting his Protestant best friend, sixteen-year-old James Morgan, a Catholic, is murdered by a splinter loyalist group, the Loyalist Volunteer Force (LVF). He is tortured and beaten to death with a hammer, his body doused with petrol and set on fire. His remains are buried in a pit of animal carcasses. His family is unable to have an open casket at his funeral.

These are just a selection of victims' accounts of the nonsensical, retaliatory violence of the Troubles.

Bear in Mind These Dead is a memorial to those killed in the decades-long sectarian conflict whose stories were lost in the “hierarchy of death.” It gives voice to their experiences and suffering. Until I read this book, I had largely seen and heard of the opposing sides referred to as Catholic and Protestant. Author and journalist Susan McKay, who grew up as a Protestant in Derry and later moved to Belfast in 1981, chooses instead to the use the terms “loyalist” or “unionist” (those loyal to the union with Britain) and “nationalist” or “republican” (those supporting the Irish nationalist objective of uniting the 32 counties into one Republic of Ireland). These terms are more accurate in the sense they denote which cause people supported, rather than their heritage or religion, which did not always align. Given McKay’s upbringing, I was surprised at how unbiased she remains throughout her writing. She gives equal care when detailing each person’s narrative regardless of their perceived ranking in society. She even exposes how unfairly Catholics were treated when it came to receiving justice (or even sympathy) in the years of inquests and reconciliations following the Troubles.

At times, I found it difficult to keep track of the various characters as I waded through the sheer volume of anecdotes. All were necessary, though, to underscore how no group of people—neither loyalist nor republican—in Northern Ireland during the Troubles can claim a monopoly on tragedy. Some families were victims of both sides of the conflict—a husband and father murdered by the British Army, a son and brother killed by the IRA. Others were victims of the paramilitary group purportedly fighting for their own community. McKay highlights the innocent civilian casualties based on personal interviews of grieving family members and survivors of various atrocities. She follows their journeys of processing the trauma both at the time of occurrence and years later after the Troubles had come to an end, whether it be clinging to hatred and bitterness or forgiving the often-unrepentant perpetrators who killed their loved ones. Father Dan Whyte, who comforted bereaved families and whose church was burned down by loyalists, wisely states, “There is no revenge so complete as forgiveness.” This comprehensive work of nonfiction is a timely reminder that political violence achieves nothing but perpetuating more hatred and violence.

Two related documentaries, the phenomenal five-part series covering the full scope of the Troubles, Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland, and The Ballymurphy Precedent, a devastating film exploring the lesser-known Belfast civilian massacre by the British Army that predicated Bloody Sunday, feature some interviewees from this book and elaborate upon their personal stories.

My Goodreads Rating: 5 Stars

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The Troubles in Fiction

1972: A Novel of Ireland’s Unfinished Revolution | Morgan Llywelyn

At eighteen, Barry Halloran joins the Irish Republican Army as an explosives specialist. He also becomes a newspaper photographer, capturing the horrors of the Troubles during the 1960s and ’70s. Camera in hand, he is an eyewitness to the Bloody Sunday civil rights march massacre in 1972.

1999: A Novel of the Celtic Tiger and the Search for Peace | Morgan Llywelyn

Picking up where 1972 left off, Barry, now a crippled photojournalist who has stepped away from IRA activity, starts a family and continues to document the events of the Troubles leading up to the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.

My Goodreads Rating for Both Novels: 4 Stars

Note: 1972 & 1999 are books four and five of the five-part Irish Century series but can be read independently of the other three books. Click here to read my review of the first book, 1916.

The Troubles in Music

“The Men Behind the Wire” performed by Barleycorn

“Sunday Bloody Sunday” performed by U2

“The Town I Loved So Well” performed by The High Kings

“Son of Ireland” performed by The High Kings

“In Belfast” performed by The Wolfe Tones

“Four Green Fields” performed by Rory Makem

Click on the song title to listen!

No part of this blog post is generated by AI.