Download or read book Belfast Diary written by John Conroy and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “For those puzzled by Northern Ireland, Belfast Diary offers a well-written, sympathetic and clear-eyed view” of life during the Troubles (New York Times Book Review) In the late 1960s, the ongoing conflict between the Protestant unionists and Catholic nationalists of Northern Ireland—divided by their stance on the country’s constitutional position as part of the United Kingdom—escalated to new, terrifying heights. Chicago journalist John Conroy was there on the frontlines, living among the people most affected by it. In Belfast Diary, Conroy offers a street-level view of life in a Catholic Ghetto in West Belfast, painting vivid portraits of its citizens and the violence they faced during the Troubles: bomb threats, murder, police brutality, and more. Conroy’s recounting of this tumultuous moment in Northern Irish history has been hailed as the best explanation of the more than twenty-five-year conflict. Now with a new afterword, Belfast Diary conveys an understanding that is an essential prerequisite to peace: the resolution of intractable problems around the world requires understanding ordinary people as well as leaders.
Download or read book Belfast Diaries written by Steve Corbett and published by Helion and Company. This book was released on 2013-10-19 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It's a very weird sensation to be shot at Very often you see the gunman when it's too late or you don't see him at all. You might as well just be targets on a rifle range. I often wondered if I would get through this tour ok, and even now I still do " In the four-month period during 1971 that Gunner Stephen Corbett was stationed in Andersontown, Northern Ireland, 33 servicemen were killed by terrorist action in the province. His unit, 9 (Plassey) Bty, Royal Artillery, was attacked by a bomb, bullet or rioters on more than 400 occasions. In 1972 alone, the toll of service personnel killed was more than 100. Yet their action was never classed as a war. When the servicemen returned home there were no marches through the streets to cheering crowds. They just quietly slipped in unnoticed and carried on with their other duties. The young Gunner's notebooks detailing his two tours of duty - Andersontown, November 1971 - March 1972, and New Lodge June 1974 - October 1974 - were put in a drawer where they were to lay, untouched, for more than 30 years. Here, for the first time, this account of his service is vividly brought to life and validated through newspaper articles, intelligence reports, and surviving examples of IRA propaganda. Share in the day-to-day life of a Gunner and his 'band of brothers' as they patrol the streets of this unforgiving suburban battleground. Relive the sights and sounds of the rioting and gun battles, and the devastating losses of fallen comrades Bernie Fearns and Kim Maccunn. Especially rare are the large collection of photographs taken by the author at that time, illustrating the life of a serviceman both on and off duty. 'Belfast Diaries' offers a unique opportunity to see this conflicted city through the eyes of an serviceman charged with peace-keeping duties at the height of 'The Troubles'; a real 'must-read' for any Northern Ireland or British Army enthusiast.
Download or read book Belfast Days written by Eimear O'Callaghan and published by . This book was released on 2022-02 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Belfast 1972. It's the bloodiest year of the Northern Irish 'Troubles', and 16-year-old Eimear O'Callaghan, a Catholic schoolgirl in West Belfast, bears witness in her new diary. What follows is a unique and touching perspective into the daily life of an ordinary teenager coming of age in extraordinary times. The immediacy of the diary entries are complemented with the author's mature reflections written 40 years later. The result is poignant, shocking, wryly funny, and, above all, explicitly honest. Belfast Days is unique book that comes at a time when Northern Ireland is desperately struggling to come to terms with the legacy of its turbulent past. It provides a powerful juxtaposition of the ordinary everyday concerns of a 16-year-old girl - who could be any girl in any British or Irish city at this time, worrying about her hair, exams, boys, clothes, discos - with the unimaginable horror of a society slowly disintegrating before her eyes, a seemingly inevitable descent into a bloody civil war, fuelled by sectarianism, hatred, and fear. Written by an experienced broadcaster and journalist who rediscovered her 1972 diary on the eve of the publication of the Saville Report (also known as the Bloody Sunday Inquiry), Belfast Days demonstrates how one person's examination of her own 'story' provided her with a new perspective on one of the darkest periods in 20th-century Irish and British history. *** "...the writing is extraordinary." -- Stephen Dubner, author of Freakonomics *** ".Brigid Jones in a war-zone." -- Anne Cadwallader, author of Lethal Allies *** "Eimear O'Callaghan's 1972 eloquent eye-witness testimony salutes the hard work, the persistence and the breathtaking courage of those who fought against tyranny and oppression for so many, many years!" - The Celtic Connection, September 2015 [Subject: Memoir, History, Irish Studies, British Studies]
Download or read book An Irish Navvy The Diary of an Exile written by Donall MacAmhlaigh and published by Gill & Macmillan Ltd. This book was released on 2003-03-05 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: DIrish construction workers in post-war Britain are celebrated in song and story. Donall MacAmhlaigh kept a diary as he worked the sites, danced in the Irish halls, drank in Irish pubs and lived the life of the roving Irish navvy. Work was hard, dirty and dangerous, followed by pints in the Admiral Rodney, the Shamrock, the Cattle Market Tavern and others. Living conditions were basic at best. This vivid picture of an Irish navvy's life in England in the 1950s mirrors that of an entire generation who left Ireland without education or hope. Days without food or work, the hardships of work camps, lonesome partings after trips home, periods of intense isolation and bitter reflection were all part of the experience. • Also available: Hard Road to Klondike.
