Lawyer Christopher Stanley reviews the eloquent and beautiful ‘Dirty Linen: The Troubles in My Home Place’, by Martin Doyle.
The peace process in Northern Ireland which has followed the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 is best seen as transitional. During this transition, reconciliation requires a consensus of the voices of the dead being spoken through the loss and grief of their loved ones and through other sympathetic interlocutors.
This is what Martin Doyle, currently Books Editor of the Irish Times, accomplishes in ‘Dirty Linen: The Troubles in My Home Place’.
The violent deaths Doyle describes and the loss and grief he seeks to give expression to belong to his family and neighbours. Those who are left endow him and enable him, because he understands their person and place, to become their voices through his “speech marks”. Doyle’s project is “polyphonic work, communicating different perspectives through many voices” (page 15).
He reminds us – and those who seek to impose silence – that those who suffered a violent death by bomb or bullet and their loved ones will not, should not and cannot be silenced.
This includes those ‘own’ lost lives – the victims of suicide and their families – unable to bear the grief of violent loss.
Doyle draws upon the Anglo-Irish cultural theorist Benedict Anderson:
“The dead, far from being gone, remain as a powerful part of the community. How we think about the dead, and the stories we tell about the relation between the dead and the living, are central to imagining new forms of community and/or narratives of nationhood” (‘Imagined Communities’(1983) page 15).
This is a compelling, eloquent, at times beautiful and vital account. It is a needful telling of a narrative — of the families, their lost loved ones, of neighbours in conflict, of fractured communities failing to reconcile deep-rooted religious, sectarian, and economic divisions upon The Narrow Ground, described by a well disposed Sir Walter Scott in 1825 as the space in which “envenomed” Irish factions did their battle “like people fighting with daggers in a hogshead”.
It is part of the competing allegedly pernicious counter-narratives to that which the British State seeks to coerce and cleanse as the ‘official account’ for the ‘public record’.
Doyle’s book assumes its rightful place – and at the right time – amid the literature of the Conflict most recently supplemented (as acknowledged by Doyle) in works by Anne Cadwallader, Ian Cobain, and Margaret Urwin, in poetry and in prose and in compelling academic contributions including Mark McGovern’s ‘Counterinsurgency and Collusion in Northern Ireland’ (2019).
What distinguishes Doyle’s book is clear from its subtitle, The Troubles in My Home Place. This is an autobiography and a biography. It is about the life of the author and about his place and his home. His sense of place – his home returned to – is acute because he understands what has led to both the physical and psychological landscape that historically surrounds and embraces, but also excludes and expels, his community.
This is both the inner landscape – the psyche – of emotions, beliefs, ideologies – violently moulded by economic, religious and political forces, religious intolerances and political exigencies and the shattered outer-world reality – The Troubles as ‘a little local difficulty’ upon a Narrow Ground.
Doyle’s Narrow Ground is a handful of rural parishes – the “Murder Triangle’ of Newry, Lurgan and Dungannon ‘ the cockpit of the Troubles” (page 7).
It is also the landscape as a bloody signification of a violent Conflict across the Island of Ireland, from Claudy to Banbridge to Belturbet, from Derry to Omagh, from Enniskllen to Dublin, from city to city, town to town, village to village, graveyard to graveyard.
Doyle has not written the history of the Conflict in Northern Ireland. Doyle has written a history of the Conflict in Northern Ireland in his part of Ireland – the village of Laurencetown, 25 miles north of the border, in the County Down parish of Tullylish, within the murder triangle (“or Lawrencetown – we can’t even agree on how to spell it” (page 1)).
It is his-story about aspects of his life, his space-place, his family, the family next door, his school and their church, a social club and their sports venue, his community and all its graveyards and memorial stones.
Because he writes of what and where he knows, Doyle can listen, record, and understand and communicate as much as an anthropological field recording made solid and in unadorned prose (and that is praise not criticism).
This is writing with understanding and understatement and without unnecessary adornment or embellishment.
Doyle therefore achieves what Ian Cobain accomplishes in a different voice and a focus on a single violent incursion, the murder of off-duty RUC Photographer Millar McAllister in Lisburn on 22 April 1978, in ‘Anatomy of a Killing: Life and Death on a Divided Island’(2021).
This is what the magisterial – and regrettably out of print – Lost Lives: The Stories of the Men, Women and Children who Died as a Result of the Northern Ireland Troubles (1999) achieves more clinically.
Benedict Anderson’s statement about the relation between the living and the dead (quoted above) is is also used to introduce the Irish Linen Memorial into Doyle’s text – 400 white Irish linen handkerchiefs. The names of those killed between the years of 1966 and 2006 are printed and overstitched with embroidery, and spotted with sewn hair, onto each handkerchief.
The Linen Memorial is a “creative project that has now spanned almost 20 years and has travelled to multiple countries, been constructed in churches, galleries, and libraries. it is an ongoing site‐conscious memorial which seeks to re‐narrate the almost 4,000 deaths which took place during the fraught period of ‘the Troubles’ in Northern Ireland”
As Doyle’s publisher notes; “Doyle skilfully weaves together the two strands of history, with the decline of the local linen industry serving as a metaphor for the descent into communal violence, but also for the solidarity that transcends the sectarian divide”.
Doyle calls his book Dirty Linen. He is also aware of the concern of the British State not to have this soiled linen washed in public when it is steeped in the stench of collusion between terrorist paramilitaries (Loyalist and Republican) and British Security Forces.
Martin Doyle is one of those important beacons whose book challenges the intentions of the British State, most recently in the pernicious and destructive Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Act 2023, to impose an ‘official’ history of the Conflict for the ‘public’ record.
Doye concludes: “Bereavement comes with a whole-life tariff, grief without any promise of reprieve or redress. I find I have become an inveterate collector of words of wisdom about grief and loss”. (page 339).
The bereaved, Doyles writes, ask only that their loss and their grief not “be inflicted on a new generation. They have done such heavy lifting for us all”.
The Troubles in My Home Place’, by Martin Doyle is published by Merrion Press (€24.99/£22.99 Hardback), 368 pages.
Christopher Stanley is a Litigation Consultant with KRW LAW LLP, in Belfast
