A young cub reporter working for a new Sunday paper aimed at new, non sectarian, rising middle class struggles and fumbles its way through an apparently senseless wave of violence just as Northern Ireland pitches itself from Internment without trial and into what became the bloodiest year of the Troubles.

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Product Description

World is running out of fresh vegetables. Irish don't like yoghurt. Chamber of Commerce say 'no' to Portadown hotelier because she is a woman. (Mind you, she looks good in her hot pants.) This is the North in 1972 and journalists previously employed on such frothy stories as these, now have the job of reporting the Saturday night bombings and the barricading of the ghettos. One of those reporters, Malachi O'Doherty, goes home to streets patrolled by Provo gunmen. The army and the IRA hold fire to let his mother walk to work between them. The moralistic columnists on the paper he works for, "The Sunday News", say the IRA is 'a disease carrying vermin' and Malachi wonders if he is infected. The question of where a young man fits in between these equally absurd and opposed worlds, is a moral challenge that faces O'Doherty as Belfast inches inexorably and indulgently towards civil war. But first there are stories to write and even a bear to fight. Will Ulster Vanguard declare UDI? Who is dumping bodies in back alleys? Will the girl in the boutique get her tits out for the photographer? How much more of this can a man take?

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #521764 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03
• Format: Illustrated
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 234 pages

About the Author
Malachi O'Doherty is a freelance journalist and commentator, a frequent contributor to several BBC programmes and one of Northern Ireland's best-known journalists. His previous books are I Was a Teenage Catholic and The Trouble With Guns ('The most subtle and astute account of the IRA campaign yet written' -- Fintan O'Toole).

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Customer Reviews

Thought-provoking
It is so hard to return to this bewildering, terrifying and, in the end, seemingly hopeless chapter in Northern Ireland's history - so tempting to fast forward to later heroic efforts at political inclusiveness, to de-escalation and of course to the recent peace process - that I wasn't sure how much I would 'enjoy' this account by Malachi O'Doherty of his first year as a journalist in Belfast.

1972 was the year of Bloody Sunday, direct rule, Bloody Friday, the first big ceasefire that wasn't, the emergence (or re-emergence) of loyalist paramilitarism, and, more appalling than anything else in the troubles, random sectarian violence and murder.

The book's title is - forgive me - telling: had events taken another turn, it could so easily have been The 'Momentous' Year. If I understand him correctly, one of the author's central points is that after the prorogation of Stormont, had the IRA realised, or conceded, or perhaps agreed amongst themselves, that their only realistically attainable goal while there existed a de facto majority in Northern Ireland in favour of the union - a future with in which unionists and nationalists would work together in government - had effectively been met; then years of suffering might have been avoided. It's a good point, and well made by someone who had a bigger stake than many in the resolution of the conflict. O'Doherty lived in the barricaded Riverdale estate in Andersonstown, where many of his neighbours were either IRA, or IRA auxiliaries, or IRA sympathisers and where it could be difficult - that's to say dangerous - to remain neutral. Some of the most eye-opening passages of the book are about his everyday interactions with ordinary people who, depending on your point of view, are either terrorists or the bloke next door. In the end, these conflicting perceptions prove impossible to reconcile, but I do respect his courage in trying.

While sufficiently in tune with the aspirations of the IRA to understand that, far from being a disparate, undisciplined and rudderless bunch of thugs, they actually had a logical strategy, O'Doherty comes across as a fair-minded, compassionate and often bewildered commentator who abhors violence and simply seeks to understand what is going on around him. In this almost diarised account, he describes, with self-deprecating humour, his first job as a young reporter at the long-defunct tabloid Sunday News, which 'looked into the miasma of political chaos, not for the thread that would explain it, but just for intriguing elements'; and manages, perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, to interweave the kind of shrewd analysis which anyone with a desire to understand the complexities of the conflict would do well to read.

The Telling Year is thoughtful, well-written and full of insight.

A must for anyone who has formed an opinion of 'The Troubles'
This book takes the reader back to Belfast in 1972 with rare honesty. O'Doherty was having conflicting experiences. On the one hand a whole new world was opening up before him through his first job as a reporter on the Sunday News whilst at the same time his personal life was becoming increasingly more restricted.

I found the book difficult to put down; the turn of every page brought a new insight into the events of 1972. We are familiar with the horrors of that year - Bloody Sunday, Bloody Friday, random shootings, bomb scares. Those who reflect upon these events are often driven by their own agenda. O'Doherty's record is a unique insight because he lived in an area under republican influence where safety demanded the support of the activities of the IRA or at the very least the sense to look the other way. As 1973 approached O'Doherty realised that looking the other way might no longer be an option.

Running parallel to O'Doherty's experience at home was his experience at work where the reactions of his colleagues in the newspaper office to the events unfolding around them were very different from those of his peers in the housing estate where he lived. A running theme throughout the book is O'Doherty's attempts to rationalise the experiences of both camps - which in 1972 proved impossible.

This book is a must for anyone who has ever formed an opinion on `The Troubles' I guarantee that such opinions will need to be revisited upon reading this book.

Inside story
This is a real inside story - inside the Troubles. It is the account of one year in the life of young Malachi O'Doherty - 1972 - his first in journalism, in, of all places, that unlamented Belfast tabloid, the Sunday News. In near-diary form it conveys the confusion, complexity, squalor, hatred, hypocrisy and occasional humour, as well as the brutality and utter futility, of the Troubles. Well worth reading, even by those who have sworn never to read another book on Northern Ireland and its Troubles.