Sometimes history needs the grand canvas. Sometimes it needs the micro-scale — and this remarkable book of local history is almost painfully focused. Martin Doyle was born in Tullylish, a rural parish in Co Down about halfway between Belfast and the Irish border. It would be unremarkable except that it lies on the edge of what has been called the “Murder Triangle”. Some of the most horrific killings of the Troubles took place here in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s — more than 20 murders in the one parish.
In this book Doyle seeks out people — his neighbours, he calls them — on both sides of the sectarian divide whose family members were killed. He tries to record what happened and understand the size and shape of the loss.
Doyle is the books editor of The Irish Times, but he tells the stories not in a particularly literary way but with the plainness of great feeling: personal feeling. If “the North is a big village”, as Doyle says, Tullylish is a very much smaller one. Everyone knew everyone. The first atrocity recounted — the shooting of two brothers (aged 18 and 22) in their home at their sister’s 11th birthday party, in 1993 — is followed by Doyle’s quiet remark that the murdered boys had once shared primary school classes with his brothers. Later, after describing how UVF gunmen broke into a remote farmhouse on a quiet Sunday evening in 1976 and shot dead two of eight children and a visiting uncle, Doyle explains that everyone in the parish knew the O’Dowds. “They delivered the milk that you put on your cereal ... and the coal that you burned in the fireplace to keep you warm at night.”
Doyle often dwells on upsetting details, but it feels intimate and heartfelt, not exploitative. He describes how the band who played at Banbridge’s Castle Ballroom on July 31, 1975, were blown up by a bomb planted in their minibus on the way home, then hunted down when they tried to get away from their minibus; Fran O’Toole, the singer, he says, was shot 22 times, “mostly in the face”.
That will haunt me. So will the story of the trade unionist Pat Campbell, shot in his hallway with a sub-machinegun in October 1973, probably by the notorious loyalist Glenanne gang. His daughter tells Doyle that they couldn’t live in the house for long because of the memories of his murder. “If we had to go to the toilet, we had to step over where my daddy was lying.”
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Or there’s Jimmy Feeney, the 18-year-old boxing champion who had his triumph reported on the back page of the Banbridge Chronicle in the same issue that reported his father’s murder on the front. In April 1975 Jimmy saw his dad being shot in the throat where he sat, with his friends, in their local darts club bar. In the muzzle flashes of the automatic fire he noticed that the gunman was wearing blue jeans.
None of these details feels gratuitous. They feel purposeful. The glorification of political violence is only enabled, Doyle writes, “if you allow a new generation to ignore the gore in which it is steeped”. He makes us look.
The victims here come from both communities, but the account is coloured by Doyle’s experiences. As a working-class Catholic he has a keen sense of the injustices endured by the north’s Catholic population. He is outraged by inadequate police investigations, and appalled by the apparent evidence of collusion between British security forces and loyalist paramilitaries. And noting that two books were published in 2021 about the burning of large houses in the north, he comments: “Perhaps more attention should be paid to the burning of small houses.”
● In the line of fire: photographing the Troubles in Northern Ireland
Doyle works in passages of memoir. He remembers being pelted with potatoes and stones by Protestant teenagers when trying to earn pocket money helping with the harvest. He writes with bruised tenderness about his schooling at Banbridge Academy, and its failure to challenge sectarianism that was “not an undercurrent, it was a riptide”. He describes how his cousin’s RE teacher made her stand up in her first week, “so the rest of the class could see what a Catholic looked like”.
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The autobiographical material on Doyle’s student life and early career, by contrast, can feel a little shoehorned in. Did I need to know that he was an extra in Father Ted? But what lifts the book — and gives it a touch of the literary — is how Doyle keeps returning to what you might call the problem of memory. In Northern Ireland’s rush to escape the terrible grip of its past, many families feel they have been left behind.
Doyle captures their enduring grief and trauma. Eamon, the father of the two brothers shot in 1993, tells him that “we’re stuck in this silence and everybody else is getting on with life”. Declan Feeney, brother of the boxer Jimmy, who lost his father too, puts it differently, telling Doyle how he loved England when he moved there because “if you can do the job, you’re their man, they don’t give two f***s who your da was”.
They say that the British never remember and the Irish never forget. This blood-soaked but ultimately deeply compassionate study of the suffering of one small, rural Northern Irish locality is a fine, and necessary, act of remembrance.
Dirty Linen by Martin Doyle (Merrion £19.99). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members.
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