Download or read book Belfast written by Feargal Cochrane and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-25 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A lively and inviting history of Belfast—exploring the highs and lows of a resilient city Modern Belfast is a beautiful city with a vibrant tradition of radicalism, industry, architectural innovation, and cultural achievement. But the city’s many qualities are all too frequently overlooked, its image marred by association with the political violence of the Troubles. Feargal Cochrane tells the story of his home city, revealing a rich and complex history which is not solely defined by these conflicts. From its emergence as a maritime port to its heyday as a center for the linen industry and crucible of liberal radicalism in the late eighteenth century, through to the famous shipyards where the Titanic was built, Belfast has long been a hub of innovation. Cochrane’s book offers a new perspective on this fascinating story, demonstrating how religion, culture, and politics have shaped the way people think, act, and vote in the city—and how Belfast’s past continues to shape its present and future.
Download or read book A Belfast Child written by John Chambers and published by John Blake. This book was released on 2020-09-03 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Chambers was brought up on Belfast's notorious Loyalist Glencairn estate, during the height of the Troubles. From an early age he witnessed violence, hatred and horror as Northern Ireland tore itself apart in civil strife. Kneecapping, brutal murders, and even public tarring-and-feathering were simply a fact of life for the children on the estate. He thought he knew which side he was on, but although raised as a Loyalist, he was hiding a troubling secret: that his disappeared mother - whom he'd always been told was dead - was a Roman Catholic, 'the enemy'. In a memoir of rare power, John explores the dark heart of Northern Irish sectarianism in the seventies and eighties. With searing honesty and native Belfast wit, he describes the light and darkness of his unique childhood, and his teenage journey through mod culture and ultra-Loyalism, before an escape from Belfast to London - where, still haunted by the shadow of his fractured family history - he began a turbulent and hedonistic adulthood. A Belfast Child is a tale of divided loyalties, dark secrets and the scars left by hatred and violence on a proud city - but also a story of hope, healing and ultimate redemption for a family caught in the rising tide of the Troubles.
Download or read book Diary of a Young Naturalist written by Dara McAnulty and published by Milkweed Editions. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A BuzzFeed "Best Book of June 2021" From sixteen-year-old Dara McAnulty, a globally renowned figure in the youth climate activist movement, comes a memoir about loving the natural world and fighting to save it. Diary of a Young Naturalist chronicles the turning of a year in Dara’s Northern Ireland home patch. Beginning in spring?when “the sparrows dig the moss from the guttering and the air is as puffed out as the robin’s chest?these diary entries about his connection to wildlife and the way he sees the world are vivid, evocative, and moving. As well as Dara’s intense connection to the natural world, Diary of a Young Naturalist captures his perspective as a teenager juggling exams, friendships, and a life of campaigning. We see his close-knit family, the disruptions of moving and changing schools, and the complexities of living with autism. “In writing this book,” writes Dara, “I have experienced challenges but also felt incredible joy, wonder, curiosity and excitement. In sharing this journey my hope is that people of all generations will not only understand autism a little more but also appreciate a child’s eye view on our delicate and changing biosphere.” Winner of the Wainwright Prize for UK nature writing and already sold into more than a dozen territories, Diary of a Young Naturalist is a triumphant debut from an important new voice.
