Eimear OCallaghan - Belfast Days: A 1972 Teenage Diary
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Belfast Days: A 1972 Teenage Diary: summary, description and annotation
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Belfast 1972. Its the bloodiest year of the Northern Irish Troubles, and 16-year-old Eimear OCallaghan, a Catholic schoolgirl in West Belfast, bears witness in her new diary. What follows is a unique and touching perspective into the daily life of an ordinary teenager coming of age in extraordinary times. The immediacy of the diary entries are complemented with the authors mature reflections written 40 years later. The result is poignant, shocking, wryly funny, and, above all, explicitly honest. Belfast Days is unique book that comes at a time when Northern Ireland is desperately struggling to come to terms with the legacy of its turbulent past. It provides a powerful juxtaposition of the ordinary everyday concerns of a 16-year-old girl - who could be any girl in any British or Irish city at this time, worrying about her hair, exams, boys, clothes, discos - with the unimaginable horror of a society slowly disintegrating before her eyes, a seemingly inevitable descent into a bloody civil war, fuelled by sectarianism, hatred, and fear. Written by an experienced broadcaster and journalist who rediscovered her 1972 diary on the eve of the publication of the Saville Report (also known as the Bloody Sunday Inquiry), Belfast Days demonstrates how one persons examination of her own story provided her with a new perspective on one of the darkest periods in 20th-century Irish and British history. *** ...the writing is extraordinary. -- Stephen Dubner, author of Freakonomics *** .Brigid Jones in a war-zone. -- Anne Cadwallader, author of Lethal Allies *** Eimear OCallaghans 1972 eloquent eye-witness testimony salutes the hard work, the persistence and the breathtaking courage of those who fought against tyranny and oppression for so many, many years! - The Celtic Connection, September 2015 [Subject: Memoir, History, Irish Studies, British Studies]
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ADVANCE PRAISE FOR BELFAST DAYS
The authors honest, humane voice throughout reaches a climax in a passionate, clear-eyed epilogue ... Buy it for yourself but, above all, ensure your teenagers read it to appreciate the peace and opportunities they have now which were denied to that earlier generation.
Anne Cadwallader, author ofLethal Allies
Funny, touching, vivid and real.
Robin Livingstone, Editor,Andersonstown News
Vivid and disturbing the terror of war invades the everyday life of a sensitive girl.
Susan McKay, Derry-born journalist and author of books includingBear in Mind These DeadandNorthern Protestants: An Unsettled People
A time machine to the turmoil, trouble and terror of 70s Belfast, Belfast Days is a remarkable memoir, bringing heartache and healing in equal measure. A passage into a wretched world of warfare through the unblinking eyes of a teenager whose steady gaze surely shames us into ensuring this path is not walked again. Mirtn Muilleoir, Former Lord Mayor of Belfast
Belfast Days will be a book youll want to save for your children and grandchildren to read. Although they might not be growing up in the terror of war and conflict, Eimears diary will inspire them to use their own unique talents and gifts to bring about a more peaceful world. An object lesson in tolerance and resilience, we can all learn from this book, no matter what our age.
Laurel Holliday, author of theChildren in Conflictseries
Belfast Days
A 1972 Teenage Diary
Eimear OCallaghan
First published in 2014 by Merrion Press
an imprint of Irish Academic Press
8 Chapel Lane
Sallins
Co. Kildare
2014 Eimear OCallaghan
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
978-1-908928-89-4 (paper)
978-1-908928-33-7 (PDF)
978-1-908928-90-0 (epub)
978-1-908928-91-7 (mobi)
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
An entry can be found on request
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved alone, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Printed by ScandBook AB, Sweden.
Inside design by www.sinedesign.net
For my Father and Mother
Jim and Maura
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
For as long as I remember I have dreamed of writing a book but before 15 June, 2010 I never planned writing this one. The seed for Belfast Days was planted that day when The Irish Times published an article I wrote about the Bloody Sunday Inquiry Report, containing extracts from my teenage diary.
It was the first time that I shared the diarys contents with anyone. I am indebted to The Irish Times editor Geraldine Kennedy who made space for the article that would arouse curiosity about my journal at home and further afield. A special mention must also go to BBC producer, J.P. Devlin, who gave me an opportunity to speak about it on Radio 4 and was the first person to suggest I should write a book.
Laurel Holliday, initially a stranger living on the west coast of America, also deserves my thanks. The author of the Children in Conflict series tracked me down via the internet after hearing my radio interview and has been unstinting in her advice, support and encouragement ever since.
My heartfelt thanks are owed to the wonderful people at Irish Academic Press/Merrion. I thank Conor Graham in particular for understanding and caring about this book from the moment he received my manuscript. Conor, Lisa Hyde and Maria McGuinness have earned my deepest gratitude for all they have done to make this book the best it can be.
My dear friend and long-suffering colleague Paul McFadden accompanied me on each step of this journey, reading and re-reading every line of each page. He restored my faith in the book when my belief faltered. For his endurance, judgement and candour, I am forever in his debt.
Finally, and most importantly, I have to thank my family. I will always be grateful to my parents, Jim and Maura, for loving and protecting my brothers and me during the darkest days of Northern Irelands history and for encouraging in me a love of the written word.
This book would not have been possible without the enduring love and support of my husband, Paul McElhone, and our next generation, Maura, Paul and Orla, of whom I am so proud. Thank you all for waiting on me patiently through long days and late nights. A special thanks, too, to our old dog Dustin for keeping me company when the others went to bed.
Thank you all for convincing me I could finish the book and for being a daily reminder of why it matters.
AUTHORS NOTE
The events in this book are recorded as the young diarist learned about them, and any inaccuracies are due to the turmoil of the times. In two cases names have been changed.
Map of Greater Belfast
PROLOGUE
Prayer is our only hope, seeing we havent got a gun!
It was in June 2010 just days before the British Prime Minister delivered the findings of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry when I stumbled across my old diary, stuffed into a battered briefcase in a spare-room wardrobe. The spine of the journal was faded and frayed, its well-thumbed pages grown dull with the passage of time. The edges of the six glossy, paper butterflies which I pasted on to its cover as a teenager were beginning to curl up and crack, but their colour was as vivid as when they first caught my eye four decades earlier.
I was shocked by the terror which cried out at me from the squiggly handwriting on the page where my record of 1972 happened to fall open: May 30 ... Came to bed convinced that prayer is our only hope, seeing we havent got a gun!
The spidery, childish handwriting in faded blue ink stopped me in my tracks. What, in Gods name, was going on in my 16-year-old mind that made me even think about having a weapon? I couldnt turn a gun on anyone, even if my life depended on it. Yet in West Belfast in 1972 as a skinny, timid, Catholic teenager, with big, curly, 70s hair I was confiding to my diary that prayer was the second-best option.
If we had been relying on my prayers to save us back then, God help us. I was just a month short of my seventeenth birthday when I penned that desperate entry in my red Collins notebook. I had seldom resorted to prayer except when pleading to St Joseph of Cupertino for help in my O-Level exams the previous summer:
O Great St Joseph of Cupertino, who while on earth did obtain from God the grace to be asked at your examination only the questions you knew, obtain for me a like favour in the examinations for which I am now preparing ... St Joseph of Cupertino, pray for us. Amen.
I was a sixth year pupil at St Dominics Belfasts largest Catholic girls grammar school where academic success was all-important. My classmates and I used to pass the grubby, dog-eared prayer to St Joseph between us at exam-times a picture of the flying saint in religious ecstasy on one side, the miraculous prayer on the other since part of the deal we agreed with the saint was to make you known and cause you to be invoked ....
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