This is a set of short stories reflecting on the lives of those living after the Northern Irish peace agreement and other places around the world where communities are oppressed.

Although I have read several Irish authors over the last few years, only a small proportion of it has been about the Troubles. The last one was Louise Kennedy with Trespassers.

Ni Chuinn was born in the year of the Peace Agreement as was one of the narrators, Jackie, as we are reminded several times throughout the book but this writing is full of the aftermath, the grief, the trauma and indignity but also the pain and the ever present conflict between those who want to forget and those who can’t.

The opening story is narrated by Jackie who can not forget the fact that his parents’ car was hijacked by loyalists when his mother was pregnant. It is well known now that trauma in the third trimester can have a significant impact on the child. Changes in behaviour and environment changes their expectations of life and this affects the genes of the baby and how they work (epigenetics). Inheriting our parents’ experiences. How on earth is this cycle broken? Is the act of writing or recording them one way?

Daisy Hill contains two characters, Rowan and Shane, who reflect the internal argument I have with this book. After a visit to a hospital, Rowan starts to talk about the Trouble and Shane shouts back;

“I don’t want to talk to you, I’m sick of it, right? You weren’t there, you remember fuck all, you just, you’ve got this obsession with history.”

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And then we move onto the state sponsored killings.

. . .it’s this huge fucking army, it’s this huge fucking state, this government that does whatever it wants, that just, that they can kill us and kill us.

Rowan finishes the conversation by saying that it wasn’t history or Politics, it was his life. And this is the struggle I have. Oh, stop going on and on about something that you didn’t experience, but also knowing that people need to talk about these events so that they do not become weighed down by them because they have expereinced them in ways that are not first hand.

There’s quite a lot about this book I don’t understand. The conversations above were taken from Daisy Hill that starts with a man having taken something and crying over his dying dog. How do the two fit to together? Are the man, John, and the dog meant to represent something? Northern Ireland and the British government and how do they link to the lament at the end?

You could read this book as not about Northern Ireland but about any conflict. It fits well with Gaza and Palestine depending on your point of view, or any conflict past or present that is ‘David and Goliath’. Unfortunately, I failed to conect with it.