Books: The Telling Year – Belfast 1972
What I remember of 1972 is searching through front page headlines to see who’d been killed the night before, and all but on one occasion being thankful it wasn’t anyone I knew. Even traumatic events like Bloody Sunday quickly faded as Republican and Loyalists took it upon themselves to conduct a particularly nasty game of tit for tat, snuffing out the lives of many ordinary people in the wider population as a kind of macabre tally of success. One Protestant assassinated one night, possibly meant two Catholics the next: a bloody arithmetic, that seemed to have no end. In the middle of it were journalists, the local variety used to writing up stories about lost budgies, new roads, and lovely girls who, in three years of sustained civil disorder barely knew what had hit them. It was Malachi O’Doherty’s first year as a journalist. A year he recounts with unremitting honesty in his book, A The Telling Year: Belfast 1972. You can read my review from this month’s Fortnight magazine here.
Malachi,
Vindictive is right. There’s a lot of serious comment on here, but the vituperative stuff is easy to spot, since it generally shies away from engaging directly with the material.
Robbie,
My last line referenceed the Tyrie story. I wasn’t just thinking of Malachi when I wrote that line. Not many journalists died in the Troubles, but many of them lived on their wits. I can also think of a few ancilliary workers who died for working on the wrong paper. With colleagues then pursuaded to keep the contract by ‘forceful’ argument.
As also noted in the review, it was autobiography, not a thesis. Neither, I expect, was it intended to be definative. Any one old enough to remember that year will remember the way men with guns sought the easiest victims, and put them to death, seemingly without a second thought.
There are dozens of stories about such gung ho behaviour, and it cuts across the paramilitary organisations. I don’t believe all truth is bitter, but some of it undoubtedly is.
But they only belie the unionists on here if you believe the McKay specimens to be more representative than the unionists on here. I’m saying that that is not the case.
There is little in the book that is any worse than has came out from Unionists on here. I think the book captures some of the complexity and range of opinions within Unionism; I don’t believe for a second it captured it all.
Truly, a good book about a godawful time. Sevebt chapters in now, and would be much further along if time allowed.
Whatever your politics it’s well worth the time invested to read it. I imagine readers’ own personal histories with the military and the paramilitaries will colour the details that resonate with them, and those they gloss over.
One telling detail from Malachi’s recollection of a Summer holiday his parents took to Donegal in 1971 ricocheted around my head at odd moments all day today. Of his mother, he recalls, “I think that was the last time I saw her playful. She was 55 years old, the age I am now. She was on holiday and merrily, not darkly, drunk. She was relieved of a heavy work routine, that was part of it….The troubles had been horribly demoralising for her and I had already seen her at times so fraught that she was almost shrieking in ordinary conversation.”
A description that would resonate with many, I reckon.