Martin Doyle describes Dirty Linen as a personal, intimate history of the Troubles through the microcosm of a single rural parish, Tullylish. It’s between Banbridge and Portadown, where Co Down shades into Co Armagh. Doyle is of the place. His grandfather was expelled from Uprichard’s Bleach Green, one of hundreds of Catholics driven from their workplaces along the river Bann in the early 1920s. It forms part of the linen triangle, an industry notably sectarian in its work practices, according to Roy Foster. It is also a part of the murder triangle, anti-Catholicism hanging in the air like the stench from the lint holes.
Bleary Darts Club was founded by Joe Toman in 1973 in an old weaver’s cottage on Sugar Island Road, in Lurgan. It was a place to go locally, play darts and drink beer. It was the kind of thing that people did then: they improvised, turned their hand to things. On April 27th, 1975, masked gunmen entered the club and opened fire with pistol, shotgun and machine gun. Joe Toman, Brendan O’Hara and John Michael Feeney were shot dead.
Everyone in Tullylish knew the O’Dowds. They delivered coal. They had a milk round. You made do with what work you found. You had to be resilient. The O’Dowds’ house was full on the evening of Sunday, January 4th, 1976, when UVF gunmen entered and shot dead Barry, who was 24, Declan, who was 19, and Joe, who was 61. The detail in the aftermath is heartbreaking, the “acts of love”. A father shielding his children, a daughter whispering an act of contrition, a glass of whiskey raised to a lifeless mouth.
Anti-Catholicism was innate and structural. There’s no other way of saying it. It wasn’t just a case of being regarded as second-class citizens; the view that Catholics were something less than human was promoted by politicians to their own ends
Doyle is a journalist. His first instinct is to step out of the way, to give space to the voices in the room. The series of interviews that form the spine of the book are eloquent, unforgettable. The southwest Down vernacular is unadorned: there’s no room to hide your grief even if you wanted to. The people of Tullylish recite the offices of their dead with dignity.
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The prose is brisk and professional, but Doyle has an acute eye and ear, is lyric when he needs to be. The Feeneys were also huntsmen and collected dead animals from farmers. The phrase “fallen stock” reverberates. In Doyle’s words, the North was one great charnel house. Jimmy Feeney describes his father’s killer to the police by the only light available in the darkness and chaos of the Bleary Darts Club, that of the muzzle flash from the killer’s gun. What light could be darker than from the gun that is killing your father and two of his friends? Doyle observes that this was the light that Jimmy saw by for the rest of his days.
There’s always a voice to say, Why drag all this up again? But there is no again in Doyle’s eyes. Much of what happened remained untold, at best lost in the daily carnage of what we have learned to call the Troubles, at worst obscured, distorted, ignored. These deaths were not properly investigated, not properly memorialised. The very least we owe them is our time, the time it takes to listen to what they went through and are still going through. There is a wider context. Milan Kundera said the struggle of people against power is the struggle of remembering against forgetting.
For all of this Doyle is good company. The early years in Millar Park are happy, if not immune from violence and its outworkings. The Doyle parents wanted everything for their children, brought them to the library every week. This time is recalled with real fondness. Walks to school, playing football until you couldn’t see the ball in the dark, Space Invaders in the local shop. There were the British comics Tiger and Hotspur, and the good stuff was read too. Graham Greene, Jennifer Johnston. But following the doorstep sectarian murder of Pat Campbell, shop steward at Down Shoes, Doyle’s mother would always answer a knock at the door as if, Doyle says, she would have been spared by the gunmen where her husband would not. And when a neighbour buys a house from a Protestant it was burned down. If a Protestant couldn’t live in it then no one would live in it. The undertow was always there. Doyle doesn’t hold back but stays the right side of polemic.
Every grief remains unmapped, closed off to the passerby, but the loss of Doyle’s wife, Nikki, to cancer, leaving three children, in 2013 lends a delicate and understated emotional tracery to the accounts of others’ bereavement
Anti-Catholicism was innate and structural. There’s no other way of saying it. It wasn’t just a case of being regarded as second-class citizens; the view that Catholics were something less than human was promoted by politicians to their own ends. Ian Paisley in 1969 said that Catholics breed like rabbits and multiply like vermin. Many of the deaths recorded in Dirty Linen have an element of what is termed collusion but in this and other authoritative tellings resembles policy. Doyle names the sectarian killers: Billy Wright and the worst of them all, Robin Jackson. All identified as state agents. At times Tullylish and its surrounds seem to be Jackson’s personal killing ground, where he operated with impunity. Despite clear evidence of Jackson’s crimes, the police weren’t interested.
