Voices from one parish tell story of Troubles in North

Launch event in Navan for Martin Doyle's 'Dirty Linen' which features the O'Dowd family atrocity

'Dirty Linen – The Troubles in My Home Place' by Martin Doyle, has just been published in paperback, with a reading event and launch taking place in Navan this week.

The personal memoir of growing up in the parish of Tullylish in near Banbridge in Co Down by the Irish Times books editor came about after a visit back to the area in the company of Navan resident Noel O'Dowd, whose family experienced tragedy in a shocking shooting atrocity there in January 1976.

Barney O'Dowd, who died earlier this year, and his late wife, Kathleen, moved their family to Navan after two of their sons, Barry, aged 24, and Declan 19, along with Barney's brother, Joe, 61, were shot dead when gunmen from the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) burst into their house in a sectarian attack.

Ten minutes earlier and 20 miles south, a coordinated UVF attack in Whitecross, Co Armagh, claimed the the lives of two brothers, John Martin and Brian Reavey. The next night, 10 Protestant workmen were massacred by republicans in neighbouring Kingsmill. In 2021, Martin Doyle wrote an essay for Paul McVeigh's 'The 32: An Anthology of Irish Working-Class Voices'. He wrote of the Troubles atrocities in his parish, including the UVF murders of the three members of the O’Dowd family in Ballydougan in January 1976. Joe had been their coalman. Barney was the local milkman.

Speaking to Myles Dungan at the recent Hinterland Festival in Kells, Doyle explained that Noel O'Dowd contacted him after reading the piece, and offered to bring him up to the old abandoned farmhouse at Ballydougan, where the family had left the summer after the dreadful events of 1976. Many abandoned homes dotted the nearby landscape as people left to escape the Troubles.

“To his credit, Noel also brought me around the parish,” Doyle said. “He didn't want me to only tell me what had happened to his family, he also wanted to show me what happened to others in the parish – more than 20, and that made me realise that there were many stories to tell.”

While he framed the narrative in the book, he wanted the voices to be those of the victims and the relatives of the victims.

“I had read a lot of histories of the Troubles, or the conflict, but so often it is the voices of the paramilitaries or the politicians that you are hearing, and I wanted very much to make it a story of the victims,” Doyle continued.

“The scale of what happened in the North is enormous, impossible to tell. The Book 'Lost Lives' is like a dictionary or encyclopedia of the terrible tragedy of more than 3,500 violent deaths, so it struck me that if you look at just one parish, 20 or so murders, and tell their stories in detail, stories no just about how somebody died, but about how they lived.

“Their stories deserved to be not just about the circumstances of their death, but also the story of those left behind, and how they rebuilt their lives.”

The area in question straddles two rivers, the Bann and the Lagan, Doyle explained. Both were very important to the linen industry, and the area was known as the 'linen triangle', from Lisburn, south of Lough Neagh and south as far as Newry, back up to Dungannon. But it also was the centre of a 'murder triangle', from Lurgan over to Dungannon and south to Armagh. Hence the title of the book, 'Dirty Linen'.

“It was an area where a lot of Catholic victims were murdered by loyalist paramilitaries in collusion with members of the security forces,” Martin Doyle stated. It wasn't always sectarian – it was political too, as Catholic members of the security forces were targeted by the IRA and INLA.

“It is very important for me in the book to have both side by side without prejudice or without favour to one side or the other, to report and reflect on the murder of Catholic and Protestant neighbours and fellow parishioners.”

When he started researching, he realised that the incidents that happened in his lifetime were basically recurrences of what had happened in previous generatioins and centuries.

“Like the atrocity that happened to the O'Dowd family,” he said. “People with their surname had been forced to emigrate from the parish 200 years earlier, around the time of the formation of the Orange Order, in Loughgall, 12 miles west of the parish of Tullylish, when many Catholic families had been forced to flee from their weavers cottages for safety in Mayo and Leitrim where they had their own linen industries.”

Local gentry and landlords thought the local militia couldn't be trusted as they were more dangerous than the some of their fellow citizens.

“So for me there is a clear historical echo in what the some of the Glenanne gang of loyalist paramilitaries colluding with members of the security forces; what they were doing and what the militia had been doing 200 years previously.”

Doyle wants the book, like Colin Davidson's portrait of Troubles victim Margaret Yeaman, “to turn the terrible things that happened during the troubles into some kind of a legacy; an attempt through words to somehow turn these terrible atrocities into something positive that reflects some of the good that has come out of these terrible things, and by that I mean the resilience of people who have been terribly damaged by these atrocities, but also the bonds who still exist across the community.”

As an example, he mentioned a man whom he met at Barney O'Dowd's funeral in Navan earlier this year.

“I was talking to a man called Mickey McInerney and he said that when he got married, his wife wore a wedding dress given lent by a Protestant friend Robert Harrison. And Robert Harris was a son of Bobby Harrison, who had been murdered by the IRA a few years earlier. It was an example of good transcending evil, of those type of community bonds surviving the terrible things. You are looking for examples of all the ways that people persevered to show that good can triumph over evil.”

At Hinterland, Doyle was critical of the Legacy Act, which the new Labour Prime Minister in the UK, Sir Keir Starmer, has since committed to repeal. Asked by a member of the audience if there was still tensions amongst communities, he prophetically said “part of me is thinking that more lately it is an immigrant family or a family of colour that is more likely to be the target of violence.”

“I think acts of sectarian violence have diminished, but is it all behind us? No. There are serious socio-economic problems, and sectarianism is still an issue."

The political progress has been very depressing in the 25 years since the signing of the Anglo-Irish Agreement, he believes, as it has been so stop-start.

“Stormont is operating again now, but it has almost not been operating as often as it has operated. But are people still being murdered week-in, week-out for either political or sectarian reasons? No, they're not. So it is important to acknowledge we have come an awful long way from where we were, but we can never be complacent. There is always the risk and threat that these things could bubble up again."

Doyle says that the fact that the deep-seated sectarianism in the North has never been properly addressed is an issue.

“We all know about it, but haven't actually faced up to it. I think it would really help if Sinn Féin acknowledged that the campaign of violence of the Provisional IRA was wrong; might it ever happen, I don't know, But I think it night be helpful. I think it would be really helpful if leading figures in the Protestant community admitted that sectarianism was rife, and those attitudes facilitated a lot of the violence; made it tolerable, Catholics were regarded as second class citizens; they were 'disloyal to the State'; all of that poisoned the waters that led to murders of Catholic civilians.”

'Dirty Linen, The Troubles in My Home Place' by Martin Doyle, Merrion Press.