Book description
'I was born in a united Ireland,' says Joe Cahill, 'I want to die
in a united Ireland.' Here Cahill gives his full and frank story -- of
a life spent in prison, on hunger strike, on the run, in safe houses,
in action, and latterly in the corridors of power of Washington as the
Good Friday Agreement was being negotiated. He tells of narrowly
avoiding execution in 1942; his visit to Colonel Gaddafi to smuggle
arms; Bloody Sunday and the burning of the British Embassy in Dublin;
the high-drama helicopter escape of IRA prisoners from Mountjoy jail.
Cahill's has been an extraordinary journey, his own life mirroring the
growth and development of the republican movement through more than
sixty years of intense involvement. New updated edition.
Brendan Anderson was born in Belfast in December 1945. He has worked
in print for thirty-five years - first as a compositor, then as a
proofreader, a typesetter and page make-up artist. Selected by an
enlightened editor at the Irish News to be trained as a journalist in
1989, he became senior reporter and security writer for that paper
within two years. He has covered all the big stories of the Irish
troubles, and interviewed and questioned all of the major players. He
has had unrivalled contacts with republicans and loyalists, and is
frequently interviewed as a security analyst on Irish and British
television and radio, and consulted by British newspapers. Seconded to
the University of Ulster, Belfast, to lecture in Practical Newspaper
Journalism in 1998, he joined the staff of the university as an
associate lecturer in Journalism in 1999. He is a freelance writer for a
United States weekly newspaper. He is a father of three, and grandfather
of ten, and lives in Belfast.
