The Troubles cast a long shadow over my childhood and played an important part in my first decade as a journalist in London. While I never fully moved on and switched off, it would be fair to say that the peace, however imperfect, that led to and followed the Good Friday Agreement in 1998 afforded me the luxury of no longer dwelling so obsessively on the daily machinations and frustrations of politics in the North.
- Martin Doyle
Dirty Linen is a personal, intimate history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland seen through the microcosm of a single rural parish, the author's own hometown. Click HERE for an extract from Dirty Linen, published by Irish Academic Press, 2023.
Radio interview with Martin Doyle about his book, Dirty Linen. Click HERE
It's very important for me that this isn't the story just of my Catholic friends and neighbours. It is the story of the entire parish; Catholic and Protestant civilians, a RUC man, a Territorial Army soldier, I make no distinction. Grief is grief. Loss is loss.
About the author
Martin Doyle, Books Editor of The Irish Times and author of Dirty Linen: The Troubles in My Home Place (Merrion Press, 2023), will be on a residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais (CCI) in Paris (September/October 2025), completing his second book, provisionally titled Irish Writers in Conversation, 1991-2025, which will be published by Lilliput Press next April.
Based on his 35-year career as an arts journalist, the book promises to serve as the perfect introduction to contemporary Irish literature, featuring more than 50 of his interviews with Irish authors: from the late Brian Moore to Sally Rooney, Claire Keegan and Anne Enright.
Theme for Martin's talk in Monaco
During his residency at the CCI, Martin will visit Monaco to give a talk at the Princess Grace Irish Library (PGIL), which will offer insights into the art of the interview, writers’ personalities, tradition and trends. He will also give his assessment of the best Irish fiction of the past 50 years, with a particular focus on Irish fiction set abroad, in line with the theme this year at the PGIL : 'The reach and impact of the Irish diaspora.'
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April 2024: Writers Martin Doyle and Fintan O'Toole in conversation at Glucksman Ireland House (NYU) in New York for the launch event of Martin's book Dirty Linen : The Troubles in My Home Place.
Martin lifts the veil of silence drawn over the horrors of the past, recording in heartrending detail the terrible toll the conflict took and the long tail of trauma it has left behind. Neighbours and classmates who lost loved ones in the conflict, entrust Doyle with their stories. Writing with a literary sensibility, he skillfully shows how the once dominant local linen industry serves as a metaphor for communal division but also for the solidarity that transcended the sectarian divide. To those who might ask why you would want to reopen old wounds, the answer might be that some wounds have never been allowed to heal.
For the launch event, Martin Doyle was in conversation with Fintan O'Toole. Fintan is a columnist and writer for The Irish Times. His books include We Don't Know Ourselves: A Personal History of Ireland Since 1958 (2022), Heroic Failure: Brexit and the Politics of Pain (2018), and Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption Sank the Celtic Tiger (2009). He is professor of Irish letters at Princeton University. Martin Doyle is the Books Editor of The Irish Times and a former Editor of the Irish Post. He is a regular contributor to the media and arts programming.