Author Description

For twenty years the situation in Northern Ireland has been incompletely and often inaccurately reported by the press. Few people understand that in one part of the United Kingdom there exists a society where what matters most is religious origin and affiliation; still fewer empathize with the deep-rooted passions aroused by this. Tony Parker spent five months in the heart of Belfast talking to the people who make up this riven and self-destructive society. He interviewed priests and politicians, schoolchildren and students, bus drivers, doctors, nurses, lawyers, shop assistants, community workers, single mothers, soldiers, and police. He earned the trust of prisoners, their parents and children, and, perhaps most remarkably of all, Catholic and Protestant extremists implacably committed to violence as their means of expression. As Mary Loudon wrote in the Sunday Telegraph, "Tony Parker is an interviewer with an extraordinary capacity to filter what people say to him without turning their words his color." Through him the voices of the people of Belfast are heard for the first time, and the effect is devastating.