Published not long after the signing of the Belfast Agreement, David McVea and David McKittrick’s Making Sense of the Troubles has become a staple general history of the three-decade-long Northern Ireland conflict. Brian Rowan’s intense new book, Living with Ghosts, might be said to be in disagreement with the title of the earlier work. The sense from reading Rowan’s memoir of reporting on the conflict, its resolution and aftermath is that it might never make sense.
Rowan, a former longstanding BBC Northern Ireland security correspondent, was ever-present on TV screens during the final bloody years of the Troubles, then through tortuous years of wrangling over decommissioning. He has remained a well-sourced commentator and occasional reporter on talks processes since leaving the BBC. But his highest profile was during the period covered by this book, one of furtive meetings with a succession of IRA spokesmen dubbed “P O’Neill”, operators from shady reaches of the security services and loyalist brigadiers in Shankill and east Belfast safe houses.
Psychological impact
This book is a memoir of those encounters and analysis of their meaning at many years’ remove, but also an insight into their psychological impact on the author. It includes dramatic moments like Rowan’s transportation, with his eyes taped, to an IRA safe house to be briefed my men in balaclavas about the circumstances surrounding the murders of three men Rowan and his crew had reported on the previous evening, alleged security service informants whose naked bodies were discarded by roadsides in south Armagh. “When I got home, I wept,” Rowan writes. “Now, when I reflect, I realise how sick this place had become.”
Much of the book is a meditation on the tension between the journalistic impulse to tell a compelling story – which the conflict in the North was, and is – and the moral quandary of participating in what is also an obscene story. The minuscule geography of Northern Ireland is also ever present, the pressure of moving around Belfast – by any measure not a big city – surrounded in the 1980s and 1990s not just by looming hills, but army watchtowers and helicopters. Escaping to Greencastle or Moville, in Donegal, is a precious release for Rowan, “a world away” – pathetically true for so many strung-out northerners over the years.
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
There is a pulpy, Dashiell Hammett quality to Rowan’s writing, which mostly fits a story that attempts to do both the reporter’s job of relating interesting facts but also the writer’s job of capturing the torment that this place inflicted on people for decades.
Matthew O’Toole is SDLP MLA for Belfast South