Download or read book Belfast and Derry in Revolt written by Simon Prince and published by Merrion Press. This book was released on 2019-09-16 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a civil war started in Northern Ireland. This book tells that story through Belfast and Derry, using original archival research to trace how multiple and overlapping conflicts unfolded on their streets. The Troubles grew out of a political process that mobilised opponents and defenders of the Stormont regime, and which also dragged London and Dublin into the crisis. Drawing upon government papers, police reports, army files, intelligence summaries, evidence to inquiries and parish chronicles, this book sheds fresh light on key events such as the 5 October 1968 march, the Battle of the Bogside, the Belfast riots of August 1969, the ‘Battle of St Matthew’s’ (June 1970) and the Falls Road curfew (July 1970). Prince and Warner offer us two richly-detailed, engaging narratives that intertwine to present a new history of the start of the Troubles in Belfast and Derry – one that also establishes a foundation for comparison with similar developments elsewhere in the world.
Download or read book War as a Way of Life written by John Conroy and published by . This book was released on 1988 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book UDR Declassified written by Micheál Smith and published by Merrion Press. This book was released on 2022-03-23 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In UDR: Declassified, Micheál Smith reveals what the British establishment, the British government and its armed forces knew and had to say about the regiment in recently declassified files. From its formation in 1970 as a locally raised militia, the Ulster Defence Regiment developed into the largest regiment in the British Army. For unionists, service in the UDR was a noble act and often a family tradition; for nationalists, an encounter with the UDR was frequently hostile, often brutal, and sometimes fatal. To the British Army, they were ‘a dangerous species of ally’, and a classic militia regiment which was part of a long tradition of the use of such forces by the British Empire. It was viewed as ‘a safety valve’ for the tempers of loyalist extremism, and it also served as the main source of training, weaponry, and intelligence files for loyalists throughout the conflict. UDR: Declassified is an evidence-based exposé of the UDR through the declassified files of Number 10, the MoD, and the NIO. The denial of access to history is a part of a continuum of British state efforts to obscure its colonial past. This book is a testimony to the value of defying such efforts and uncovering the truths behind our traumatic past.
Download or read book Roger Casement written by Jeffrey Dudgeon and published by Belfast Press. This book was released on 2016-01-05 with total page 730 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this revised and expanded second edition with more photographs, all Roger Casement's Black Diaries are, uniquely, again published together, including the never-before-seen erotically-charged 1911 Diary over which London threatened an obscenity prosecution. A number of new characters are introduced and some old mysteries solved. The volume provides both a comprehensive view of the diaries' texts, with explanations for many of the cast of characters, famous, infamous, and fleeting, and a context for the author whose significance and seminal role in the political development of independent Ireland has been masked by the debates over the diaries' authenticity. This is a uniquely fresh and original look at the Irish patriot and humanitarian, hanged in 1916 for treason. It was the same Casement whose reports on rubber slavery and genocide in King Leopold's Congo and the Peruvian Amazon, in 1904 and 1911, reflected in two of his Black Diaries, that shocked Edwardian England. The book also deals with the neglected sides of Casement's life, his involvement in Ulster politics, his family background in Co. Antrim, his Belfast boyfriend Millar Gordon, and his sociopathic companion, the Norwegian sailor, Adler Christensen, as well as a comprehensive view of the authenticity controversies, Casement's homosexuality, and his time in Africa and Brazil. Roger Casement had iconic status in life and after death was sanctified and vilified in equal measure. His real self was consequently obscured. This book combines a rigorous academic study of Casement, the public and political figure (with over 1,000 references and an extensive bibliography, updated to 2016), alongside an account of his personal life, sexuality, and consular career, and an informed view of how they all interlocked and originated. It also provides a fresh assessment of the events leading up to the Easter Rising and British intelligence failings, and an up-to-date account of the controversies that have swirled around Casement to this day, including the attempts made in Dublin, from the 1930s, to threaten the truth about the Black Diaries. '"No Roger Casement - No Easter Rising"' Casement groomed the key personnel who set about creating the Irish Republic, from 1904 to 1923. He commissioned the first arms for the IRA - on two occasions, in 1914 and 1916. To know about Roger Casement is to know why Ireland achieved independence and why Ulster stayed separate remaining in the UK after partition. This volume therefore provides an insight into the political conflict in the north and suggests how it could be diminished by both learning and respecting each other's stories and agreeing to disagree.
