1993 Keepsake Christmas stories Book

Morgan Llywelyn's continuation of the Irish Century series, this time covering the years between the IRA's Border Campaign in the 50's, the following period of dormancy in the struggle, the birth of the Northern Ireland civil rights movement in the 60's with the resulting increase in Unionist fueled sectarian violence, the split in IRA between the Provos and the Officials, and, finally, the British policy of Internment and the Bloody Sunday massacre in Derry, which marked the beginning of the period known as The Troubles. This time our dramatic focus is the character of Barry Halloran, son of Ursula (focus of 1949) and grandson of the republican revolutionary Ned Halloran (focus of 1916 and 1921). Barry starts out in the IRA himself but the nightmares he has from his experience killing a man face-to-face make him unwilling to play a role on the frontlines. At first he continues serving as a bomb-making expert, provided the purpose is only infrastructure sabotage and that they always issue warnings to avoid killing anyone. After a time even this level of violence is more than he can stomach, so he turns his photography hobby into a career as a photojournalist (inspired by what he has heard about the family friend, journalist Henry Mooney, a major character in the earlier novels), doing his part by documenting the conditions for Catholics and Nationalists in Northern Ireland. Barry has high hopes that the non-violent civil rights movement, inspired by the Blacks civil rights struggle in the US, will prove to be the correct course of action, until the worsening violence that would culminate in Bloody Sunday seems to dash those hopes. I found this as engaging as the others in the series, with a nice supporting cast of characters, including Barry's mother Ursula, his IRA comrade Seamus McCoy, and Barbara Kavanagh, the Irish American woman he comes to love (granddaughter of Henry Mooney). Superior historical fiction, highly recommended.