Northern Ireland is no longer the compelling reading it once was. With the sublimation of its more fundamentalist elements into a nascent parliamentary democracy, the working out of big politics has left the streets. It is now more conducive to work out difficulties within the smoke filled offices of the First and Deputy First Minsters, and the Executive.

More and more books on Northern Ireland have the look of the PhD thesis; in depth studies on one aspect or another of the political, social, or cultural strands of the conflict. As the troubles fade from the memories of those who lived through its traumatic onset, the often frantic and haphazard character of those early days are being marshalled into the formalised narratives of history and bent to the convenience of political hagiography.

In the early 1970s it was different. After realising that the rioting of ’69 was not going to be ‘over by Christmas’, it began to dawn on ordinary people, who’d watched the Vietnam war as though it were outtakes from another US war film, that this homespun conflict was not going away anytime soon.

The literary critic, Edna Longley has noted that “…the autobiographical bent of Ireland, mostly seems to say that the usual narratives don’t fit – ‘let me tell you something different, something not been previously brought into account’.”

In The Telling Year, Malachi O‘Doherty brings to life his fumbling first year as a professional journalist: a year that was to be, entirely coincidentally, the bloodiest year of the Northern Irish Troubles.

He spent most of that year in the Sunday News, a kind of broadsheet tabloid which began during the 1960s with the deliberate aim of grabbing the attention of Northern Ireland’s newly affluent middle classes. The atmosphere in the newsroom reads like something akin to the BBC cop series, Life on Mars.

Training was on the job, writes O’Doherty, and consisted of the editor ‘throwing my work back at me and telling me it was shite’. His colleague Paddy would provide him a brief guide to the ‘house style’: ‘No details in the first paragraph. The second paragraph always begins with “and” or “but”. Don’t worry about Grammar. No big words’.

At the time, the paper was unique. A self styled ‘Northern Ireland’ newspaper, its staff was self consciously drawn from both sides of the community. Yet its offices were set within the almost exclusively Protestant bastion of the Belfast Newsletter.

Intended at first to be light inclusive and frothy, they hoovered up small scale human interest stories from nearly fifty smaller regional papers that served Northern Ireland at the time. Whilst the front page carried news of bombs and killings: inside they plied stories of yoghurt, Syrian brown bears and ‘lovely girls’. Saturday night’s atrocities made compelling front page reading on Sunday morning.

Yet it is also clear how the paper’s journalists struggled, and ultimately failed, to understand the political complexities and intrigue behind the events they reported.

Of course, this is autobiography not history. At its heart is an assay of what can or cannot be done by an individual caught between the conflicting forces of military ‘order’ and paramilitary ‘chaos’. It is not another run of the mill account of what happened and why. Rather, at its heart is a nasty, and very real, dilemma:

“I lived among bombers and heard little criticism of them from my family or our neighbours. I had ambiguous feelings about them. I was morally confident that they were wrong in their methods; but I could not share in the mockery of their rationale. And those who were unionist and Protestant, who were confident in their history and position, made no distinction between ideas and method when sneering at those who brought bombs into their workplaces. And at a moment at which they were under threat seemed a tactless time to correct them. Therefore I immediately felt shamed into silence. The sense of shame would stay with me all the time I worked at the newspaper.”

What lingers by the end, is the lived experience of being a journalist. Few of O’Doherty’s and his colleague’s scrapes with death ever made it into print. It is possible that had he publicly recorded those nocturnal toings and froings in and around his Andersonstown home he might have gained a celebrated start as a journalist. But it would also certainly have made him a fugitive from his own family and their community.

Indeed, journalism in 1970s Belfast consisted, as sociologist Frank Burton once described it, of a series of “leaps into the dark”. In the years since, O’Doherty has continually asserted his value by stepping outside his own community and reflecting its often bitter and conflicted truths. An anomalous stone, perhaps, ‘to trouble the living stream’.

If ‘The Telling Year’ is anything to go by, it wasn’t the journalists who enjoyed their war.

Based on a review for Fortnight magazine.