To read it is often wrenching, to write about it even more so. To review is to revisit, and for a reviewer the professional divide is hard to maintain. If you come from south Down you know the people, you know the dark terrain. You heard the Miami Showband on the radio. You know where you were when the Reaveys were gunned down, watched on television as police picked through the human wreckage of the Whitecross massacre.
The Catholic Doyle and his siblings went to the Protestant Banbridge Academy, a well-intentioned ecumenical gesture by his parents. He describes it as “slightly diluted orange”. He talks to a former teacher about sectarianism in the school, and here as elsewhere he lets the teacher’s own words hang in the air. Equally, credit is given to Winston Breen, a reforming headmaster who lost his own brother to a republican bullet.
The Doyles all did well. His brother Shane, a history professor, puts it bluntly: “Repeated reminders that Catholics were stupid provoked the desire to do well, and to leave.” Martin went to St Andrews, where he “realised I could become a different, middle-class, person if I wanted. But I didn’t really.” He spent the first decade of his career working for Irish community newspapers in London. (He is now Books Editor of The Irish Times.) There was an obligation to represent the “marginalised outgroup” of the Irish diaspora. Every grief remains unmapped, closed off to the passerby, but the loss of Doyle’s wife, Nikki, to cancer, leaving three children, in 2013 lends a delicate and understated emotional tracery to the accounts of others’ bereavement.
Each story is given equal weight. The blinding of Margaret Yeaman in an IRA bombing. The shooting dead of the RUC reservist and long-serving nurse Bobbie Harrison by the IRA. Richard Beattie speaks of the murder of his father in an INLA bombing that claimed two other lives. The criteria for inclusion is the connection to Tullylish, not religion or politics. Many – more than you would think possible – draw on superhuman reserves to pray for the murderers. Others resist bitterness but withhold forgiveness, and who would blame them?
On Thursday, October 28th, 1993, Sheila Cairns photographs her husband, three sons and daughter in the kitchen of the family home in Bleary. The occasion is Róisín’s 11th birthday. Shortly after the photograph is taken, gunmen in boiler suits and balaclavas burst in and shoot dead 22-year-old Gerard and 18-year-old Rory. Eamon Cairns, father of Gerard and Rory, tries to find the jolly man he was before the loss of his sons. He goes to the All-Ireland Fleadh, finds a quiet spot to cry, then goes about his day “because I’d squared it with Rory and Gerard”. He says that “supposedly rigorous investigations” into the murder of his children “were deliberately flawed and collusive”.
In the context of this book, the British Legacy Act bringing an end to all legal avenues of redress to victims in the North is unspeakable. The files relating to the killing of 12-year-old Majella O’Hare and 14-year-old Julie Livingstone by British army units have been sealed until 2065. Also unspeakable.
In The Glass Essay the poet Anne Carson is rebuked by her mother for refusing to let go of her heartbreak over a lost love: “Why hold onto all that? And I said, / Where can I put it down?” That is the truth of the matter. There is nowhere for the people of Tullylish to put down their hurt, but Dirty Linen allows them to break in part the long silence. This is an important, humane book, stunning in its sweep and power. It will prove to be a classic.
Prof Eoin McNamee is director of the Trinity Oscar Wilde Centre. His 19 novels include Resurrection Man and the Blue Trilogy
Three other essential books about the Troubles
Lost Lives, by Chris Thornton, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney and David McKittrick (Mainstream)
A recital of all the dead killed in the Troubles, with a description of the circumstances of each death. No work approaches the authority of Lost Lives, its great, sombre tolling of the names of the dead.
The Sun Is Open, by Gail McConnell (Penned In the Margins)
Gail McConnell’s poems encircle the murder of her prison governer father when she was three. This is both a work of adamantine witness and a patient unearthing of what is rare and beautiful.
Lethal Allies, by Anne Cadwallader (Mercier)
The collusive framework of sectarian killing during the conflict is starkly documented.
