Belfast Days: A 1972 Teenage Diary by Eimear O’Callaghan, Merrion Press. Reissued ten years after its publication, Belfast Days: A 1972 Teenage Diary, revisits the worst year of the conflict as seen through the eyes of 16-year-old West Belfast girl Eimear O’Callaghan. Discovered nearly 40 years later, the honesty and savagery of the words shocked the former St Dominic’s pupil when she came upon the pages while clearing out a wardrobe. Eimear, who had gone on to have a career in broadcast journalism, was suddenly given a front row seat into her teenage self and the tumultuous events that were playing out within earshot and eyeshot of her Fruithill Park home. “It teaches me that the passage of time may soften the stark images and dull the strident sounds of our violent history,” she writes in the prologue. “It can allow the ‘truth’ about the past to be distorted. My diary though, is unsparing. With its brutal candour, it has proved more trustworthy than memory.”
