Book Review: 1972 and the Ulster Troubles: “A very bad year.” Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010. Pp 400. €35.00 (cloth).

Parkinson Alan F.. 1972 and the Ulster Troubles: “A very bad year.” Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2010. Pp 400. €35.00 (cloth).

Alan Parkinson has written a useful contextualized history of one of the worst years of violence in Northern Ireland—1972. This was also a year that marked radical political change—a politicization and radicalization of the Northern Catholic community after Bloody Sunday, a polarization of the communities, and the end of Stormont rule. Parkinson deals sure-footedly with the major events. Despite having written this book before the publication of the Saville Report on Bloody Sunday, the author’s judgments are fair, although like many he underestimated how far the report would vindicate the victims and their families.

The main value of the book lies in its contextualization of these events in the everyday experiences of those caught in the violence. Parkinson makes use of the valuable accounts of each death amassed by McKittrick et al. in Lost Lives (Edinburgh, 2004), and he also conducted his own interviews. The real value of the book is in giving a flavor of the time, showing how the events were understood by those caught in them and how radically different perspectives emerged. At this detailed level, his account is sensitive and accurate: he portrays the young republicans for whom bombs constituted a welcome breach of normality, a disruption of the everyday life that they wanted to change, and whose underestimation of the time necessary for bomb warnings caused carnage, and he portrays the ordinary people for whom this was unthinkable, passing all understanding. He also focuses on the surrounding popular interpretations of the events: the explanations and denials, the rumors, all of which provided the meaning of and the rationale for polarization.

The impatient reader might wonder why we need such detail. The answer is simple. This level of detail is necessary if we are actually to learn lessons from the Northern Ireland conflict. One of the big questions about Northern Ireland is why the “middle ground,” so apparent in the 1960s, did not hold. Not just the violence but also the official and unofficial responses to violence form an important part of the answer, and the book gives us a flavor of this. Parkinson notes that he left Northern Ireland in September 1972. If this is a “return,” it is careful, detached, balanced one, assessing each issue and debate on fact rather than giving big political interpretations. The result is enlightening, a vignette of one year, in which many can recognize not just their own experiences (or those of their parents) but those also of the “other side.” It provides a good empirical basis for the causal analysis of the movement into (and later out of) conflict and violence.

I have two small criticisms. I picked up one mistake: Maurice Hayes was never minister for community relations (52) but rather was chair of the Community Relations Council, and as such he resigned after Bloody Sunday. I was also disappointed in the conclusion, where Parkinson loses a little of his detachment and portrays 1972 as a strange sort of victory for unionists, who survived. These do not, however, detract from the overall value of the book.