Reporting the Troubles, edited by Deric Henderson and Ivan Little

My review of Reporting the Troubles: Journalists Tell Their Stories of the Northern Ireland Conflict (Blackstaff Press), edited by Deric Henderson and Ivan Little, appears in today’s Sunday Business Post Magazine. Here’s a short excerpt:

Reporting the Troubles comprises seventy short essays by journalists who spent time reporting from the heart of the conflict. It runs in roughly chronological order, beginning with Martin Cowley’s brief memoir about his involvement with the 1968 Duke Street protest [i.e. Bloody Sunday, widely understood as the first day of the Troubles] and ending with Gail Walker’s reflections on a troubled peace (“we are faced with a frightening dilemma and responsibility: what to remember and what to forget”). In between are dozens of snapshots from hell: recollections of that period, in the 1970s, when (as the editors put it) “one day’s murders would routinely be overtaken by the next day’s atrocities,” or of the depradations of the Shankill Butchers in the early 1980s.

Every piece fascinates and moves. Robert Fisk speaks for many of his fellow contributors when he remembers writing “DIED” over names in his contacts book. Gloria Hunniford describes staying on air for BBC radio as a car bomb exploded outside the studio building. Justine McCarthy grippingly reconstructs an interview with the “moral contortionist” Martin McGuinness (he declined to be photographed with a graveyard in the background: “People might think I’m responsible for these”).