Henry McDonald's childhood and teenage years were dominated by the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Growing up in the Markets - a working-class Catholic district of central Belfast - he witnessed IRA men and British soldiers being shot down outside his door. His home was smashed up by the British troops on Internment Day in 1971, then bombed by loyalist terrorists four years later. But despite being caught up in the maelstrom of incipient civil war, McDonald managed to escape his background. He became a punk rocker in 1977 and, a year later, joined a group of young soccer hooligans who followed Irish League side Cliftonville. Colours, however, is more than just a memoir about the formative years of someone born in the epicentre of political and sectarian conflict. McDonald time-travels in two directions: first, back to the dark days of Ulster's violent past; second, into the twenty-first century, using some of the key incidents of his boyhood and youth to compare the Ireland of the past with the Ireland of today.
It is a journey that takes him from the GPO in Dublin, a revered site in the history of Irish republicanism where the 1916 Easter Rising was launched, to the sex shops and swinging parties of postmodern hedonistic Dublin. Filled with football thugs, terrorists, paedophile priests, abuse survivors, drug dealers, comic writers and modern-day martyrs, Colours exposes Ireland in all its complexity and diversity, as seen through the eyes of someone who has experienced first-hand an island and a nation undergoing revolutionary changes.
- ISBN10 1845960254
- ISBN13 9781845960254
- Publish Date 8 September 2005
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 13 February 2016
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Transworld Publishers Ltd
- Imprint Mainstream Publishing
- Format Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
- Pages 256
- Language English