Making Sense of the Troubles: A History of the Northern Ireland Conflict

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The book talks the reader through the tensions and issues before the violence started, through the killings, riots, bombings and murders and efforts at peace-making. All is explained clearly and succinctly. We meet the various characters involved in the politics and violence of the era, eaach of them described quite clearly.

The election result was yet another illustration of Unionist divisions. Thirty-nine of the Unionist party candidates gave their allegiance to the Faulkner approach but, in an echo of O’Neill’s 1969 crossroads election, ten others refused to do so. Unionist rejectionists won 27 of the 78 assembly seats with 235,000 votes, while Unionists supporting the initiative won 22 seats with 211,000 votes. Faulkner thus emerged from the election leading a bitterly divided party and without a majority among Unionist voters. His best hope was that, if a working system of government could be set up, its successful functioning would gradually attract more Unionist popular support.

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Peace came to Northern Ireland because the truculent parties got the best that was available to them after taking decades to work out that they had been pursuing political fantasies, not because Blair or anyone else showered them with wisdom and grace or applied any particular genius to contriving a deal." But is it a good read? Yes, if you don’t want to be bogged down with pre-Troubles history (too simplistically outlined in the book) or don’t need to understand the ideologies of unionism and nationalism per se. In this way, Making Sense feels written for a general English/benign foreign audience.

This exclusive B&N edition contains an exclusive conversation with Anthony Doerr and director Shawn Levy, exclusive endpapers, and a foil-stamped cloth cover.

Wikipedia citation

Horror piled on horror in July 1972. The restlessness of the mid-1960s had first degenerated into the violent clashes of August 1969 and now descended further into killings at a rate of three a day. That month had many of the features which were to become all too familiar as the troubles went on. Republicans killed Protestants while loyalists claimed Catholic lives, often with particular savagery. On 11 July a number of drunken loyalists broke into the home of a Catholic family, killing a mentally handicapped youth and raping his mother. At the resulting murder trial a lawyer told the court: ‘The restraints of civilisation on evil human passions are in this case totally non-existent. You may well think that in this case we have reached the lowest level of human depravity.’ He associated with some loyalist paramilitary organisations such as the UDA. Advocating a semi-independent Northern Ireland he staged a series of Oswald Mosley-style ‘monster rallies’, arriving complete with motorcycle outriders to inspect thousands, and sometimes tens of thousands, of men drawn up in military-style formation. What Craig said at the rallies and elsewhere was even more alarming. In a series of what became known as the ‘shoot-to-kill’ speeches he openly threatened the use of force, declaring: ‘We must build up dossiers on those men and women in this country who are a menace to this country because one of these days, if and when the politicians fail us, it may be our job to liquidate the enemy.’