Download or read book Belfast punk and the Troubles An oral history written by Fearghus Roulston and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2022-07-26 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Belfast punk and the Troubles is an oral history of the punk scene in Belfast from the mid-1970s to the mid-80s. The book explores what it was like to be a punk in a city shaped by the violence of the Troubles, and how this differed from being a punk elsewhere. It also asks what it means to have been a punk – how punk unravels as a thread throughout the lives of the people interviewed, and what that unravelling means in the context of post-peace-process Northern Ireland. In doing so, it suggests a critical understanding of sectarianism, subjectivity and memory politics in the North, and argues for the importance of placing punk within the segregated structures of everyday life described by the interviewees. Adopting an innovative oral history approach drawing on the work of Luisa Passerini and Alessandro Portelli, the book analyses a small number of oral history interviews with participants in granular detail. Outlining the historical context and the cultural memory of punk, the central chapters each delve into one or two interviews to draw out the affective, imaginative and political ways in which punks and former punks evoke their memories of taking part in the scene. Through this method, it analyses the punk scene as a structure of feeling shaped through the experience of growing up in wartime Belfast. Belfast punk and the Troubles is an intervention in Northern Irish historiography stressing the importance of history from below, and will be compelling reading for historians of Ireland and of punk, as well as those interested in innovative approaches to oral history.
Download or read book Northern Ireland in the Second World War written by Brian Barton and published by Ulster Historical Foundation. This book was released on 1995 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What was the full impact of the Second World War on Northern Ireland and how important was its role in the allied cause? This book assesses Northern Ireland's contribution to the war effort—its industrial production, its use as a base and training center for British and American troops, its strategic importance in the Battle of the Atlantic and the contribution of its volunteers to the allied campaigns. Using recently released papers in Dublin, it looks anew at the Blitz, particularly on whether the lights in neutral Eire helped the German bombers in their devasting raids. It recreates much of the atmosphere of what it was like to live for over 5 years under the combined attentions of German bombers, shortages, bureancracy and American soldiers. It examines the sensitive issues of why there was no conscription, the initially lacklustre performance of the Unionist government, de Valera's persistence with neutrality, and the extent of the tensions between locals and GIs stationed here. The long-term significance of the War—on inter-community relations, on governmental relations north and south, and between Stormont and Westminster - is assessed. It contends that in many of these areas, and in the establishment of the post-war welfare state, the Second World War was a major turning point in the history of Northern Ireland.
Download or read book Ireland since 1800 written by K.Theodore Hoppen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-12-02 with total page 339 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The second edition of this bestselling survey of modern Irish history covers social, religious as well as political history and offers a distinctive combination of chronological and thematic approaches.
Download or read book Old Ireland in Colour 2 written by John Breslin and published by Merrion Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 234 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Northern Ireland written by Carol Daugherty Rasnic and published by Brandylane Publishers Inc. This book was released on 2003 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Northern Ireland: Can Sean and John Live in Peace? explores the reasons for Northern Ireland's so-called "Troubles." In a compelling and detailed narrative, Professor Rasnic addresses the two primary causes of the conflict-religion and politics-and the source of response to the Troubles-the law. While serving as a Fulbright Distinguished Professor of Law at Queen's Belfast, she experienced the moods, hopes, and fears of those who have endured the atrocities. Interspersed with the author's personal interviews with many of the principals in the peace talks and vignettes that recall her childhood and adolescent years growing up in a small Southern town, Northern Ireland provides a clearer understanding of the essence of what has caused-and continues to cause-so much tragedy and grief in this beautiful province.
Download or read book Belfast 69 written by Andrew Walsh and published by Fonthill Media. This book was released on 2017-05-17 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: August 1969, Belfast. A campaign for civil rights in Northern Ireland that had begun less than two years previously degenerates into inter-communal violence. The three days of 13, 14 and 15 August changed the course of Northern Irish history by radicalising a whole generation of Catholic youths. On the Protestant side, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) – revived in 1966 but barely mentioned outside Shankill Road – was in full conflict by 1972. How did the events of August 1969 radicalise the emerging youth of both sides of the religious divide? How did they drive an otherwise indifferent generation to carry out some of the most heinous crimes in Irish history and become embroiled in the longest period of Irish ‘Troubles’ to date? In Belfast ’69, Andrew Walsh uncovers the truth by interviewing many from both sides – the young men who joined the numerous ‘armies’ that sprung up in the wake of that fateful August. Illustrations: 41 colour photographs
