Belfast Days

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Belfast 1972. It’s the bloodiest year of the Northern Irish ‘Troubles’, and 16-year-old Eimear O’Callaghan, 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 author’s 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 person’s 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 O’Callaghan’s 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] Eimear O’Callaghan is a former BBC news editor with more than 30 years’ experience in print and broadcast journalism, notably with The Irish News, The Irish Times, RTÉ, BBC Ulster, BBC Radio 4 and BBC Radio Foyle. Eimear left the BBC in 2010 to set up her own communications consultancy, Leapfrog Communications, and continues to work as a freelance writer. Prologue: ‘…prayer is our only hope, seeing we haven’t got a gun!’ 1. ‘Wish something big would hurry up and happen.’ 2. ‘Sure there will be serious trouble.’ 3. ‘Blitzed, strife-torn corner of the earth.’ 4. ‘Two months to bury our dead.’ 5. ‘Dread of Protestant Backlash.’ 6. ‘My nerves are shattered.’ 7. ‘Unchristian type of satisfaction.’ 8. ‘All I could do was pray.’ 9. ‘Too good to be true.’ 10. ‘The inevitability of civil war.’ 11. ‘All my childish instincts.’ 12. ‘Fixer la salade.’ 13. ‘Dirty, horrible, backward, dark Belfast’ 14. ‘A pity ALL the Catholics hadn’t been killed.’ 15. ‘We’ll all be butchered.’ 16. ‘No longer is anyone unlikely to be shot.’ Epilogue: ‘Thankful to be alive.’ New edition to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the single worst year of the Northern Irish Troubles

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