Colours: Ireland - From Bombs to Boom

by HenryMcDonald (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2004

  $3.63

  Henry McDonald's childhood and teenage years were dominated by the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Growing up in the Markets - a working-class Catholic district of central Belfast - he witnessed IRA men and British soldiers being shot down outside his door. His home was smashed up by the British troops on Internment Day in 1971, then bombed by loyalist terrorists four years later. But despite being caught up in the maelstrom of incipient civil war, McDonald managed escape his background. He became a punk rocker in 1978 and, a year later, joined a group of young soccer hooligans who followed Irish League side Cliftonville. All My Colours, however, is more than just a memoir about the formative years of someone born in the epicentre of political and sectarian conflict. McDonald time travels in two directions: firstly back to the dark days of Ulster's violent past; secondly, he uses some of the key incidents of his boyhood and youth to compare the Ireland of then with the Ireland of the twenty-first century. It is a journey that takes him from the GPO in Dublin, a revered site in the history of Irish Republicanism where the 1916 Easter Rising was launched, to the sex shops and the swinging parties of post-modern hedonistic Dublin. Filled with football thugs, terrorists, madams, paedophile priests, abuse survivors, drug dealers, comic writers and modern-day martyrs, All My Colours exposes Ireland in all its complexity and diversity, as seen through the eyes of a someone who has experienced first hand an island and a nation undergoing revolutionary changes.