Same space, radically different experiences - a new book tells the stories of people from the Border counties, writes Susan McKay

'What kind of contamination of spirits exists there? What kind of ghosts exist there? What kind of healing is needed there?"

The questions are posed by Eamon Baker, one of the 100 interviewees whose stories are told in Borderlines - Personal Stories and Experiences From the Border Counties.

From Derry, Baker is talking about what he feels when he drives through Coshquin on the Derry-Donegal border and passes the memorial to Patsy Gillespie and the five British soldiers, all of whom died when the IRA forced Gillespie to drive a "human bomb" into a checkpoint in 1990. Baker comments that he still feels the revulsion he felt over the slaughter when it happened.

The next interview in the book is with Brian Bethell, the father of Paul Bethell, one of the soldiers blown up on that terrible day.

"I just want to understand why Paul was killed," he says.

He also wants his son to be remembered, and explains that after a long campaign involving writing to Queen Elizabeth, the Archbishop of Liverpool, the head of the local council and various brigadiers and others, he succeeded in getting Paul's name inscribed on the Cenotaph. At first he was told that his son couldn't be on the war memorial, because there had been no war in Northern Ireland.

HE DECIDED TO take part in Borderlines because he wanted Irish people, including those who murdered his son, to read it - and listen to it, for this is also a recorded archive.

"What we wanted to do was to encourage the quieter voices to speak out," says Trish Lambe of Dublin's Gallery of Photography. "We want people to hear the stories of other people whose experience of the same space is radically different from their own."

The idea originated around Lambe's kitchen table. She is from close to the Armagh border, as is her partner, artist and academic Anthony Haughey. "We were talking about the transitional phase after the conflict and the need to record it," she says.

The project was planned, the introduction to the book explains, "within the spirit of optimism that coincided with the peace process", when there was "a sense of a new kind of possibility that we could deal with our past, turn our back on it and move forward into the future". It was funded by the EU programme for peace and reconciliation.

The recorded archive consists of many, many hours of interviews. Brian Bethell talked for eight hours over the course of three days. Others talked for half an hour. It will be held in the Linenhall Library in Belfast and in other libraries and museums along the Border. The book consists of edited versions of the interviews, and will be launched in January.

"The book is like a first step into the archive," explains Lambe. There are photographs too. Some of them are good - annoyingly, they are all uncaptioned.

It starts in the west, with Baker, Bethell and others from or connected with Derry and Donegal. The Borderlines research team, scrupulously concerned to be respectful to everyone, have faced the old chestnut of what to call that contested city, and have dealt with it by calling it Derry Londonderry and then letting interviewees call it what they want.

Then it moves east to Tyrone, Fermanagh, Leitrim and Cavan, where an interviewee who chooses to be known as "anon" says that the Border "defines who you are". Then come Armagh and Monaghan, and finally, Down and Louth. It is an eclectic mix.

There are stories about violence, told in voices that are sometimes bitter, often angry, invariably full of distress and grief. There are stories about smuggling. Clare Quigley recalls her parents instructing the children to ditch the butter and save their bicycles if the customs men stop them. Her granny, a teacher, used to sit on a bag of flour and spread her "very grand black skirts around it".

There are funny stories. One involves a garda, customs officers and RUC men investigating the abduction of a greyhound in Carlingford. The optimism which came with the Belfast Agreement was frittered away in the political wrangling that followed. Some who had agreed to be interviewed withdrew, or asked not to be named.

Then disaster struck the Borderlines project last summer. On the eve of the launch, it emerged that there had been crossed lines between project staff and several of the interviewees, who refused to allow the book to go ahead in its existing form. The whole run of 2,000 big, shiny, expensive books had to be destroyed. It took three days. They filmed it.

"It was terrible," says Lambe. "But the process had to have integrity and part of it was honouring our commitments to all of those involved. We see this as a journey for all concerned. Quite a hard journey at times."

Borderlines: Personal Stories and Experiences from the Border Counties will be available at the Gallery of Photography from January, €50