Growing up in rural Northern Ireland in the 1970s, Martin Doyle glimpsed few signs of the Troubles. There were no peace walls, he never walked in a victim’s funeral cortege and only once did he spot soldiers patrolling his village. Yet his life was saturated by the conflict. It was like an invisible pandemic, one that he knew was striking down his neighbours, but had not yet visited his home.
When his parents went shopping, he was expected to sit in the parked car: in order to deter car bombers, no vehicles were permitted to be left unattended. If his parents were late returning from a night out, he wondered whether they would ever come home. Once, at the age of about eight, Doyle’s mother told him that an elderly neighbour had died. “‘Who shot her?’ I asked. The idea that an old woman might have died of natural causes did not even occur to me.”
Doyle grew up in the village of Laurencetown, about 25 miles north of the border, in the County Down parish of Tullylish. The milk that the people of Tullylish poured on to their cereal each morning and the coal that kept them warm of a winter evening was delivered by a family called O’Dowd. In January 1976, masked gunmen burst into the O’Dowd family’s remote farmhouse, shooting dead three male members and wounding a fourth. Like Doyle and his family, the O’Dowds were Catholics and the gunmen were loyalists.
That same evening, three brothers from another family were fatally wounded in a loyalist gun attack at their home 15 miles away. Four nights earlier, on New Year’s Eve, three Protestants had been killed in a republican bomb attack on a bar in Tullylish. The night after the attack on the O’Dowd home, not far away in County Armagh, 10 Protestant workmates were lined up along the side of their minibus and shot dead. The IRA has still not admitted responsibility for that massacre. In Laurencetown, Doyle’s mother took to putting her children to bed in the dark, fearful of what a light might attract.
Today, Doyle is the books editor of the Irish Times. Here, he returns to Tullylish to tell the stories of the people whose lives were lost within its few square miles, to examine the toll that the conflict took on the parish, and the grief and sense of loss that continues to linger over its fields and farmhouses and villages. It is a deeply personal and moving history, a labour of love, one that is painstakingly researched and, at times, simply painful. It will be hailed as an outstanding memoir of the Troubles.
In the 19th century, Tullylish formed part of the “linen triangle”, an area that produced fine linen for export around the globe, creating enormous wealth for mill owners and secure employment for thousands. By the late 20th century, it was also part of what became known as the “murder triangle”, where republican gunmen and bombers targeted soldiers, policemen and uninvolved Protestants, and where loyalists stalked and killed Catholics. There could be a terrible intimacy to the hatred and violence; killers often lived close to their victims, or worked alongside them.
In Dirty Linen, loyalist killers can sometimes be seen to be operating hand in glove with elements of the security forces. On a depressing number of occasions, they were serving members of those forces. Police investigations could be dismally slow and short-lived.
The killing began in Tullylish in the summer of 1972, when a patrol from a Scottish infantry regiment was sent to search an abandoned house. It had received a tipoff that arms or explosives were hidden inside the building. Indeed they were: an IRA bomb concealed beneath the living room floor was detonated, killing three of the soldiers.
Over the next 25 years there would be a further two dozen lives lost in and around the parish. Countless people were maimed and there were several suicides. The dead included three members of the Miami Showband, a cabaret group that was stopped at a fake British army checkpoint after a gig in Banbridge, a small town on the edge of the parish, in July 1975. The checkpoint might have been fake, but several of the men who set it up were real: they were serving in the British army. They were also loyalist paramilitaries. Two of them contrived to blow themselves up while secreting a bomb on board the band’s van; their surviving comrades opened fire on the band.
Then there was Alan McCrum, an 11-year-old Protestant boy killed on his way home from school in March 1982. An IRA bomb exploded without warning in the centre of Banbridge, killing Alan and injuring 34 others, including a woman who was blinded. Young Alan’s family immediately made clear that they were praying there would be no retaliation, no sectarian backlash, his death being something, they said, “which the Lord himself has allowed”.
While sectarian hatred was a base ingredient in the brew that poisoned Northern Ireland’s well, Doyle believes that glimmers of cross-community Christian charity, such as Alan’s family’s appeal, should be remembered and celebrated. “It was the bedrock, the backstop that saved the north from sliding into all-out civil war.”
It was not always there. Many years after the attack on the O’Dowds, surviving members of the family still remark that none of them heard a car pull up before the shooting began, or drive away afterwards. The implication is that the killers arrived on foot from their own homes, silently creeping like “scouts and trackers”, Doyle writes, “with local knowledge of back roads, shortcuts and weak points”.
For all those people in Tullylish who were determined to love their neighbours, there were always others who wished to slaughter them.
Anatomy of a Killing by Ian Cobain (Granta Books, £10.99). To support the Guardian and Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
Dirty Linen: The Troubles in My Home Place by Martin Doyle is published by Merrion Press (£21.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
