At the heart of the inferno

Memoir: The reader is spared nothing in a bold and brilliant record of the worst years of the Troubles.

I cried only twice over Northern Ireland. Both times it was after interviewing fathers about their dead daughters: the father of 12-year-old Majella O'Hare, shot by a British soldier in 1976; and the father of Marie Wilson, killed with 11 others in 1987 by an IRA bomb in Enniskillen. Out of all the thousands who died, why did these two touch me? Maybe because I knew that's how my father would have talked about me, with love and with terrible pain, if I'd been the one to die.

But most of us covering the North learned not to engage emotionally. There was too much blood, too much grief. You'd be swamped by it. You tried to be cold, not to be afraid. I used to arrive before 6am for the early shift at RTÉ's Fanum House offices in Belfast. The big steel security gates were hard to open and I can still remember struggling with the massive padlock, knowing that right across the road from me was the entrance to the loyalist Sandy Row, knowing that I was a sitting duck with my bicycle, knowing that 1976 would probably turn out, as indeed it proved, to be almost the worst year yet for sectarian assassinations (308 people died that year, the second heaviest of the Troubles). I wanted to make sure I wasn't one of them.

And upstairs, gathering information for the early-morning bulletin, you were even happier to be safe inside. One sectarian murder would have set off a series of tit-for-tat killings, particularly over the weekend, so that your audio into the Monday morning bulletin sounded like a harvest of revenge. Sometimes it was a random Protestant or Catholic caught on the street; or a couple in a mixed marriage who were punished by the tribe. Sometimes it was a bit of headline savagery such as the Miami Showband murders by loyalists in 1975, or the Kingsmills murders of 10 Protestants workers by republicans in January 1976. Other times it wasn't sectarian but the result of one of the grubby internecine feuds on the republican or loyalist side. Then there was the regular drip-drip of soldiers and policemen killed. You thought about their widows and families for a minute and then the phone rang again and you moved on to the next atrocity.

It's to their credit that so many of those who have reported long-term on the North have remained impartial. As long as I could stay detached, I stayed. As soon as I was pressed to declare an allegiance (which almost always happens after a few years in Belfast), I came back to the Republic.

I WAS NEVER a player, but Kevin Myers was. He threw himself into the thick of it. It may, he says himself, have affected his journalism, but it has produced a book that I couldn't put down. I wanted to put it down because it hurt. It hurt to be reminded of all the dead one had so quickly, so deliberately, forgotten. In the pulling together of the peace process, it was convenient perhaps to pull a veil over the past. And yet the dead must be acknowledged to keep us from sliding backwards. That is why Northern Ireland's chronicle of the dead, Lost Lives, written by David McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney and Chris Thornton, and fully acknowledged in this book, is such a towering piece of journalism.

McKittrick and his colleagues recorded the dead, on and off the battlefield. Kevin Myers records the battle itself and a life weaving in and out of firefights, mashed body parts, paramilitary drinking dens and random sex. What he describes is a 20thcentury inferno, dark and desperate. In the middle of it all is Myers himself, cruising the dangerous streets with his clipped public-school accent and his mane of curly hair, a bizarre mixture of young fogey and student leftie. It was a conflict he felt keenly himself, torn between the belief that the IRA, being working class, must be progressive, and the haunting memory of a murdered British soldier. Robert Bankier was lured into the Markets area and Myers, who guessed there would an ambush, came across the soldier, fatally wounded: "'He said nothing but looked at me directly, and by the light of the lamp above, he died." Myers felt somehow responsible.

The violence was anarchic and it was everywhere, unlike my time in Belfast, when it had settled into its own vicious sectarian pattern. In the early 1970s, you couldn't avoid it, and Myers, as he says himself, became hooked. He searched it out. He arrived just after a bomb blast at Jack Lavery's pub in Lisburn Road. The owner thought he'd get away with carrying the bomb out of his pub. He didn't.

"We stared around. There were tiny fragments of pink on the ground, mere smears, but hundreds of them, a confetti of human flesh."

Another bomb, near the RTÉ offices, went off as Myers arrived. He was reminded of biology classes at school and dissecting rabbits. "And it was the smell of rabbit entrails that now filled Donegall Street, in part vanilla, in part raw steak, in part anus-fresh excrement: the lingering aromatic remains of what had been human beings moments before, and now were scarlet pebble-dash."

Myers doesn't spare us, not from the reality of bombing, nor from the vain and vapid and murderous warlords, nor from the helter-skelter of his sexual life, nor even from the details of his bowels. As with anything to do with Northern Ireland, there are moments of the blackest humour, but the overall effect is one of horror, even, given Myers's ornate style, gothic horror.

THERE ARE SAD moments in this book. At one stage he says: "Isolation is my natural condition. I do not attract or keep friendship." That would not be how Lily, who cleaned our offices in Fanum House, saw it. Lily came from a staunch loyalist area. She adored Kevin. She had dark words about the woman who broke his heart, an affair he describes here. As far as Lily was concerned, there wasn't a woman in the whole of Ireland who was good enough for Kevin Myers.

Belfast was a hard station for Myers. He was young, barely out of university. Emotionally, professionally, politically he was thrown in, and threw himself in, the deep end. Not many of us would have emerged from that vortex undamaged, and Myers didn't. What he's written as a result isn't a good book. It's a bad book, bad and bold and brilliant.

Olivia O'Leary is a journalist and broadcasts for both RTÉ and BBC. Party Animals, a second collection of her RTÉ Radio 1 political columns, has just been published by O'Brien PressMemoir

Watching the Door By Kevin Myers Lilliput, 271pp. €20