These “stories of the men, women and children who died as a result of the Northern Ireland troubles” restore to the 3,637 victims their names, their age, what they did, and what they were doing when they died. In Robert McLiam Wilson’s novel Eureka Street, there is a striking metaphor for violent death. Wilson writes that a full life is like a novel, whereas one truncated violently is reduced to a short story. tells all those stories, elevating the dead from grim statistics to someone else’s tragedy – and ours.Various researchers have tried to make sense of the patterns of violence, or to compile the definitive list of the dead. The authors of came together in 1992 to colour in the outlines Three are working journalists, one a historian.

Most of the tales they tell have been aired before, but remained locked in the first draft of history, the brief newspaper accounts of so many people whose only memorials are their family and friends, and the gravestones in cemetries across these islands.Northern Ireland is now witnessing a surge of victims’ groups, a reaction to the Victims Commission set up in the Good Friday Agreement. Unionist and nationalist politicians vie to establish a hierarchy of victims and exploit their memory to suit party agendas avoids this nonsense. David McKittrick of The Independent writes that “Those who died… included civilians, members of loyalist and republican groups, political figures, soldiers, joyriders, alleged drug dealers, judges and magistrates, those killed in the course of armed robberies, prison officers, police officers, convicted killers, businessmen, alleged informers, Ulster Defence Regiment members, those who died on hunger strike, men, women, children, pensioners and unborn babies. They are all here.”Another decision which could cause controversy is the exclusion of the names of those accused or convicted of the killings – with the exception of some paramilitary figures so well known “that no useful purpose would be served in not mentioning their names”. So some killers are referred to only in terms of paramilitary affiliation. This coyness is not out of fear but rather “to ensure that this work should not be used as a handbook for vengeance” There have been enough “retaliations” already.

Most involve people who neither knew nor cared about the victims. Tit for tat, as it is stupidly called.Stupidity is a current which runs through this book; an arrogant stupidity which motivated the cruellest killings. There was the belief that Catholics could be beaten and shot into accepting second-class status; or that shooting the eldest sons of Protestant farmers could make the rest of their families realise that they were, all along, deluded Irishmen. The crowning achievement of this harvest of eight years’ labour are, nevertheless, the single stories. Each of the dead is chronologically numbered, from John Scullion (1), murdered by the UVF in 1966, to Charles Bennet (3,637), murdered by the IRA last July Not that the Provos admitted that one.