Belfast Days

A 1972 Teenage Diary

Eimear O'Callaghan, Eimear O’Callaghan

• Publisher: Merrion Press
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781908928894
• eBook ISBN:
  9781908928900
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Belfast 1972. It s the bloodiest year of the Northern Irish Troubles and sixteen-year-old Eimear O'Callaghan, a Catholic schoolgirl in West Belfast, bears witness to it all in her diary. What follows is a window 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 forty years later. The result is poignant, shocking, wryly funny, sometimes prophetic, and above all, explicitly honest.

This unique publication 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 sixteen-year-old girl who could be any girl in any British city at this time, worrying about exams, boys, her hair, clothes, saving for the latest David Cassidy single - 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, fear, and the folly of politicians.

Written by an experienced broadcaster and journalist, Belfast Days demonstrates how one person's examination of her own story, upon rediscovering her 1972 diary, provided her - and all readers - with a new perspective on one of the darkest periods in twentieth century British and Irish history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Praise
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface to the new edition
• Author’s note
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Map
• 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 ‘The glory of the Lord.’
• 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 ‘Cèpes à la bordelaise.’
• 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.’
• Plate Section