Growing up in rural Northern Ireland in the 1970s, Martin Doyle glimpsed few signs of the Troubles. There were no peace walls, he never walked in a victim’s funeral cortege and only once did he spot soldiers patrolling his village. Yet his life was saturated by the conflict. It was like an invisible pandemic, one that he knew was striking down his neighbours, but had not yet visited his home.
When his parents went shopping, he was expected to sit in the parked car: in order to deter car bombers, no vehicles were permitted to be left unattended. If his parents were late returning from a night out, he wondered whether they would ever come home. Once, at the age of about eight, Doyle’s mother told him that an elderly neighbour had died. “‘Who shot her?’ I asked. The idea that an old woman might have died of natural causes did not even occur to me.”
