Dirty Linen The Troubles in My Home Place MARTIN DOYLE
Martin Doyle, Books Editor of The Irish Times, offers a personal, intimate history of the Troubles seen through the microcosm of a single rural parish, his own, part of both the Linen Triangle – heartland of the North’s defining industry – and the Murder Triangle – the Badlands devastated by paramilitary violence. He lifts the veil of silence drawn over the horrors of the past, recording in heartrending detail the terrible toll the conflict took – more than twenty violent deaths in a few square miles – and the long tail of trauma it has left behind. He also conveys the texture of the times, the high streets where cars could not be left unattended, the newsflashes, the constant background buzz of threat and fear.
Neighbours and classmates who lost loved ones in the conflict, survivors maimed in bomb attacks and victims of sectarianism, both Catholic and Protestant, entrust him with their stories. Doyle marries his local knowledge with a literary sensibility and skilfully shows how the once dominant local linen industry serves as a metaphor for both communal division but also the solidarity that transcended the sectarian divide. To those who might ask why you would want to reopen old wounds, the answer might be that some wounds have never been allowed to heal.
Hardback • €24.99 | £22.99 • 368 pages • 234 mm x 153 mm • 9781785374609
About the Author Martin Doyle is Books Editor of The Irish Times, which he joined in 2007. He started his career in London in 1990 with The Irish World, joined The Irish Post in 1992 and became Editor before moving in 2001 to The Times. A native of Banbridge, Co. Down, he is a graduate of the University of St Andrews in Scotland, where he studied French and German. He contributed an essay to The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices (Unbound, 2021) and to the Routledge Handbook of the Northern Ireland Conflict and Peace (forthcoming).
